Drips Org Retrospective 2023
- Objectives
- What did we accomplish this year that aligns with the objectives and goals set at the beginning of the year?
Q1/Q2-23
Publicly launch Drips v2 contracts and application.
Integrate social-linking (verified credentials + oracles) within the Drips app.
Research multi-chain governance options in order to potentially deploy Drips v2 contracts on more EVM networks.
Build & ship “Continuous Dependency Funding” experience within the Drips app.
Build & ship “Awesome lists” experience within the Drips app.
Continue to iterate on core experiences based on user feedback.
Conducted approximately 20 in-person video interviews with prospective users and collected detailed feedback from them on the Drips app and feature roadmap.
Q3/Q4 23
Continue to iterate on core experiences (streaming and splitting funds, public funding profile with ability to send/receive/split funds) based on user feedback.
Integrate the Radicle code collaboration protocol, with the assumption that it has a stable release.
Conduct an additional audit, in the scenario that our Total Value Locked in the protocol increases above $1m
Potentially deploy Drips v2 contracts on more relevant EVM networks (Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon)
Conducted additional video interviews with real users of the Drips app, including both funders and recipients and collected feedback on pain points and new feature requests.
- What were our most significant achievements?
Publicly launch Drips v2 contracts and application.
Three well known orgs have started to use Drips (Radworks, Octant, FundingTheCommons) & we are working on bringing more orgs and more capital to Drips before the end of the year.
- [if applicable] How did we perform against our KPIs? Were there any that we exceeded or fell short of, and why?
In the application we submitted in 2023 our main objective for 2023 was to prove product / market fit for Drips. While we aren’t there yet, we believe that we have made great progress towards that goal, given the orgs we have started to onboard and the feedback we have received from both funders and builders.
In addition, we have evolved our thinking with regards to the metrics that will show guide us on that front. Specifically we have started using the following metrics to guide our progress:
- Number of orgs that use Drips to fund their critical software dependencies.
- Total $ value deposited in Drips
- % $ value collected
- % projects that have claimed who also choose to split to their dependencies
- Funder retention
These are the metrics we monitor to know if we have Product/Market Fit.
We also have decided to onboard over video all funders and recipients and interview them over video, instead of conducting surveys, which was what we had outlined on our 2023 proposal.
- Roadmap
- Did we meet the milestones and deadlines set in our roadmap?
Yes. 80% of all milestones were successfully completed.
- Were there any unexpected obstacles that impacted our roadmap? If so, how did we handle them?
No. We executed really well against our roadmap.
- What adjustments did we make to the roadmap throughout the year, and were they effective?
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We decided to prioritise KYC related work much earlier, as we consider it to be a blocker for bringing more funders in.
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We also decided to deprioritise integrating with Radicle, as it hasn’t had a stable release yet.
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We also decided to depriotise integrations with L2 networks, as we assessed the governance of L2 deployments as risky with regards to trust-minimization (we can’t have RAD token holders govern these deployments in a trust-minimized environment).
- Challenges
- What were the biggest challenges or setbacks we faced during the year?
Designing, coding and auditing smart contracts comes always with a lot of additional complexity (vs traditional type of back-ends). It took us a while to ship v2 as a team, but we finally managed to bring this live in July 2023 without any major security issues. Our original plan was to ship it in Q2 but we kept debating/changing its scope until we landed to the right feature-set and design. Besides that nothing noteworthy.
- Stakeholder Feedback
- What feedback did we receive from stakeholders, customers, or users?
We have conducted approximately 20 in-person video interviews with prospective funders and recipients and have collected detailed feedback from them on the Drips app and feature roadmap. Some names of the funders we spoke to are 1. Protocol Labs 2. Octant 3. Optimism 4. Gitcoin. Some names of the recipients we spoke to are 1. ehtersjs 2. sourcify 3. OpenZeppelin 4. Snapshot labs.
All of our feature prioritization is a direct product of these sessions. Some pieces of feedback that stood out for us:
- KYC is a must-have for certain funder orgs
- The lack of multi-party list creation mode adds a lot of friction when decentralized teams want to agree on who should get funded and with what amounts
- Dependency automation wasn’t as important as we thought it was. Most developers know by heart the most impactful projects on their direct dependency tree. The amount of projects that have real impact on the life of a developer is usually between 3-10.
- How did this feedback influence our development efforts?
All of our work is tightly prioritised based on user feedback.
- Next Steps
- What specific actions or initiatives should we prioritise based on this retrospective?
See our org proposal for 2024 where we outline all initiatives currently planned. All of them are prioritised based on user feedback.
