[Closed] April 2023 Marketing Budget for Targeted Meta Lordz User Acquisition

Marketing DAO Marketing DAO
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Intro

Meta Lordz is a web3 MMORPG (think “World of Warcraft for web3”). www.metalordz.com

We met much of the community at NEARCON and have been grateful to receive grant funding from both Near Foundation and Human Guild. These funds have been put to good use, allowing us to scale our team and build our product. In fact, the Meta Lordz Alpha release is now fully built and WILL GO LIVE THIS MONTH (April 2023), and commence marketing spending in the next 4-8 weeks.

Who We Are

We’re a team of 25, spanning the UK, India, Hong Kong and Nigeria. We’ve been working together for the best part of 18 months, building Meta Lordz into something fantastic which we’re confident gamers will enjoy.

Our team are from Meta, Google, Activision, Blizzard, King, Improbable, Octro, Gate.io, Goldman Sachs and more - we know how to run & scale businesses, and we’ve demonstrated a great deal of caution and careful management over these 18 months - we’ve kept costs down, crafted some fantastic partnerships, and build a truly great product which you are all invited to play. Please let me know if you’d like a playtest! (TG: danb888)

** Our Proposal **

Unlike many web3 projects, we have an extremely tailored initial marketing plan. We’re focusing initially on the Brazilian market - for three key reasons:

1 - We know Brazil well. Our marketing lead is Brazilian, with a great local network. He is ex Activision/Blizzard, King and Google, and has scaled many games - new and established.
2 - We’ve validated product-market fit in Brazil by collaborating extensively with partners and players in the region. The brawler-style PvP arena we launch during the Alpha is popular in the market.
3 - We have a tailored partnership with Bayz, the largest community of gamers in Brazil (web2 and web3) to get us exposure through some of the best-known influencers and streamers in the market.

This focus on one geography for the initial launch enables us to sow the seeds for strong retention and some organic growth. We want teens and young adults across Brazil to be comparing their game progress and assets - aiding retention and organic growth. This is best achieved with a local focus in a market we know well - rather than a broad, international campaign from a standing start.

Over a dozen of the best known influencers in the region are already on standby to support us during our launch period for approximately 6 weeks.

We request USD 10,000 to pursue this intricately planned, detailed and customised campaign with Bayz.

We ask for USD 10,000 of this upfront, to help fund the crucial first phase of our plan with Bayz. Meta Lordz will fund the remaining USD 15,000 out of our own funds, as we believe it is important to share the risk with the community. We believe this will help us onboard 2,500+ users to the game and therefore bring a multitude of new real-world gamers to NEAR.

The stage will then be set for the second phase of our Bayz engagement, which Meta Lordz intends to fund directly.

The specifics of the Bayz plan, including named influencers, dates, material, etc is commercially sensitive but can be shared directly with individuals in the DAO if this is helpful for a decision to be made. We can also discuss on a call.

Expected Impact & Success

We expect to acquire 12-20,000 users during and in the weeks following this targeted campaign (phase 1+2). The exact performance depends on market conditions at the time, but this is a number we’ve landed on after extensive consultation.

During the first 90 days, we aim for around 25% of these users to engage with Meta Lordz using web3 / digital assets and therefore to bring these new users to the NEAR ecosystem. Web3 conversion above 10% for retained users would be considered successful - and would truly validate that web2 gamers can and will be taken on a fun & low-friction journey to web3: this is our core mission, and what we want to demonstrate with this campaign.

More importantly, we believe this initial investment in user acquisition represents the best way to start the flywheel spinning - complementing our existing community of 20k Twitter / 10k Discord members - for a fun, properly constructed MMORPG, with all the progression mechanics, beautiful artwork & playability you expect from a AAA studio, launching and growing within the NEAR ecosystem.

Links

Game trailer: Video Apr23.mp4 - Google Drive
Whitepaper: http://docs.metalordz.com/
Discord: Meta Lordz
Twitter: http://go.metalordz.com/twitter
Lore video: http://go.metalordz.com/lore

Final Note

At Meta Lordz, we’re absolutely addicted to web3 gaming. We’re a hand-picked group of seasoned professionals from the world’s top gaming, tech & finance organisations.

We’ve been hand-picked from thousands of applicants to be the FIRST AND ONLY WEB3 GAME in the Amazon/AWS accelerator. Our Co-Founder Dan also led a panel discussion at NFT.NYC this year on reducing frictions in getting gamers using NFTs.

Our product has been hand-crafted over nearly 18 months, and feedback from pro gamers, large VCs, gaming communities globally, and even my mother (!) has been universally positive. We cordially invite anyone in the community who is curious to come and play our game, and meet the team. Please do reach out.

Other Project References:

Wallet Details:

Wallet: metalordz.near
Owner: Dan Bronstein (on behalf of Meta Lordz)

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Hi @MetaLordz – thanks for the proposal – have you shared reports on the forum for previously funding proposals (Gameball Rally and WOTA)? If not, we need to review those before approving additional funding. You can link them in your original post for reference. Thanks!

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Thanks, not sure i follow. I shared tags to other similar proposals but these are not my projects. What do you need?

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@haenko @garikbesson could you please take a look and make decision please ?

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Hi @MetaLordz

  1. You attached links not related to your project. It’s more confusing than helpful.

  2. You said that you received 2 grants from NEAR Foundation and Human Guild. What was done with the money from these grants in terms of integration with NEAR? I looked at your site - the only thing related to NEAR is the logo in the Partners section. Even without a permalink to NEAR site or something. I can’t connect my NEAR wallet on the marketplace page as well.

  3. Also, in the partners section you placed Mintable logo. I checked out their site - it’s the Ethereum-based NFT marketplace. Do you plan to launch NFTs on Ethereum?

I don’t think MarketingDAO should pay for promoting projects which don’t have any interactions with NEAR blockchain. Right now it seems that this is exactly the case.

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Thanks @garikbesson

1 - This was a specific requirement based on the guidance we received for completing this request - i.e. provide links to proposals for other similar projects. Please feel free to disregard, but this is what the DAO asked us for.

2 - Integration with NEAR/Aurora is ongoing - we have deployed smart contracts to mainnet but we’re currently in a fully off-chain pre-alpha to test game functionality. Unlike most web3 games, we are taking a more mature approach to testing and bringing the game to market, which does not involve throwing web3 into the mix before we have a stable alpha. All funds raised spent so far have been on building the product which is now available for download at metalordz.com

3 - Mintable were a partner for a round of NFT sales in 4Q22, we are certainly not intending to launch any NFTs directly on Ethereum

Hope this helps. If you don’t support projects like ours, i.e. high quality games which are built and playable and integrating into web3, I’d be curious where you think funds would be better spent.

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Thank you for the answers.

But I still don’t see any proof of NEAR integrations.
Could you at least attach links to your contracts on Aurora mainnet so we can be sure that they exist?

By the way, Aurora has their own grant program, why do you ask for an additional grant from MarketingDAO which support projects based on NEAR? You mentioned you developed only Aurora contracts.

I would be happy to support, for example, an NFT drop on NEAR or any other activity related to real actions in the NEAR/Aurora chains. But I don’t see anything like that in your proposal.

If you don’t support projects like ours, i.e. high quality games which are built and playable and integrating into web3, I’d be curious where you think funds would be better spent.

Please don’t try to manipulate me. It is against our Community Etiquette

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Hi Eugene from Human Guild here, since you will be launching on Aurora, you cannot get marketing support from Marketing DAO, because it only allocates money for the development of projects that are launched on NEAR, not on Aurora.

Also, in addition to this, I would say that you need to at least launch on the testnet, and preferably on the mainnet, before asking for money for marketing. Before you launch on the testnet or mainnet, we cannot be sure that the money will go to advertising a game that is launched on NEAR/Aurora, and not on advertising for the game on Polygon

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Thanks for the clear answers here. We will pick up on this when we meet the criteria to proceed, wishing you all the best in the meantime.

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Unable to support. Please feel free to resubmit when you have a clear roadmap that aligns with Near cosystem goals.

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Thanks for your proposal Metalordz,

To clear up some of the points raised by the community:

  • Adding links to previous similar proposals is indeed recommended. The issue seems to be the ambiguity of the header: ‘Other project references’ can be interpreted differently by different people. This is particularly the case as we also ask for references to previous work (of the applicant) when assessing the quality of their content, etc. This can be prevented easily n the future by making the header a bit more clear (‘Similar 3rd party proposals M DAO has approved in the past’) or something along those lines.

  • After listening to the community feedback, on the forum and offline, the concern seems to be that the project has received extensive funding from NF and Human Guild as is nowhere nowhere near to launching on Mainnet. I am not privy to the nature of those grants so can not comment much on that. However, as it relates to this specific proposal, it does seem inappropriate to use NEAR Community Funds to continue the development of a Web2 game that may never make it to testnet.

I understand the sophisticated, iterative approach to product development prior to deploying on-chain. However, this may also mean that it is probably too early for Marketing DAO to be able to support this. Would encourage you to consider applying again as we get closer to Mainnet.

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Thanks for the detailed and thoughtful answer here @satojandro

This application is now closed, but for the sake of the community and future grants (to other projects), I’d encourage you guys to think about tweaking one of two things: the grant cap, or the stage of development.

If you are capping grants at $10k (absolutely de-minimis for all but the smallest of live projects), but you are also demanding to see on-chain functionality and some user metrics, you really do need to think about number of projects, and the quality of the projects, that the grants will ever actually reach.

Proper games need proper capital - we can’t do much with $10k once we’ve started to scale.

Early stage projects which rush too fast into the web3 elements but lack meaningful gameplay are universally failing.

The ROI on these grants might not be so significant with these constraints. Just my personal views here.

Having said that, I accept the points which the community members have made above relating to our own application - so we will revisit at the appropriate time.

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Agreed, but I want to note that this is a grant program, not investing.

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From your personal perspective @garikbesson, perhaps, but make no mistake that this is an investment by NF, albeit an indirect and highly unusually structured one.

The taps presumably will stay on in the long term only if the ROI makes sense to NF.

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Thanks for taking the time to provide additional context and feedback.

There is a lot of valuable information in this tread and I also greatly appreciate healthy discourse which hopefully can serve as an example for others.

I’d also like to add a bit more historical context about Marketing DAO. The original inception was focused on ‘Passion Projects’ - identify the top contributors from the Community (usually individuals) and empower them to do more. Over time we’ve greatly expanded scope to include professional service providers and, to some extent, projects building on NEAR for things such as awareness and activation campaigns.

As the ecosystem evolves, we continue to test the boundaries and push them to try to accomodate most applicants where we believe there can be meaningful growth. That being said, we acknowledge that the Marketing DAO, as a Community Funding Vertical, is not well suited to fund project operations. This is explicitly excluded from our guidelines for several reasons; some including the limited budgets but also the very informal relationship between the DAO and grantees - we do not have the ability to make any determinations about any particular business. We limit ourselves to looking at the desired impact on the ecosystem - which is why we also limit projects that are already live.

There are additional, very valid questions such as why there is a Creatives DAO but not a ‘Builders DAO’ or a ‘Startup DAO’ and why Developers DAO is basically just an extension of Pagoda and, from what I’ve heard, out of reach for most developers and builders. These are separate conversations and you can probably tell I have some opinions on the matter and would support serious initiatives to implement new funding avenues for builders.

In the meantime, I encourage you to check out to recently announced programs that may help you:

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