A New Approach to Growth: Arm the Missionaries.
Jupiter is redefining the future of finance. And we’ll need millions of more users and community members to get there.
Once upon a time, to get this kind of growth, a team would hire a marketing agency. CMOs sat down in their corner offices and demanded campaign ideas from workers in tiny white cubicles. These small teams would generate taglines, slogans, and a small number of overarching campaigns every year. They would put these campaigns on billboards, ads, and magazines, and then pray that their customers resonated with the messaging. And they would be handsomely rewarded for their creative energy.
That world is dead.
Centralized marketing cannot work in a decentralized world. Instead, the right approach is to involve the community at every step: narrative creation, content creation, and message distribution. Gone are the days of a suit telling the world what the company is all about; instead, the community decides what is true, what resonates, and what is the best way to bring others along.
We call this approach Community Powered Comms.
If implemented correctly, Community Powered Comms will deliver two massive benefits:
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Arm the Missionaries: Jupiter has a vocal and deeply engaged community (we’re biased, but we think it’s the best community in crypto). By creating more content, and involving the community in the process, we provide ammunition that these active community members can leverage to evangelize Jupiter. The more equipped our community is with key updates, narratives, and messages, the more likely we are to grow the top of the funnel larger.
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Expansion Outside of the Base: Jupiter is reaching saturation in Solana DeFi. This is a good problem to have, but it is a problem nonetheless. As Jupiter continues to grow, it is essential to reach new audiences. Starting with the crypto-curious and extending into absolute normies, Jupiter needs a community-driven strategy to bring more people onchain and accelerate the Meta. We need to not only speak to these audiences, but to actually meet them where they are.
Turning the Universe into the Jupiverse
This is where Uplink enters the picture. Our goal is to turn the universe into the Jupiverse. We are the top-of-funnel for Jupiter and the WGs.
We create content that broadcasts key messages from the team, the DAO, and our partners as widely and loudly as possible. Strategically, we’ll accomplish this through a community-first approach. That means working together with the community to package major announcements into digestible content and then distributing that content as widely as possible. Ultimately, the aim is to grow the pie, adding new community members and new users of Jupiter.
If we do our job well, the Catdet community will:
- Grow Faster: a strong content effort will attract net-new users of Jupiter and net-new community members. This is particularly important as we seek to grow Jupiter outside of the Crypto Twitter bubble.
- Contribute More: we can’t all write Rust code. We can’t all develop tokenomic strategies. But every Catdet can create content - whether it’s editing clips, writing threads, making songs, producing videos, or something else. We want to see more community participation in building the public presence of Jupiter.
- Have More Ammo: More mainstream-friendly content means more collateral to send to friends, families, baby mamas, etc. By creating a library of content that can be deployed by Catdets in their own evangelization efforts, we’re arming our most valuable messengers.
- Become More Bullish: The more the community actually sees, the more engaged and dedicated they will become. It’s the natural response to regularly seeing the continuous effort from the team/DAO/partners.
What Uplink Has Done So Far:
In our first 4 months, we’ve generated 6,500,000+ impressions, 54,000+ likes, created one of the biggest recurring events on Solana, and worked with dozens of community members to make it happen. Here are some of the highlights:
The Planetary Calls
Every week, thousands of community members come together to get up to speed on the Planetary Call. Hosted by Kash Dhanda and Meow, the call covers the key updates from across the Jupiter ecosystem. Averaging 44,399 views across Twitter and YouTube every week (!!!), it is the largest recurring event in the Solana ecosystem. Thousands have tuned in live, and the format is already being adopted by other ecosystem teams.
- Total Calls: 16
- Total Views (Twitter+Youtube): 710,385
- Total Twitter Impressions: 1,717,600
- Total Comments about Soju the LadyKiller: too high to count
The Satellites Program
Decentralization is not a lack of leaders; it is an abundance of them. With this spirit, we’ve activated a wide range of creators to act as Jupiter Satellites - helping to distribute the key narratives the team/DAO wants to get out into the world.
- Total Twitter Views of Satellite Content: 4,172,684
- Total Bounties: 9
- Total Views of Bounty-Produced Content: 141,868
- Total Clips Created: 163+
- Total Threads Created: 138
- Catdet Submitting Content: 100+
The Jupiter YouTube Page
Before Uplink began, there was no YouTube page at all. Now, there is a thriving page with 6,700 subscribers and more than 150 videos (averaging 5+ videos per week). While YouTube growth is notoriously hard and slow, we’ve provided above-average results in the short period and are only now beginning to see the compounding growth effects. We’re particularly proud of the amount of watch time - 17,600 hours - that we’ve already clocked, demonstrating that the content is clearly resonating.
- Total Watch Minutes: 1,056,000
- LFG Interviews: 24,000 views across 12 interviews
- Total Views: 181,400+
- Total Videos: 150+
- Total Youtube Impressions: 1,600,000+
LFG Launchpad Support
We’ve also worked hand-in-hand with the CWG and the LFG candidates to prepare them for success. Some of this comes in the form of informal mentorship and advice, while at other times we produce specific content to help spread the word about the projects.
- LFG Interviews: 12
- Total Twitter Views: 453,721
- Total Twitter Likes: 2,639
What’s Next: Scaling Awareness & Engagement
The strategy that got us from 0-1 isn’t going to get us from 1-10. Our primary focus for the next 12 months is growth, rapidly. We’ve figured out some things that work, but to reach the scale we know is required, we need to re-focus our content strategy on sustained growth, expand the community’s participation, and broaden the scope of how we bring people to Jupiter.
Scale the Decentralized Content Creation Efforts
We started with ~5 satellite creators, all of whom have been excellent to work with (see the end of this post for examples). But we need to dramatically scale the number of creators we work with to accelerate growth. We’re test-piloting a version of this right now with @rganizedgeneral via weekly Jupiter editor missions, along with content creation workshops for editors. We plan to continue the bounty program and start a new Satellite micro-grant program to fund anyone who is able to create compelling Jupiter content. These microgrants will range from $500 - $10,000 and enable Uplink to quickly work with new creators without requiring a DAO proposal.
Key Metric: Community Members activated and participating
Double Down on Shorts and Clips as a Growth Strategy
As we scale the Jupiter community, YouTube dominance is a necessary step for mainstream adoption. The fastest and easiest way to grow is to create more clips (of existing content) and shorts (of net new content) that can help us reach new audiences. We’re going to dramatically scale up our shorts product to 5 per week using a combination of Uplink WG Members like Famous Cloudzz and Uplink Satellites. We’re also going to focus on increasing retention, A/B testing thumbnails, improving discoverability with SEO, and creating content to target search keywords on Youtube.
Key Metric: YouTube subscriber growth
Attract the Masses with New Content Formats
To date, most of our content has been internally focused. If this proposal is passed, we will dramatically ramp up our content creation efforts around net-new topics. This includes a focus on DeFi education - guides, tutorials, etc - along with current events like the latest memecoin trends and the best trading tools to use with Jupiter. The ultimate aim is simply to capture more mindshare and generate more sophisticated DeFi users. We also want to expand to new channels - specifically TikTok and Instagram - that will allow us to re-use our content in new avenues for new audiences.
Key Metric: Usage of Jupiter products
The Working Group Members
Kash Dhanda // Strategy & Planetary Calls // Part-Time
Spends his days leading Superteam, the premier network of Solana communities on the planet, with a focus on onboarding talent directly onchain. Currently, Superteam has IRL communities in 14 countries, with more being added every month. So far, Superteam has generated $4.5m in Member earnings and attracted more than 70,000 people to its events globally. Kash also hosts the Solana Ecosystem Call every month to highlight top Solana developments, with Toly, Raj, Balaji, and others as guests. Outside of Superteam, Kash is also an advisor to multiple protocols, including Streamflow, Ironforge, and Jupiter.
Seb Monty // Content Creator // DeFi Education // Part-Time
Sebastian Montgomery, better known as Seb Monty, is a prominent educator in the Solana community. He has been deeply involved since Solana’s early days. Starting in 2021, he worked with Phantom wallet, helping it grow from 30,000 to 1.5 million users in 7 months.
Seb is dedicated to educating people about blockchain through various content platforms. He regularly produces videos, offering clear, concise, and valuable insights into Solana. With a goal to bring over 10 million users to Solana in the next two years. He obsesses over content. It’s the first thing he thinks of when he wakes up, and the last thing when he sleeps. When he isn’t creating content and researching, he is also the General Manager of validator.com, where he educates people on staking their $SOL.
Organized General // Content Facilitator // Community Stalwart // Full-Time
Nick Loupe, known as Organized General (OG for short), is a long-time user and community member in the Jupiter Ecosystem. With a background in Mechanical Engineering, he is a natural problem solver who has always been passionate about balancing utility and aesthetics in consumer-centric product design. He believes that understanding the end users’ wants versus needs is paramount in this context. Guided by first principles thinking, Nick has led operational teams for two different startups. He is driven by the idea that most knowledge gaps between different groups are fundamentally communication problems. The challenge he aims to tackle is how to get everyday people to use Solana and Jupiter. He believes that creating short-form video content for a non-crypto native audience is a key strategy to onboard and effectively communicate to hundreds of thousands of potential Solana and Jupiter ecosystem users. Although achieving engagement and views on platforms outside of Twitter is significantly more challenging for crypto-related content, Nick is determined to help overcome this obstacle with the support of the community. His goal is to create missionaries rather than mercenaries, through democratized social efforts empowering community members to join in solving this communication-based problem. Continuing to build the best community in web3 and helping to onboard the next generation of Solana and Jupiter participants.
Famous Cloudzzz // Content Creator // Clips & Shorts // Full-Time
Famous Cloudz, a full-time content creator who joined the web3 space in 2021, produces engaging and informative short-form content on YouTube and Twitter (X), focusing on the latest trends, insights, and developments in the crypto world. With over five years of experience in editing and content creation, Famous Cloudz is a self-taught marketer known for his innovative and captivating approach to digital content.
Over the past two years, Famous Cloudz has successfully launched and managed a personal crypto Twitter account, organically growing it to over 25,000 followers. This account has achieved an impressive yearly total of 37 million impressions and 1 million video views. Cloudz also creates engaging and informative YouTube content centered around Web3, amassing a dedicated following of over 5,000 subscribers.
Famous Cloudz is dedicated to significantly growing within the space and helping the Solana blockchain thrive. His primary goal is to capture people’s attention through short-form content, whether entertaining or informative, turning boring blockchain discussions into captivating content. Famous Cloudz is committed to ensuring viewers are both entertained and informed in the shortest amount of time. Cloudz is here to redefine the culture.
Srijani Parui // Planetary Calls Producer, Youtube Channel Manager // Part-Time
Srijani is the Chief of Staff at Superteam, the largest global community of builders on Solana. Besides overseeing the day-to-day operations, she has made several research and content contributions through Superteam, including -
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Launching Superteam Build, a repository of project ideas & resources for developers on Solana. Build got over 15k sessions during the Hyperdrive Hackathon, and the Solana VCs List remains a valuable resource for many founders even today.
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Producing explainer videos for the Superteam Youtube (example) and Twitter (example) with over 500k cumulative impressions.
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Producing the monthly Ecosystem Call - one of the largest recurring community events in Solana.
Outside of Superteam, Srijani moonlights as a designer on Solana. The J.U.P Planetary Call POAPs are among her best design work.
Pedro Pereira // Lead Editor // Part-Time
- Digital Animation Graduate with the first Portuguese Stopmotion Feature Film “My Grandfather’s Demons” under his belt as Prop-Maker and Set-Dresser and nominated for the “Best Young Film-Maker Award” at Cinanima 2020 with the movie “Geometric Discovery”. Has been learning and developing his skills for the past 9 years in fine arts including drawing and painting, sculpting (both traditionally and digitally), film-making, animation, photography, video editing and other crafts. Professionally trained in “Universidade Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias” and in “Sardinha em Lata” by renowned Portuguese and international artists.
Funding Request
We are requesting an operating budget of $552,000 to fund operations for 12 months and a $JUP allocation of 2.15m vesting over 4 years with a one year cliff to ensure long-term alignment. To clarify, this means that in the first year, no one will receive any $JUP. Only afterwards will $JUP be given, on a linear basis, for up to 4 years from the time the budget passes. The $JUP allocation will be split across working group members and future members of the Satellite program.
The high-level breakdown of the operational budget:
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Compensation for 6 Working Group Members for 12 months: $318,000
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Avg compensation: $4,416 / member/month
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If we want to continue to produce outsized results, we need to reward top-tier talent. The members receiving these payments and their respective roles are listed in the next section.
3. Note: Kash Dhanda serves as an Advisor to the Jupiter team and will not receive any compensation from this DAO budget. However, to ensure the Working Group’s continued viability in case Kash were to drop out, we have included a budget for his replacement. All unspent funds will be returned to the DAO. -
Satellite Microgrants: $146,000
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These grants go to Catdets who are commissioned to create larger pieces of content that are outside the scope of the normal bounty program. For example, The Tale of Two Traders (61.3k+ views) by Dr. Peepee.
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Satellite Bounties: $52,000
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These bounties go directly to Catdets who are creating content for JUP, and further the J4J spirit. All bounties will be denominated in JUP and the USDC from the operational budget will be used to market-buy JUP as needed. For example, Video Mission around Meow’s interview on When Shift Happens.
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Flex Budget: $36,000
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This budget covers the cost of software subscriptions (e.g. Streamyard, editing software, etc) along with the freelance editors, designers, and marketers that we may engage from time to time to support the Uplink WG or the Satellites.
Note that any unused budget will be returned to the DAO treasury at the end of the 1st year.
We are deeply indebted to the CWG (Slorg, Kemo, C2yptic, and Durden) for their help so far. We are also grateful to Meow, Soju, Siong, and the rest of the Jupiter Team for being such great partners and providing feedback every step of the way.
