from: https://github.com/orgs/akash-network/discussions/756

Akash Community Marketing/Support Team Proposal

Introduction

After seeing many great features being released on Akash such as GPUs, easy-to-use CI/CD workflows, and fiat/trial funds, we feel like the network is ready for the masses. Now is the time to start marketing and supporting the network, community, platforms and tools, on a larger scale. We want to explore creating a focused and skilled marketing/support team for Akash helping users using the network and bringing users to the network. Examples include: posts on X/Reddit/Medium, sponsored videos where Akash is used, sponsoring small deployments in exchange for banners (game servers, web tools), helping create integrations to Akash, and creating smaller programs within the program such as "Deployment/Contribution of the month."

Proposal Research

This document was mentioned on the December Steering Committee Call and presented in front of the SIG Community Call after that. We have also set up groups and calls with Overclock Labs employees, as many as we could reach that were relevant to this proposal. So far, the feedback has only been good. Support on different social channels is something Adam (Head of Community) agrees can be improved upon. Furthermore, we have received a great amount of feedback from the Decloud Nodes Lab Validator which we have worked to incorporate into this document. The hourly funding for this proposal is similar to other proposals in the past.

Big shoutout to AndrewG (Decloud Nodes Lab) for the great feedback!

Strategies

Please refer to this page for a full breakdown of different strategies to be delivered, and this page for a breakdown of experimental (and free) strategies to potentially be used and delivered. This page also includes some of the results we expect this proposal to have. Many results will only be published during the Q1 result and not predicted in beforehand and if you want some information from any Q4 item please leave a comment here.

Notable strategies from both the paid and free/experimental lists

• Creating posts on different platforms (X, Reddit, Medium) with different educational, promotional, and informative text from our own personal channels or new channels created for this proposal. Examples include: conducting thought experiments in regard to creating images and deployments, making comparisons to e.g. other tech, creating new templates for communities to use, stress testing the network, and more. The goal of this is to make Akash something people recognize over time and help out in other communities where there is no good standardized way of running their tools.
• Attempting to work with the Events 2025 Proposal Teams to educate attending team members on how to be a useful events participant. Examples include: creating documents on how to collect leads, funnel users to different community programs, and executing marketing strategies. In case the marketing team does attend any events, we will educate ourselves on how to improve ourselves within the roles from the attendees examples for the Events 2025 Proposal.
• Bringing back user support for our communities on Reddit and X, at least once every workday. Some of the communities have been neglected for years now, it is time this changes. While we have many users commenting on posts on e.g. Reddit, it is good to have people with up-to-date information also responding when it makes sense to do so.
• Helping different platforms promote their new features that can be used by the masses (e.g. Akash Console with their recent CI/CD tool once this is out of beta, or the credit card integration) through sponsoring a relevant YouTube channel to create a video on it. The goal of this is to increase the number of unique developers deploying their own applications on Akash.
• Bringing back our presence on X spaces by aiming to host or getting invited to different meetings at least once per month. Each meeting will have different goals.
• Helping write a monthly newsletter for Akash including an overview of what is being worked on, relevant events, updates, and programs.
• And please be aware that we are open for ideas to add to the non-billed experimental tasks list for strategies utilizing the miscellaneous marketing budget.

Note: while we would like to complete everything, we offer the experimental tasks for free both both because we don't know how many hours to expect from these and that we are not certain that we can complete all of them. Collaboration with the core team is crucial to get e.g. the Events 2025 collaboration delivered. It is also our first time doing some of these experimental strategies, and things can go wrong - don't expect all of the experimental tasks to be completed.

Resources required

For a detailed breakdown of the resources required related to funding, please refer to this page.

4x contributors, to be scaled up as time goes on.

A marketing budget where we are not limited to a tight budget

The possibility of collaborating with other proposals and teams. While this is only required for the experimental tasks, we are hoping for experimental tasks to become main reoccuring tasks in Q2.

The main contributors for the first proposal are: Rodri (technical role and responsible for financials), PiberDev (program lead and technical role), and Robert (non-technical role and social media advisor). All of these contributors have attended events representing Akash in the past, and all of these contributors are also long-term Insiders/Vanguards. We are also welcoming Lil D, an Akash Insider, who will be starting out helping with the newsletters and recaps.

As detailed in the budget breakdown, tasks are broken down into hours and frequency. This divides the contributor pay depending on how much work each contributor works. Work 5 hours, get 5 hours of pay. Work 20 hours, get 20 hours of pay. Not everyone has the same skillsets or availability and this is crucial when the program scales in the future.

Proposal funding

We are requesting 3 months worth of funding for Q1 2025, totaling $34 967,50 USD worth of AKT. About a third of the currently expected hours we expect this program to require will be given for free in this proposal while we run this Q1 pilot. No additional overages will be included but contributor pays will be prioritized and based in USD at the time of paying them in case of volatility. If this proposal passes, we will hold on to the budget for Q1 and send it back if the proposal for Q2 does not pass. The proposal for Q2 may not request as much if there is overage from this proposal that can be subtracted from the Q2 proposal's request. If we do not believe we are getting good results on the marketing budget, we will try to make any appropriate changes on the experiments to get better results.