Best practices when creating a proposal on Deep Funding
SingularityNET has initiated a program to seed our ‘decentralized AI platform’ with new and exciting services. The funding for this program is generated from AGIX tokens that are minted monthly on the Cardano Blockchain at a predefined rate. With this community-endorsed initiative, we can support developers (and others) to create and onboard AI services on our platform, or develop solutions that utilize services that are already published on our platform.
In the first round alone, we have $1,000,000 in AGIX to offer for good proposals!
If you are an AI developer interested in developing and monetizing your AI services, or an app developer that requires AI-based functionality, read on. We will explain how easy it is to submit a proposal and get funded for your efforts.
VP of Product Jan Horlings talks us through proposing on Deep Funding in this video:
Who will get awarded?
The main aspect of the funding process is that the projects will be awarded by the community of AGIX token holders. We will organize a voting process where every project can be rated on a scale from 1 (poor) to 10 (great). To be eligible, proposals need to have a minimum grade (currently 6.5) and a minimum share of all votes cast (currently 1%).
Our community of AGIX holders is generally passionate about Blockchain, AI, and SingularityNET’s mission of creating a benevolent AGI. To get awarded, you will need to convince these individuals that your project is attractive, important, and realistic. The trick is to find a balance between being concise and giving sufficient detail. Explain in clear words what the use case is behind your proposal, what problems it aims to solve, and make sure to address two main project conditions:
Project conditions
Deep Funding offers the freedom to submit a wide variety of projects. There are only two main conditions that should be on every proposer’s mind:
- The proposed project should help the AI platform grow.
- The proposed project should support the mission and vision of SingularityNET.
Helping the platform grow: Projects can follow several ways to help our AI platform grow. The most straightforward one is to have a new or existing AI service published on our platform. Second in line would be frontend solutions utilizing the services already on the platform. There is also (a limited) room for proposals that support the platform by means of marketing or business development. Finally, at some point, we expect proposals that help SingularityNET build out the functionality of the platform itself or the tooling around the Deep Funding program.
Supporting the vision of SingularityNET: All projects should support our vision of benevolent Artificial (General) Intelligence. There are no crisp guidelines for this, but our community may ask you to explain how your solutions will avoid unwanted biases or unethical purposes. The reason for developing decentralized AI is that we have more faith in the wisdom of a large enough crowd than in any centralized entity, being a country, organization, or institution to make these crucial decisions for us. That is why we rely on the community when it comes to determining the ethical values of the proposals and giving them sufficient weight in the voting process.
Proposal conditions
Besides conditions for your project, there are also some conditions and guidelines concerning your proposal. For a detailed description of required and optional information visit https://deepfunding.ai/rules/#ReferenceGuide.
In broader strokes, GOOD proposals have:
- A concise summary
- Sufficiently detailed information on your project and your team
- A breakdown of the costs
- A milestone plan that is aligned to the budget needs
- The requested funding amount
This information is required to be eligible for funding. However, the BEST proposals may also have:
- A good value proposition and market fit (having convincing market research is a plus)
- Support from a complete and professional team (including all needed roles to develop and roll out)
- Explicit ethical rules and purpose
- A business case that has a good prospect of generating high value / high quantity API calls
These attributes are not required and may not apply to every project. But it will make your project stand out if you have not only considered the technical aspects but also analyzed the market conditions, market fit and have thought about how to best roll out the project and reach your target audience.
Video presentation
SingularityNET will gladly help you in reaching your target audience. During the proposal entry period, we will offer teams the option to submit a short presentation of their proposal of 3-5 min. A video presentation works best if you add a personal touch. Seeing a real and authentic individual presenting an idea they care about can make a lasting impression! Some quick tips from our video editor:
- Video quality minimum FullHD (1920×1080) and can be upto 8K
- Shoot the video in landscape format.
- Don’t record video via Zoom. Pro tip: For best results use the backside camera of your mobile.
- Shoot with daylight if possible
- Position the camera on a steady surface at eye height. Don’t hold it in your hand.
- Think about your surroundings. Having some space behind you is better than sitting just in front of a wall.
Giving back – revenue sharing
For smaller grants, we don’t ask anything in return, except your effort to help us grow our platform. For larger proposals, however, we would love to see successful projects giving back some of their revenue to the Funding Program. This has the potential of making Deep Funding stronger and more sustainable. There are 2 things to consider:
- Every project is different, so it is hard to come up with one formula that fits all
- We want the community to be involved in this and pass judgment on the offerings.
As a result, we came up with an approach that enables the project teams to make revenue or equity sharing part of their proposal. The chosen approach gives you a lot of flexibility. You can decide the sharing method you propose (more on that below), the percentage you think is reasonable and specific conditions such as a threshold for the sharing to take effect. This ensures that you only have to share revenue if and when your project is an actual success.
This amount of flexibility enables you to either offer a very high or very low level of sharing or even leave it out completely. But we expect the community to take this into account when voting. This introduces an element of gamification where:
- Proposals with a very good business case can afford to offer lower compensation to SNET/Deep Funding in case of success
- Proposals with very high ethical goals but little business value may not need any sharing model at all
- Weaker or riskier projects may want to convince the community by offering a higher sharing reward in the case of success
To help the teams create good proposals and make it easier for the community to compare them we defined 4 different sharing methods, each with its own set of variables to adjust
We defined 2 traditional methods:
- An equity sharing model for teams that would like to offer a share in the legal entity that owns the proposed solution.
- An IP (Intellectual Property) sharing model. This means that whenever the proposed solution is offered for sale or for licensing, a percentage of the revenues will flow back into Deep Funding.
We also defined 2 crypto-related models
- A token-based model. When a team expects to tokenize their product, they can promise part of these tokens to flow back in the Deep Funding wallet. Details like percentage, vested period, etc., can be defined case by case.
- API call sharing model. This model is based on the expectation that services on the platform will render revenues. The team can define that a percentage of these future AGIX revenues will flow back to the Deep Funding wallet while adding additional conditions like a threshold or a lead time.
The given templates are aimed to create a short and easy-to-understand / easy to compare outline of your sharing proposal. When awarded, we will describe this in legal terms and required detail into the contract. All funds will flow back into a Deep Funding wallet to be used for further support and development of the Deep Funding program. Note that we will not accept direct rewards like airdrops to the community by individual teams. This would put the objectivity of the voting process at risk and will not benefit the platform.
We are looking forward to learning how both the teams and the community will apply this method and what dynamics will appear. We will be using these learnings to adapt and improve this process in the following rounds. This novel method of revenue sharing is a good example of our continuous improvement approach to Deep Funding processes and governance.
Getting ready
We hope that the rules outlined above will make you feel empowered in drafting high-quality concise proposals that fit the characteristics of your projects. We hope to see constructive feedback from the community that will inspire you to improve your project, make you successful and help the platform grow. So, get ready to submit your proposal and use this opportunity to get valuable feedback from an interested crowd.
We are looking forward to seeing your project proposals on Deep Funding!
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