Project Description:
Kiwi - for almost 1.5 years - has been curating the most important news, essays & products for Ethereum builders. Since it’s inception, the goal has been to run a decentralized crypto Hacker News.
All content - together with upvotes, and comments - is stored on our P2P protocol, similar to Farcaster. Kiwi is fully open source: front-end, back-end, protocol. Our data is open, so anyone can fork us.
Although access to our app (kiwinews.xyz) is gated with an NFT (that costs a few dollars) to generate some revenue and prevent spam, all links are public. They can be accessed by an alt client, RSS feeds, bots on Twitter and Farcaster, setting up a node, or our free weekly newsletter.
We’re co-developing the Kiwi ecosystem with our community. Our users share suggestions, ship code, and run dashboards that help us run the project, and we compensate them by sharing a % of our revenue.
In other words, Kiwi shares with the public both curated crypto content and all the tech powering our app and protocol.
Public Repository:
Docs: Kiwi Docs | Kiwi News
Budget Breakdown
Milestone #1: Onchain Ads [1 ETH]
Deliverables: A simple user interface that lets publishers post ads on Kiwi. We would also have a simple moderation system to prevent ads from being used by malicious actors.
- Expected Outcome: By setting up the user interface, we can generate real revenue from ads and become more financially sustainable.
Milestone #2: Driving product growth [2 ETH]
Deliverables: Implement a better design, improve the onboarding and pricing mechanism, signify more clearly how active people are on Kiwi.
- Expected Outcome: By increasing the number of users and our retention rate, we can serve our mission better and also generate more money via ads, and other opportunities.
Milestone #3: Protocol hardening: [1 ETH]
Deliverables: Fix a bug that currently makes it impossible for a newly joined node to sync the entire data set.
- Expected Outcome: This will make it easier to further decentralize our protocol and let our community run nodes.
Funding Requested: 4 ETH
Plans should you fall below, reach or exceed funding goals:
If we:
a) fall below funding goals
We will keep working on Kiwi, just like we’ve worked for the last 1.5 years.
But we’d probably have to spend more time on business development than product, which might be suboptimal for long-term growth and fulfilling our misson.
b) reach funding goals
We will execute the roadmap, as mentioned above.
c) exceed funding goals
Our ultimate goal is to have Kiwi pay the bills for us two co-founders to work full time on it. If we exceed our funding goals we’ll just do more of the above mentioned milestones to get a little closer to financial sustainability.
We have a long backlog of product ideas, so we will keep working on them. We have ideas for a job board, making comments upvoteable, optimizing the mobile app and so on.
Impact Measurement and Reporting
Inputs > Activities > Outputs > Outcomes > Long Term Impact
Short-term Outcomes (0-3 months):
- [Describe the immediate results expected from the project, such as the completion of specific milestones or deliverables.]
- Onchain ads: Currently, we only make a few cents from the onchain advertisements. But if we can implement an easy-to-use UI more publishers will compete for running ads which will increase prices.
- Product growth: Driving product growth in the short term helps us justifying continuing to work on Kiwi News generally.
- Protocol hardening: At the moment, the contributor that runs our Dune Dashboard cannot sync his node because of the bug. Once we fix it, he can work more independently again.
Mid-term Outcomes (3-6+ months):
- [Describe the anticipated outcomes from the project, such as increased user engagement, adoption rates, or community growth.]
The onchain ads UI will validate whether there is actual demand for onchain ads and if it makes sense to spend more time on this.
Generaly speaking, reaching more sustainable revenue model would let us focus more on product and community activation. That would lead to better user engagement, which - in our case - leads to more signal and better content and commments shared on our platform.
That in turn leads to more growth, since for Kiwi, our content and the community is what makes people pay for the app.
Long-term Impact (5+ years):
- [Describe the long-term vision for your project, including how it will create lasting changes and benefits for the community or ecosystem.]
If Kiwi reaches more adoption, it will serve as a forum for nuanced conversations about Ethereum. We believe that - just like Hacker News keeps web2 community in check - Kiwi could do the same for Ethereum.
That would lead to less builders following hype, more scrutinity for bad actors and making it harder to run scams.
Even if some users wouldn’t read Kiwi everyday, we can serve as a tool for double-checking current hypes, since users’ comments and different type of content shared on Kiwi can help to get out of the social bubbles.
Plus Kiwi could keep serving as a repository of quality links and conversations. Since Google isn’t a good search engine for crypto, we could build one based on Kiwi’s content.
Outcomes Measurement:
- [Explain how you will measure the outcomes and impact of your project, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Include specific metrics or indicators you will use, such as user engagement, adoption rates, community impact, and user satisfaction. Also share the tools you’ll be using for this purpose.]
The main goal for now is getting to financial sustainability for us two co-founders as this will guarantee us to run the project over the long term. So all outcome measures are ultimately just lagging indicators to increase our income to a point where it becomes sustainable.
Yet, our main mission is improving the Ethereum community by delivering high-quality crypto content & conversations to builders.
Therefore, most of our metrics are based on that goal.
1) Number of users clicking the links per day
If many people click our crypto building-related links, it means that we surface content they think is valuable.
We track link clicks by adding a “https://news.kiwistand.com/outbound?url=” param to each outbound link, and then publish the results on our stats page in Daily Active Devices section.
2) Number of users submitting, upvoting, and commenting on links
Every action on the protocol level takes and EIP712 signature, which means that we can easily track each submission, comment and upvote from our users.
We publish the results on our User stats page.
3) Number of links stored on the protocol
If the links and comments are high-quality and follow our guidelines, the more content, the better. Therefore we track this number on a Cumulative Total Messages chart.
4) Number of people who paid to use the product
At this point people can use Kiwi for free by following our bots, RSS feeds or the alt client. But for us the best signal is when people decide to pay a few $ to use Kiwi.
Therefore we track this number by following our Kiwi Pass NFT contract.
5) Adoption rate
We track how many users who minted a Kiwi Pass are active. We use our Dune Dashboard for that.
Interim Reporting
Regular Updates:
- [Detail how often you will provide updates on your progress (e.g., monthly, quarterly)]
We can provide updates every week or month, sharing what we’ve delivered.
Milestone Verification:
Features
- [Explain how you will verify that milestones have been achieved, such as through deliverables or progress reports. Should your project receive funding, you’ll be expected to setup a Karma GAP project page: https://gap.karmahq.xyz/]
We would record short demos, explaining what features and product work has been done, and showing them in action. We can also write short posts on the forum.
Sustainability Plan
- [Outline your path to financial sustainability, focusing on key strategies such as your revenue model (e.g., product sales, subscriptions), strategic partnerships or collaborations, or any plans for securing future funding. You may choose to address one or more of these pathways.]
We are on the path to sustainability. We make around $500/month from Kiwi Pass Sales, and made $1,800 from organizing two writing contests. We are in talks with 5 different projects to organize more contests.
To become sustainable, we need to increase our revenue by a lot. We are very lean and - apart from running servers - we just have to pay ourselves some basic salary.
The basic salary has to cover expenses such as rent, food, and so on, which is around $5,000/month before taxes. Half of it goes to tax, social insurances, etc.
Therefore, we need around $10,000/month to be able to keep on working full-time on Kiwi without having to take some extra gigs.
We are exploring different models.
We don’t want to take VC funding because we believe that projects such as Kiwi should stay credibly neutral.
So we are exploring ideas such as:
a) ads,
b) subscription model,
c) user donations,
d) job board,
and a few others.
We’re super serious about financial sustainability and talk about it a lot on our semi-public Telegram channel for Kiwi Pass holders. If you wanna see us in action, consider joining!
Case Studies and Testimonials
Gathering Feedback:
- [Describe how you plan to collect feedback and testimonials from users, stakeholders, and beneficiaries to showcase the impact of your project.]
Since the inception we have been gathering feedback from our users.
We do it regularly, on our 470+ users’ community Telegram channel. We also DM new users, asking them for feedback.
We also receive spontaneous testimonials from users on Farcaster and Twitter.
Here are some examples:
Carl Cervone, co-founder of OSS Monitor
Peteris Erins, co-founder of Auditless
Nick Grossman, partner at USV
bunny, CEO of Dora
Showcasing Success:
- [Detail how you will compile and present case studies and testimonials, such as through blog posts, social media, or formal reports.]
We have been sharing opinions via our blogposts. E.g., one of the new features we introduced (karma rewards program), was commented on by our community member, misha.
We might also share these positive opinions on social media and once in a while share a more formal blog posts focused on that.
Advancing Values of Freedom and Privacy
We started Kiwi becaues we were unhappy with how moderation was done on Hacker News and that a billionaire like Elon can just buy a social network like Twitter.
It is the content creators who co-own these networks and so a lot of their value generation should also flow back to them.
We’ve architected Kiwi News radically open, much more than some of our competitors.
ALL our code is open source, also our entire product code, which means that people truly have the freedom to take power out of our hands if they’re unhappy with how we’re running the show.
We set ourselves up in this way because we really believe in walking the talk! Kiwi, contrarily to X or HN, will always remain vibrant and open to innovation because this is how it was architected. The operators of HN and X will always remain powerful because they monopolize the software that their community uses to communicate. We think this is unaceptable and so we want to demonstrate with Kiwi that an alternative model is possible.
Supporting Decentralization
We’re supporting decentralization in a few ways:
P2P Protocol. All our content, including upvotes, comments, and submissions, is stored on a decentralized network rather than centralized servers. Learn more about our p2p network protocol.
Community-first approach. Since the beginning, we share a percentage of our revenue with our contributors, reinforcing the idea that the community collectively benefits from Kiwi. We’re also sharing our revenue with the top posting accounts. It’s contrary to the traditional web2 social model where users post content so that the platform can sell more ads.
Open-source. Kiwi’s entire codebase, including the front-end, back-end, and protocol, is open-source. This allows anyone in the community to fork the project, contribute to its development, or create their own versions of Kiwi. So even if we are not around, people can keep developing the project.
Team Information
Tim Daubenschutz
(Tech & Product)
- Worked on the precursor of NFTs @ ascribe.io in 2015,
- Co-created Soulbound tokens. Authored EIP-4973, EIP-5192 & ERC-4973 Reference Implementation
- Ran rugpullindex to protect investors from rug pulls
Mac Budkowski
(Community & Growth)
- Founded & hosted web3 talks - one of the most popular builders-oriented crypto podcasts,
- Co-built Goerlinator that distributed 20,000 GoerliETH to Ethereum builders and was mentioned in Week in Ethereum News,
- Wrote communication guides for web3 builders.
Social Proof
We originally built Kiwi News Protocol to replicate the early Farcaster whitepaper. We’ve since then open-sourced this knowledge in talks and docs.
We have been around since February 2023, when Kiwi has been incubated as part of the Zeitgeist.xyz accelerator.
Since then we have been growing a lot.
We wrote technical blogposts with OP Labs, recorded podcasts with Developer DAO, partnered with Lens & Dappcon and have been featured in the ENS newsletter.
We were speakers at Devconnect, Protocol Berg & Farcon. We are also power users on Farcaster - both Tim and Mac.
We also received grants from Optimism (RPGF 3 & RPGF4), Libp2p (RPF1), Farcaster, Purple and Gitcoin.
We also received public endorsements from:
Carl Cervone, co-founder of OSS Monitor
Peteris Erins, co-founder of Auditless
Nick Grossman, partner at USV
and many others.
Transparency
Our treasury is open for anyone to see.
All Kiwi money goes to our multi-sig. We do payouts about once per month that go to contributors’ wallets.
To receive money, the contributor (that includes us), needs to issue an invoice so that all our financials are in check. Afterwards we update our Ledger in Google Sheets where we track every inflow and outflow of the Kiwi’s money.
If these payouts include contributors other than us, we write posts describing who received money and for what.
Here are examples of these post:
Other funding
Grant funding:
- OP RPGF3: 28,318 OP
- OP RPGF4 (waiting for streaming): 4,805 OP
- Libp2p RPGF1 (waiting for streaming): 1,296 OP
- Gitcoin Round 18 & 20: $2050
- Purple: 2x 1 ETH
- Farcaster: $1,500
- Impact Gift from the Ethereum Foundation employee: $1,500,
Non-grant funding:
- Kiwi Pass sales: ca. $15,000
- Writing contests: $1,800
