💸 Grants to start creator communities on Solana
Superteam is helping Solana Foundation find, fund, and support visionary brand & community founders. These could be any type of communities — driven by art, a cult of personality, access to IRL perks like parties and hostels — all united by financial and philosophical alignment.
PFP drops, a jargon-filled roadmaps and lazy Discords are now artefacts of the bull market. The time is right to build life-long squads, of holders who aren’t buying to sell, bringing your online community together IRL, and creating an ecosystem of profitable businesses around them.
Examples of this already exist:
- ByWassies is allocating their treasury to community sourced businesses and initiatives, while pursuing an expansion via initiatives like the ByWassie Hotel in Singapore.
- Zo World is leveraging their experience in hospitality to run luxury physical spaces for crypto enthusiasts and their NFT holders around the world. Starting with BLR, India.
- Metacamp started with a grant, but now has become the physical hub for much of the Solana action in Singapore.
If you’re a creator looking to build a digitally native brand and expand via collaborative efforts of your community — this is the right place to start. We’ll get you a grant, share our experience in community building, and help you get started on Solana.
🏡 The ideal roadmap and plan
Ideally your community (whether new or pre-existing) has as many of the following characteristics as possible:
- Unique art, brand or Intellectual Property;
- An expressly stated mission; (What big idea do you want to bring into the world?)
- A social media presence;
- A member recruitment and onboarding process;
- On-or-off-chain governance;
- A leadership team or founder;
- NFTs integrated into the community;
- The capacity for collective action by pooling labour or capital;
- A dashboard to measure progress of the stated mission;
The more of those qualities that fit your community, the more “real” it is. It should have real purpose, real metrics, real leadership, and real money. And if it does, it’ll be in need of real tools.
On Art. What art form are you taking this idea to the market with? Are they some kind of NFTs? A simple PFP collection, 1/1 art, music, a limited edition coffee table book or a community token. Possibilities aplenty, do what fits your plan the best.
On business. Once you create a tight community and a brand you kick-off the next phase to make the community self sustainable. This involves helping your holders make a contributing to your project by starting a business or otherwise increasing the value of the IP. Kickstart a merch business, build a hotel, fund a podcast, start a crowded-funded movie or start the next Disney.
🎯 Some big ideas and areas of focus
The community founder will know what they can do best. We will follow your lead on what you think should be built. If you’re looking for inspiration, here are some things we are actively thinking about:
- Futurism: Make futuristic art and inspire a whole new generation of thinkers and doers. Start with the digital art, but don’t stop there. Host elite art exhibitions, put up installations, write books, and change how people see future.
- Onboarding: Build an ecosystem of enthusiasts, organizers, and crypto projects that are together do projects at scale with then sole purpose of onboarding new users to crypto. Solana Spaces was a great experiment in this domain.
- Science: DeSci communities have been quite successful in organizing themselves to come to the cutting edge of a specific vertical of science they are interested in. These communities can align, study together, fund research, conduct fellowships, create new public goods, etc.
- Media: Create great art and attract all the artists to build a media empire. Build the base and let the community build derivative brands and business lines. You make the cartoons, but others do the comic book, the short film, the merch.
- Nomadism: Align and build a brand focussed on digital nomads around the world. Over time provide shared community resources, solve problems at scale, and provide solutions at scale. Share knowledge, resources, experiences and assets.
📥 Apply for an Instagrant now.
⚙️ How It Works:
- Submit the application form (5 minutes).
- The Foundation does their best to respond within ~72 hours.
- If approved, you'll receive an email notification for onboarding and further steps, and 25% of your requested funding in your SOL wallet will soon follow in our next payout.
- Update the community once a week on your progress.
- As you achieve your self-described milestones, receive the rest of your funding.
- Submit finished work for feedback, review, and distribution.
❓Frequently asked questions
Anyone!
We prefer projects that 1) yield results quickly and 2) are executable by the Proposing team.
- Proof of Work > Credentials. Anyone is welcome to apply for Instagrants, given they have enough Proof of Work to make the review committee believe the work will get done.
- Speed > Perfection. We want to give grants rapidly. Not perfectly. We trust people to get work done.
- Believers > Consensus. As long as a minimum quorum of the reviewing committee believes it's a good use of funds, we will fund it.
Unfortunately, our sponsors do not have the ability to provide individualized feedback at this time.