Name of project
OnBoard: a user education and acquisition platform for Harmony
Application type
Partnership
Proposal overview
What is OnBoard?
OnBoard is a learn-to-earn platform that rewards users for completing specific on-chain tasks on a new chain or protocol.
For users — OnBoard is the most beginner-friendly web3 education platform. Users learn essential concepts, discover the best web3 projects, and earn token rewards for using those projects hands-on.
For Harmony projects — OnBoard is the most effective web3 user acquisition channel. Projects can showcase themselves to the next billion crypto adopters and attract more informed, invested users by incentivizing specific interactions.
What will we build on Harmony?
We want to develop an exclusive Harmony track, starting with 10-15 accessible, high-quality tutorials. Every tutorial will teach users core web3 concepts and show users how to perform an on-chain task on a Harmony project. These tutorials will be paired with a “Harmony 101” overview that introduces users to the unique aspects and strengths of the chain.
Some proposed tasks and projects are below, with suggestions welcome for modifications or additions:
| Category | Action | Featured Project |
|---|---|---|
| Onboarding | Create a mobile Harmony wallet | 1Wallet |
| Onboarding | Bridge funds to Harmony | Horizon Bridge |
| DeFi | Swap tokens for $ONE | SushiSwap |
| DeFi | Become a liquidity provider | ViperSwap |
| DeFi | Lend tokens for interest | Tranquil Finance |
| DeFi | Buy an algorithmic stablecoin | Unite Finance |
| NFTs | Buy a Harmony NFT | daVinci |
| Gaming | Use an in-game marketplace | DeFi Kingdoms |
| Gaming | Invest in metaverse land | Mars Colony |
| DAOs | Create and fund a multi-sig wallet | Gnosis Safe |
After building these tutorials, we want to leverage this partnership and funding to run an acquisition campaign for the Harmony ecosystem, teaching thousands of new users to engage in verified on-chain activities. Users will earn $ONE rewards as they interact with the chain and its top dapps, growing the ecosystem and new token holders.
How this will benefit the blockchain ecosystem?
- We educate and capture crypto newcomers. There isn’t currently an accessible way for someone new to crypto (i.e. who may not even know what a crypto wallet is) to start in the Harmony ecosystem.
- As a “day 0” starting point to enter crypto and discover chains/dapps, OnBoard shapes users’ products of choice for the rest of their web3 experience. Through application-focused educational material, OnBoard allows Harmony to target the next wave of retail users entering crypto, ensure they hold $ONE, and make Harmony their default network.
- We help acquire informed users. Web3 chains and projects struggle to acquire knowledgeable users and rely on speculative, gameable methods like airdrops and liquidity mining to grow.
- Harmony and ecosystem projects can partner with OnBoard to fund rewards that incentivize on-chain activity from users who understand the goals of the protocol, its place in the ecosystem, and how to use it.
- Rewards distributed through OnBoard are protected from sybil attacks and abuse: our users are KYC’d so no individual can claim token rewards more than once, and a given project’s rewards can only be claimed if a user’s wallet has never interacted with that project before.
- By bringing higher quality users and a better user acquisition channel to the ecosystem, OnBoard encourages developers and projects to build on Harmony.
- Harmony and ecosystem projects can partner with OnBoard to fund rewards that incentivize on-chain activity from users who understand the goals of the protocol, its place in the ecosystem, and how to use it.
What is our progress?
Our MVP is live at onboardcrypto.io.
As a proof-of-concept, we drafted 3 sample written tutorials for DeFi projects on the Polygon network (PoolTogether, SushiSwap, and Aave) — available at polygon.onboardcrypto.io.
We plan to create similar high-caliber guides for Harmony projects. Finalized tutorials will include guided video walk-throughs to make onboarding smoother for newcomers.
This MVP has support for email- or wallet-based user accounts with multi-wallet authentication, sybil-resistance through a decentralized identity network (BrightID), and on-chain activity verification to facilitate reward payouts.
We have a waitlist of 550 people interested in onboarding to web3, and the list is growing every day. We’ve also partnered with OrangeDAO to onboard 1,000+ crypto-curious Y Combinator alumni to web3 through our platform.
What is on the roadmap?
In addition to developing educational content for Harmony, we plan to add the following features to the platform:
- More personalized education with suggestions based on users’ on-chain history
- Additional KYC options (government ID, Proof of Humanity, exchange accounts, etc.)
- ROI dashboard for our partners highlighting verified new on-chain users
What is our launch plan?
We plan to reach users through our access to highly-motivated communities as well as traditional media channels. The following are some current and upcoming methods:
- Co-marketing with partners on Twitter, Discord, etc.
- Public press campaigns on TechCrunch and Forbes advertising the launch of the learn-to-earn platform
- Social ad campaigns across TikTok and Instagram
- University partnerships with crypto organizations and their new members (we have direct access to clubs such as Harvard Blockchain and Blockchain@Dartmouth)
- Our partnership as OrangeDAO’s official onboarding platform, allowing us to introduce 1,000+ crypto-curious Y Combinator founders to web3
Who are the team members?
Ayan Agarwal, CEO — New York, USA
- Elected as 1 of 3 treasury committee members of OrangeDAO, a development DAO of Y Combinator alumni
- Former Founder & CEO of ParaMouse, acquired
- MBA Candidate at Harvard Business School (deferred matriculation while building startup)
- Bachelors in Economics and Computer Science from Dartmouth
Shreyas Agnihotri, CTO — New York, USA
- Leads Business Development and Partnerships at OrangeDAO
- Former Software Engineer at Yelp
- Bachelors in Computer Science and Data Science from Dartmouth
Once we receive funding, we plan to contract or hire additional team members to help us with content creation and platform engineering.
What help do we need?
- Feedback. To ensure we’re representing Harmony and its projects accurately, we’ll be sharing our tutorials with the Harmony team to allow for edits before publication. We would also appreciate the team’s input on which projects and tasks to feature.
- Introductions. This partnership would be strengthened by any introductions the Harmony team can make to ecosystem projects. This will allow us to build better user acquisition campaigns for these projects: identifying which tasks they’d prefer to incentivize and distributing native token rewards on their behalf if they so choose.
- Co-marketing. We believe there is mutual benefit in directing users curious about Harmony or its projects to OnBoard to hep them dive directly into the ecosystem. We’d like, if possible, for OnBoard to be publicized on Harmony’s social accounts and other channels, and promoted as a learning resource on Harmony’s landing page.
Proposal ask
We request a total of $104,000.
$30,000 — Developing 10-15 Harmony tutorials and expanding platform features
$30,000 goes to team salaries.
Preparing the platform to support Harmony requires our engineers to:
- Integrate Harmony wallet authentication
- Set up a pipeline to automatically verify and credit users for Harmony on-chain activity
- Build dashboards to report verified on-chain users
Creating new tutorials requires our content team to:
- Test ecosystem protocols
- Write tutorials and create video explainers
- Discuss, coordinate, edit, and finalize content with Harmony and ecosystem projects individually
- QA tutorials on 50-100 users (recruit users, interview and survey to gather feedback, and implement content changes)
$74,000 — Running an acquisition campaign to attract 2,000 new Harmony users
$20,000 goes to team salaries.
Acquiring users requires our team to:
- Build and run marketing campaigns across social
- Manage our Discord community and run support for users
- Internationalize content and hire additional support where needed
$54,000 funds our per-user costs ($27 per user).
For each successful user we will have the following expenses, on average:
- $10 in ad spend. This is based on benchmarks of $0.15 cost per click and a 1% conversion rate in the USA, assuming one third of users come through non-social channels (partnerships, organically).
- $15 in rewards. Users can complete from 3-15 tutorials, each of which will earn them ~$2 in $ONE tokens.
- $2 for KYC. The providers we use charge a fixed fee to process and verify each user.
A user must be “successful” to count towards the goal of 2,000. A successful user is one who has configured a Harmony-compatible wallet, held $ONE, and performed on-chain actions in at least 3 different dapps through OnBoard’s tutorials. This is strong preparation to be a user and contributor in the Harmony ecosystem moving forward.
Metrics for success
Tutorial development: We will build 10-15 tutorials for Harmony and its ecosystem projects. Each of our tutorials will be highly accessible, with clear explanations and no industry jargon.
User acquisition campaign: We will introduce 2,000 users to Harmony and its projects. After using OnBoard, these users will be $ONE holders and have an on-chain record in at least 3 dapps on Harmony.
| Initiative | Date | Deliverable | Funding Awarded |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tutorial development | 2 weeks after partnership approval | 5 full tutorials. Each includes an in-depth explanation of how to conduct an in-app task along with definitions and guided video walkthrough. | $10,000 |
| Tutorial development | 4 weeks after partnership approval | 5 full tutorials. Each includes an in-depth explanation of how to conduct an in-app task along with definitions and guided video walkthrough. | $10,000 |
| Tutorial development | 6 weeks after partnership approval | Up to 5 remaining full tutorials. Each includes an in-depth explanation of how to conduct an in-app task along with definitions and guided video walkthrough. | $10,000 |
| User acquisition campaign | 11 weeks after partnership approval | 1,000 successful users. Each user will have completed at least 3 on-chain tutorials. | $37,000 |
| User acquisition campaign | 16 weeks after partnership approval | 1,000 successful users. Each user will have completed at least 3 on-chain tutorials. | $37,000 |
wondering if you could tell us more about how you envision a proper and successful marketing campaign?