I wrote this piece for Questbook. You can check out more of my work for them at the link below:
When building a product, the best feedback comes from working directly with your clients and partners to understand what’s important to them. One of the best examples of this we have seen in our journey is our work with the team at Polygon DAO.
We were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work with the Polygon DAO team on their initial launch, and we continue to work with them on an ongoing basis. Today, we’ll cover a bit of our shared history and how we have taken their feedback over time and improved our platform.
I wrote previously about some of Polygon’s History in my retrospective a few months back. In it, I described their origins from Matic and some of the different iterations they have seen over time with their grant programs, including the Matic Developer Support Program (launched in 2019) and #DefiForAll (established in 2021). At the height of the 2021 bull market, many ecosystem funds and grant programs were launched, like #DefiForAll. Many of these ended up folding due to unrealistic expectations and oversized fund valuations that were not sustainable for the long term.
Polygon knew that Polygon DAO and its grant program needed to be different. It had to be a sustainable program that could support projects over the long term by providing more than just funding but a holistic support framework.
Polygon approached this challenge by considering the best approach to structuring how it could onboard 1000+ new projects onto Polygon (a mission statement they continue to work towards even today). They realized that grants would be a critical part of this story but not the only answer. During these early stages, the vision for what was then known as the Polygon Ecosystem DAO started to take shape.
One of Polygon’s first (and most important) initiatives was to delegate the flow of grants to the newly formed Polygon Ecosystem DAO (later, their name changed to just Polygon DAO). Early on, this was a key area of focus for the DAO Genesis Team in developing a more extensive governance model. The team realized they needed to build a platform that enabled and supported them. Thus, they launched the Polygon Village: A one-stop shop that could help guide builders in all the ways they can engage with and request support from Polygon and its vast ecosystem.
Today, Village is a robust and thriving community where builders can access not only grants but Jobs, Bounties, Welcome Vouchers, and Village Wonders (their accelerator program). In addition, Polygon Village has demonstrated the DAO Team’s thought leadership in going above and beyond a simple grants program to a comprehensive suite of support that can meet projects wherever they are in their journey.
Now that we have given you a bit of the background let’s dive into how we initially engaged with Polygon and how that partnership helped us to develop our Grants Management Platform.
Our team started to engage with Polygon in Q2 of 2021. At the time, Polygon was already one of the more active grant programs in the space, with Developer and Ecosystem Support Programs in full swing. They had a relatively high volume of grant applications. In addition, Polygon asked our team to help meet and interview different community members and grant applicants to garner feedback on their experience. Our goal in this was to see how Polygon could evolve its program to meet the needs of builders better.
We started the engagement by setting up many different individual Telegram groups to interview them and learn about the experiences, good and bad; they had in working with Polygon. We quickly discovered that feedback expectations were not always well aligned, confusing the process and causing misunderstanding of how grants were decided on and distributed. We also learned that, sometimes, just as important as the funding was the desire to work with Polygon to create greater brand awareness through their social media and ecosystem.
This feedback proved invaluable and helped us understand how we could better develop a workflow to optimize their current process and what steps we could take in developing Questbook’s Grant Management Platform better to meet the needs of grantor programs and applicants alike.
In addition to engaging with applicants and community members directly, we looked at the workflows that supported the application process. For example, applicants needed to fill out a form, join the Polygon Discord, write a proposal in a dedicated channel, and wait for DAO Team members to provide feedback. In addition to the front end of the workflow with application intake and review, the team struggled with manual entry and tracking of applicant data which also proved challenging.
These processes took time and effort to manage as volumes increased, and things like success metrics or milestones were not well defined. Ultimately, this workflow didn’t meet their desired outcomes for improving SLAs and grantee satisfaction, and they were looking for options on how to improve but stay true to their goals and ethos.
We saw this as an opportunity to improve their experience by developing an optimized workflow and accompanying platform to support. This feedback helped us tremendously early on in developing our platform and tailoring it to the needs of grant programs across Web3.
When Polygon DAO launched and added dedicated team members for managing the grants lifecycle, we went live with our grants management platform. The insights from working closely with Polygon DAO proved invaluable in building a platform that helped tie all parts of the grants management process into one seamlessly integrated tool.
*“Our product is all about making the process of Web3 Grants Management seamless. We tie together all the different parts of the grant lifecycle in one open-source platform.”
- Harsha, Co-Founder of Questbook*
With Questbook, the Polygon DAO team can now create, receive, review, track, and disburse grants all in one place. Without their insights and feedback, we would not have fully appreciated the importance of these kinds of problems and may not have correctly prioritized our time and resources. Instead, we thank them for their partnership in helping us to build a platform that delivers real value.
Some examples of this value are:
Time spent reviewing and approving applications went from 2-3 months to now, on average, 15 days. Turnaround time is an excellent indicator because it relates to many aspects of the process flow (from intake to disbursement).
A monthly application window where grants are submitted by the 10th of each month and targeted for disbursal in the last ten days of the month. This change allowed the Polygon DAO team to segment their budget and see what metrics, like applications received and total funds disbursed, would look like month over time.
The ability to delegate review and approval of applications across different members. Our platform allows them to assign reviewers to proposals so the Grant Management team can monitor the review's progress through the grant lifecycle.
Development of the evaluation rubric, a feature allowing programs to define custom criteria for evaluating proposals (helpful for grants teams with multiple members).
A batch payment feature allows for grants to be allocated and disbursed efficiently across multiple applicants without heavy manual entry and one-by-one approval of funds sent to individual addresses.
"If not for Questbook, we would not have come up with this new structure. Community insight docs were the key to setting up the process.”
Thanks to the efficiencies gained from Questbook, Polygon has identified many innovative new projects they wouldn’t have caught otherwise. As a result, the grant process has become smoother and more decentralized for both the protocol and the applicants. However, we still see much potential with all the success we have seen. As Joel John mentions in Grants and Web3:
“The end state for ecosystem grants will be to tackle problems traditional financing cannot fix. These are usually public goods that require time and years of commitment.”
We couldn’t agree more, and that’s why we wake up every day excited to build. We talked to various programs and thought leaders across the Web3 space daily. We would welcome the opportunity to develop partnerships with others as we have with Polygon DAO.
Until next time,
- Sov