What are you building and why?
BLAH focuses on enabling artists to create, share and sell art that depicts utopian versions of current cities. The idea behind the platform is to bring talented concept architects to one place and gather their vision for a perfect futuristic urban landscape.
The marketplace will not only serve skilled creators and collectors but also Bring Love And Hope to our users who seek escapism from the doom and gloom of modern life. Like the well-known platform TikTok, BLAH will have a dashboard for scrolling and browsing altered images of one’s hometown, creating a solid burst of dopamine, making one’s day better. Imagine seeing your hometown/city in its futuristic utopian version.
What makes you different from your competitors?
BLAH is designed and built to be used by architects, artists, and designers such as Zaha Hadid, who imagine new types of utopian buildings and structures within our current cities. The utility of our platform comes from enabling such users to upload beautiful renders of unique buildings and structures that transform cities and embed important useful information such as blueprints and other specifications. Data such as this adds value to the renders/mints by making it easy for a prospective buyer/collector to want to purchase them to either build set buildings or hold their rights, anticipating that someone will buy the entire collection.
Such a foundation incentivizes the architects, artists, and designers to create and mint works of art with plethra of data points, which increases the value of their work and its utility. Such utility also helps us achieve our goal of bringing more love and hope to the world because each creation has the potential to exist in the real world, thus changing the city that they live in.
Our strategy also allows for fractional ownership of different collection parts, from the image renders to the blueprints and all the other uploaded data. Our platform makes it easier for collectors and builders to aggregate and purchase what they need to build the expressed structures. We aim with BLAH to make a simple, intuitive platform that inspires while promoting avenues for actions that have a positive local and global impact. To achieve its type of user experience, BLAH leverages the backend for registering intellectual properties from its sister platform, the Intellectual Properties Registry System (IPRS).
Why are you the one?
We aren’t just another NFT store site that sells purely visual content. BLAH aims to give posted NFTs a long-term utility with a direct connection to the real world.
As our customer avatar is a utopian architect, artist, and designer Zaha Hadid, it is pretty apparent that said utility would contain an architectural value. The marketplace will sell pieces with building, landscape, and interior design concepts that can be brought to life by the new owner/their company after the purchase.
It is safe to state that BLAH will reimagine the NFT term from character images to a technology that professionals can use to reimagine, create then build better cities.
What are your project milestones and estimated budget for each step (Please list)? And when are the expected delivery dates for each milestone?*
Quarter 2 2022 (Apr-Jun)
- Improve the BLAH MVP by adding the following features:
- NFT Tagging
- Search Mode
- Discoverability
- Stats & Analytics
- Bugfix
- Kick-off a marketing workstream
- Execute Market/Competitor Research to decide on the most effective marketing strategy
- Collaborate with other DAOs on NEAR Blockchain (Waitlist giveaways)
- Set up a content plan for an Instagram account
- Create, execute and refine a content plan for Twitter
Quarter 3 2022 (Jul - Sep)
- Improve the experience of the Collectors and Artists:
- Implement different Bidding Options
- Add Auction Types filter
- Improve usability/bugfix
- Build connections within the web3 community:
- Sign influencers for collaboration with BLAH
- Article series Launch on Medium featuring Zaha Hadid and other similar professionals
- Execute Marketing analysis of the past quarter to adapt the Marketing strategy
Quarter 4 2022 (Oct - Dec)
- Level-up user experience by releasing of following features:
- Developing and deploying the Fractional Ownership feature
- Implementing Royalties Distribution feature
- Add NFT Staking feature
- Festive marketing event planning:
- Execute Halloween and New Year themed NFT giveaways
- Schedule AMA Sessions on the Discord server
- Make a 2022 re-cap with the project’s stats and achieved milestones
Budget requested
As per our team’s estimation, it is fair to request funding of 13,000 USD per month for each quarter for both engineering (1) marketing (2) to achieve the goals mentioned above.
How will this impact the NEAR Ecosystem?
BLAH offers a specialized environment for architects, artists, and designers to express their utopian yearnings, while also allowing such expressions to have utility. On top of this, BLAH provides a valuable use case of the IPRS, showing just one simple application of such a fantastic tool. Both these facts will impact the NEAR ecosystem positively and bring more architects, artists, designers, and collectors to the ecosystem.
What makes you excited about NEAR?
NEARs blockchain, in our opinion, is one of the most developer-friendly platforms in web3. The inviting environment and excellent project development conditions make NEAR a successful networking workplace where developers working on various projects may share their experiences and abilities.
Building on NEAR helps to achieve a “utopian” society, ruled by smart contracts and governed fairly. As our project aims to contribute to a better future, it was a straightforward decision to use the NEAR platform.
As NEAR aims to “Reimagine the world,” BLAH is here to contribute.
On top of that, we will make a positive image and add to the protocol’s reputation, as our project promotes bringing hope into the uncertain future. Moreover, BLAH shares similar values with NEAR, which creates a strong connection between developers and motivates them to expand the project and bring awareness to the NEAR ecosystem.
How will you measure project success?
Product/Development KPIs
- 1000 daily active users the first month after launch.
- 50 minting and actively collecting users in Quarter 3, 2022.
- Generate $1000 sales per month via the minting
Marketing KPIs
- 1,000 community members on Discord due Quarter 2, 2022.
- Sum of 4,000 social media (Twitter and Instagram) accounts followers and an average of 150 interactions per post.
What have you already achieved?
Throughout the 1st Quarter of 2022, our team has been building an MVP with the ability for artists to mint, sell and enable collectors to purchase and collect NFTs from artists. All the essential features implemented in the MVP can be found in the MVP Feature List.
$3,000 was already spent to finance the front-end development of MVP. On top of that, 3D models from KitBash3D were purchased using said amount to improve artists’ experience and provide better assistance on artwork creation.
Regarding the community building/marketing efforts, BLAH’s founder, Princeps, by his own efforts, has made a Discord server, a Twitter, and Instagram account to start the user base expansion.
On top of that, BLAH is actively engaging with the NEAR community via the gov.near forum. Not only the project seeks NEAR native team members through a community platform, but it also publishes product info and contests.
DAO Council: @Princeps @dee.alice @TudorKrypt @saic
