**Response to optimising for "views" and "top of funnel" in #general**

> I think we do a good job in the middle of the funnel.

I actually totally disagree on this part. I think we are pretty woeful on the middle funnel. The majority of people that have heard of Nouns do not really grok what it is, never-mind all the potential builders outside the NFT bubble that we are missing out on because it’s too esoteric to dive in to. In reality, no one gets what we’re doing, and it’s impossible for them to have a vision for Nouns.

How easily are the people we want to attract (quality builders and community members) able understand the answers to these questions right now?

**“So what does nouns actually do and stand for?”**
This is a branding exercise, this is key for our work to answer.

**“What is Nouns actually to me?”**
The answer is not NFTs, or a DAO (that is just infrastructure), its an open source brand that you can be funded to build on (or build on permissionlessly). It’s a energised and broad community. It’s a movement. We need to demonstrate this through our videos.

**“What’s a nounish concept / proposal?”**
Current way to understand this: read hundreds of proposals on nouns.wtf/vote, tally their results, investigate if they were “successful” or not, if the dao likes them, analyse all this data… etc. What if instead they could watch a handful of nounish videos that show the things we’re proud of?

**“Can it be any cultural domain?”**
Here are some screenshots from version 1 of our intro. We will continue to experiment and iterate with ways to tell this story all the time. This is hugely important to be understood if we want to experiment in every vertical.


**“How do I get funded?”**
Videos about this will be hugely valuable, currently it takes a lot of effort to understand this.
Our top priority here is to make a few videos focussed exclusively on getting funded via **Prop House** and then other videos about the other ways as a whole, and individual videos on specifics (on chain, nsfw etc.)

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The hurdle to understand all these questions right now is absurdly high for someone not native to our ecosystem. And even then, it takes a lot of time and energy.

It’s imperative that there’s quality consumable content out there that helps people not only understand what Nouns is doing but be inspired to join in. What we need is social media channels (eg. YouTube and Instagram) that have a significant catalogue of content you can just sit and consume.

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GIF OF “I KNOW KUNG FU” SCENE WHERE GOLDY AND DAN ARE “MORPHEUS” and “TANK” WATCHING THE SCREEN WHILE “NEO” IS THE POTENTIAL NEW BUILDER
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> Top of funnel, in my mind, is what this project is all about. This is a meme - we want attention to the meme. That is how the meme grows and spreads

I disagree here also. If this was the case, we should just spend 100% of our treasury on pure awareness campaigns. But awareness of what? Nouns? What does Nouns mean?

Authenticity, depth, meaning… these are things that are “nounish”, and we want to show the world that this is what we are. We need to show these things in action and have them be understood before we go make heaps of noise and get attention. Otherwise people we see us as a brand that stands for nothing (except wanting attention).

This is why we try to fund things with novelty and impact, not only because they are more interesting than an advertisement, but because they are more meaningful. Why does this matter? Because Nouns is a *brand*, and we need to do brand building before we do pure awareness.

If we focussed on top of funnel awareness before there was anything meaningful to consume about Nouns in the layers below, it will be a big waste of resource.

There needs to be a foundation of nounish things that the attention stands on top of, right now these are very obscure and difficult to consume. We want to fix this.

This is why we’re brand building and optimising for brand and understanding over attention (at first!). Nouns isn’t ready to optimise for attention because we don’t have anything of meaning for people to direct their attention at (we have made many attempts to do this, but because they are poorly documented they do not have the impact we want them to). We want to solve this.

**SO WHAT IS OUR STRATEGY?**

We believe our top goal should not be (superficial) awareness right now, that’s what a centralised organisation would do, it’s also what a organisation with a well defined and understood Brand would/should do. Our goals are more geared towards 2 things in PHASE ONE of nounish (this next 6 months): BRANDING & ONBOARDING. We want to embody “nounishness” in video form, and create a path to Nouns onboarding via video consumption.

**1. BRANDING**
We need to define Nouns for the world

**2. ONBOARDING (middle funnel)**
Nouns should want to onboard as many curious, enthusiastic, awesome proposers and builders as possible. As @seneca said once on a nouner call which has rang in my head ever since: “We need to recruit our army for the meme war”. And right now I believe the DAO has way too high friction for anyone to understand what it is we’re doing and get inspired to come here (or to be convinced to collaborate with us).

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Without a rabbit hole of content to consume, we are just another NFT project. This is why we believe the first step to solve the problem is to create a corpus of evergreen nounish stories that will inspire builders to join our meme army. We want to have the depth and breadth of what we have funded in the past year to live forever

**This is not to say we are against getting views! Of course not!** We want views, meaning, and an invitation to new builders are inextricably linked, but we have to lead with meaning (brand building) and invitation to new builders. If we lead with views at the expense of the other two, they will be undermined and the brand easily corroded, which we think will be a failure and missed opportunity for the DAO. Once we have kocked it out of the park for points 1 & 2 above over the next six months our strategy will evolve.

**PLEASE NOTE: Dan and 1 other team member are basically exclusively dedicated to focussing on growth. So there is no neglect on this part of the strategy here, our thesis is that the massive volume of short form content we are going to output (140+) and share as Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and Tik Tok posts will have a significant positive impact on subscriber and view growth (as explained here:https://discord.com/channels/849745721544146955/873197966373052426/1020071527418441848)**

Our plan is to do the strategy above, and capture as much relevant data as possible, we will study metrics on all levels of the funnel that pertain to our work, and my hypothesis today is that the next proposal will move more towards the upper level of the funnel. And “views” move up the ladder in terms of importance.

It’s possible our prop should actually be called “the nounish content machine” instead of “nounish marketing”, because I think thats the issue we’re trying to solve in PHASE ONE: having content to engage with vs pure marketing per se. As we grow our foundation of nounishness, we will focus more and more on reach.

Thank you all for your thoughtful questions and points of view, they have helped a lot of pushing us to understand and laser in on what we should be trying to do and why.