P3RKS is a platform that empowers DAOs to provide perks and rewards to their contributors beyond their native token. It enables DAO Operators to easily and smoothly stand up such programs without the overhead of sourcing partners and distributing these perks to members.

P3RKS is a project being built by contributors of Developer DAO but exists as its own entity.

The lead of the project: Discord: @kempsterrrr | D_D | BST#8590, Mail: will@kempsterrrr.xyz

Problem and Opportunity

We believe that DAOs are the future of work.

For this to happen, DAOs need to become more competitive with traditional organisations in attracting and retaining talent. Currently, however, traditional organisations have advantages with pre-defined norms for providing perks to employees.

With DAOs having thousands of mostly part-time (often ad-hoc) contributors, providing benefits packages and employment perks akin to traditional organisations is extremely challenging. Further, it’s largely not possible due to the legal challenges with contributors across many jurisdictions, overhead in creating/maintaining the packages and other associated costs.

There are, however, many protocols, products and service providers who are determined to get their offerings into the hands of DAO contributors. These are early adopters building the future - the exact target market for these web3 tools.

Connecting these two groups together, in a simple way, is the opportunity for P3RKS.

Value Proposition

P3RKS unlocks new ways for DAOs to reward their contributors for free and with minimal effort.

We aim to achieve this by providing a platform with pre-vetted partners who are interested in offering discounted access to contributors based on the DAO they’re a part of.

P3RKS helps DAOs attract and retain top contributors. In return, contributors receive more value from their contributions. Partners get targeted distribution to their ideal users. All stakeholders in the value-chain benefit, and the ecosystem grows.

It’s our intention to expand the platform to allow DAOs to provide bespoke benefits. These benefits could be gated (or otherwise modified) by total tokens held, by tokens earned over a particular time frame, by specific tasks being completed or by any other arbitrary criteria.

Lastly, we’re building P3RKS for the community. It is our intention to decentralise governance over time, ideally returning more value to all involved, and allowing those contributing to guide and benefit from its long-term future.

Underlying Magic

Right now things are intentionally simple.

By noting the relevant DAO tokens in a contributor’s wallet (be they NFTs, or ERC-20), the platform displays the available perks that a contributor is eligible to claim (alongside instructions on how they can be redeemed).

This narrow initial scope delivers on the key value proposition and provides a platform for the team to iterate further.

Though the team’s future product decisions will be influenced by user feedback, we have plans to complete the following:

• Move from our no-code (Airtable) backend to (likely) a node + Postgres solution with a third-party auth provider
• Custom domain hosting of DAO perks redemption page (i.e. benefits.gitcoin.co)
• Marketplace to connect DAOs with providers
• The ability for DAOs to offer custom benefits
• Explore how we can turn P3RKS into an on-chain protocol

Funding Model

Initial funding is coming from grants and other DAOs. In addition, we are looking into the feasibility of token swaps with other projects. However, we are capturing value in-product such that the project is not reliant on grant funding.

The following is an example of how P3RKS captures value when a user redeems a perk:

• The provider has a product that costs $100/year
• Partner offers to provide an ongoing 30% discount
• P3RKS receives a portion of that - say, 5% of the initial price
• The remaining 25% is passed onto the contributor

This is our initial model however we expect it to evolve over time based on DAO Contributor and Partner feedback. We’re keen to return maximum value to everyone in the value chain and will be figuring out how best to achieve this as we go.

Go-to-Market Plan

We’ve soft-launched the MVP to Developer DAO members, offering rewards from major RPC providers (e.g. Alchemey), several web3 focused financial tracking tools (e.g. Kubera) and a few DAOs offering various tools, protocols or services.

Although the focus initially is on testing the functionality of the MVP (rather than marketing), we’re actively speaking with all partners about how we can collaborate on content and marketing initiatives.

These collaborations will leverage the network efforts of already established followings that most of our partners have. Alongside development, we’ll be capturing interest from DAOs (either from DAO operators directly, or contributors signalling they want their DAO to use P3RKS) and further partners.

We hope the network effects that the DAOs themselves bring will further amplify our marketing fly-wheel.

Competitive Analysis

For traditional organisations, there already exist numerous platforms for offering employee perks, such as https://www.perkbox.com/. These are not suitable for DAOs as they charge on a per-user basis.

It is possible, of course, for DAOs to build these programs themselves: a brilliant example is Surge Women who recently launched their own perks. The challenges are the overhead costs associated with researching and establishing partner relationships and then creating a solution to distribute the perks. It’s inefficient for each DAO to solve this by themselves.

Instead, P3RKS allows DAOs, for free, to generate a perks package for contributors from a pre-vetted list of partners.

Team

You can find all the team members by their Discord handles:

@kempsterrrr | D_D | BST#8590 is the Developer_DAO community guild lead, Ops lead, full stack developer and a member of the “Founding Team”;

@jazza.eth#0178 is a core contributor to the design guild, designed the $CODE claim site and is in the core team at DevNode. He was previously building apps in the fitness space.

@Colin4ward#6586 is a core contributor to the MBD Guild, establishing several partnerships. He is also a core contributor in the writers guild and leads the newsletter team.

@MartinB#3285 is an early contributor to the DAO, very active in the Development and has contributed to several projects including DevNode.

@pbillingsby.eth#3207 is another early contributor to the DAO, very active in the Development Guild and has contributed to several projects including the DAO’s jobs board and education platform.

Current Status, Accomplishments to Date, Timeline, and Use of Funds

The P3RKS team have moved quickly focussing on delivering value to users as fast as possible and learning as we go. Our MVP is out via a soft launch with Developer DAO members and we’re starting user feedback and interviews with Contributors, DAO Operators and Partners interested in using P3RKS.

Our immediate goals are to prioritise improvements for the Contributor experience whilst building out a roadmap for how we can support other DAOs and continuing to onboard new partners. We aim to expand P3RKS beyond Developer DAO before the end of 2022.

Grant funds will be used to retain existing contributors, cover some limited operational (hosting, SaaS services) and incentivize new contributors.