We are FinSiteful: a company on a mission to empower people to solve their financial problems together. For now, we are focusing on making sure underserved students at community colleges around the US have access to the financial resources they need to stay in school, may it be literacy, management tools, advice, or money.
We sell this platform to the community colleges for a fee and they distribute it to their students.
So, how does blockchain fit in? Well it’s the future as you all know, so we plan to future proof our community platform with it.
In particular, we plan to bring on users who are less likely to take initiative to learn & adopt blockchain solutions. Think about it this way: how would all these community college students come across blockchain and learn about it? Through FinSiteful!
More specifically we will use blockchain to enable long and short term credit needs and investments. This is the money component listed above.
What stage of the product or idea are you (and your team) at?
App in production and live on community college campuses. Blockchain & Microfinance in design + development with Q3 launch in mind.
Is it live on Harmony and/or another chain?
No
How many active users do you currently have, or aim to acquire?
400 active users
12,500 by end of 2022
How much funding do you need?
$500k
What are your milestones?
12,000 students positively impacted
25 Community Colleges on the Platform
50 active microfinance contracts
What help do you need, or what gaps are there in your team?
Harmony API integration
Harmony auth
Harmony onboarding for us as platform and for users
Team (Please request LinkedIn’s, ‘new users are only allowed to include 4 links’)
Engineers
Charlie
Dominique
Luke
Lucas
Designers
Laura
Sales
Jason
Josh
Officers
Axel (CPO/CFO) - Product + Operations
Kirtan (CTO) - Technology Jack (CEO) - Everything
Proposal ask
$500,000
Justification
Salaries for entire team for 10 months. This is enough money to get us through our sales cycle which will give us the revenues needed to sustain ourselves for the next milestones.
Metrics for success by End of 2022-23 school year
12,000 students positively impacted
25 Colleges on the Platform
50 active microfinance contracts
Thanks for the application. Please note we do no lead investments. If you are actively fundraising and have a lead investor, we may consider participating as a follow-on investor depending on your valuation.
However, it seems a DAO would be a better funding track for this initiative.
If still interested, please read our DAO Funding Guidelines and adjust your proposal accordingly.
Please ensure that your proposal meets the criteria necessary to be considered for a Harmony DAO bootstrap grant.
Note, that even if your proposal meets certain criteria, it does not necessarily guarantee approval or funding
The Harmony DAO Ops team will resume approvals and funding on May, 1st. Thank you for your patience and understanding as we learn best practices and navigate the proposal process. In the meantime, please take a look at the updated DAO Funding Guidelines.
note: this comment is not an approval of the proposal
As @giv mentioned earlier we do not lead investments. I am going to decline this proposal without prejudice. Please update and resubmit when you’ve been able to secure fundraising.
In response to:
Please note that we have found over the past year of DAO operations that the organizations that don’t start with a large, dedicated community and a goal to fund themselves tend to have very low success rates. They tend to have a hard time recruiting additional community support and tend to bring limited value to the overall Harmony ecosystem.
The bar to receive a DAO bootstrap grant is now higher than it has been historically. In order to receive a bootstrap grant going forward, DAOs will need to evidence a high level of transparent reporting, robust community involvement and a business plan that reflects a commitment to self-funding. Further guidelines are being finalized and should be released in the comming week.
I apologize that this process has been lengthy and drawn-out and I appreciate yours and the DAO’s patience. Harmony and the DAO Ops team wanted to exhaust every option before responding with a declination.
Do not let this dissuade you or your DAOs passion to build on Harmony. Harmony is integrating new tools to help build a robust DAO ecosystem. I’m looking forward to your success.
Please ensure that your proposal meets the criteria necessary to be considered for a Harmony DAO bootstrap grant.
