July/August 2024 Status Report

What could you change if you knew you had the power to change it?

Hello All,

This update covers progress from mid-July through mid-August.

The sections of this update are as follows:

• TL;DR

• Primary Updates

• Accomplishments and Wins

• Failures and Learnings

• Upcoming Priorities and Planning

• Asks

• Gratitude

• Early marketing efforts have been slow to yield results. We’re regrouping and trying some new things.

• Based on recent feedback, we’re fixing some critical user experience issues and addressing technical debt before adding new features.

• Summer interns are busy working on research, content creation, and marketing projects.

• We’ve received inquiries from some VIPs, but only sporadically.

• The biggest impediment to progress at this point is our lack of visibility to relevant audiences. We are still virtually invisible online.

• The Netroots Nation outreach campaign generated over 20 meetings and many new insights into the left-of-center organizing ecosystem but few opportunities to recruit actual users.

• We’re curating a new cohort of beta testers.
  

• We’re attempting to raise supplementary funds through a new Manifund EA community participation grant series.
  

• We have some great events coming up!

• We’re still looking for help and collaboration in specific areas.

Early user feedback patterns have necessitated some fixes in our interface design choices, sign-up flows, and contextual messages.

The “Chain of Trust” setting, i.e., one-time-use-only invite codes, is on hold until we finish this sprint of improvements and revisions.

During a lull in building new features, our intrepid developer, Tetra, has been making our infrastructure more robust by improving server-side rendering speed, snapshot tests, and device emulation.

We’ve also set up an internal KPI tracking system.

In our last update, I outlined several tactics we would try to meet our user acquisition and product/market discovery milestones. Let’s review where we stand a month later:

• Refine our user personas and ideal customer profiles for targeted marketing campaigns.

• Develop distinct value propositions targeted to specific audiences.

We’ve made progress, populating a CRM with several ideal user profiles associated with specific use cases. We’re using these profiles to create narrative storylines for marketing content.

Here are two examples:

We’re making more every week. Back to the recap:

• Determine the case studies that would demonstrate credibility and Social Proof. Proactively scout for those users.

For a good case study, we need a large enough sample size of active campaigns to evaluate against our criteria. We haven’t accomplished that yet.

• Recruit users from inside marquee organizations so we can say, “Used by [Impressive recognizable organization].”

Several concurrent outreach campaigns are underway for this express purpose, but there are no reportable outcomes yet.

• Posting consistently to Substack, Reddit, X, and Threads.

• Active social media management to increase followers and spur engagement with high-profile accounts.

• Influencer/KOL targeted engagement.

It’s been harder than expected to achieve momentum here.

We’ve tried a few things:

• Engaging with accounts ranked by activity, topic relevance, and followers.

• Engaging with accounts based on keywords, hashtags, and recency.

• Direct DM outreach to high-profile influencers in relevant online communities.

It has had no noticeable effect (yet). I have to admit that I’m probably bad at this and definitely inexperienced, but I have neither the time nor the inclination to get good at it.

I suspect there’s a lot of insider knowledge about how all of this really works, but I don’t have the bandwidth to sift through the bullshit (and boy is there a lot). Ironically, the only consistent advice I get from people I know is “be consistent.” Gee, thanks! The interns are helping me build a content catalog we’ll post on an automated schedule. If anyone reading this has expertise in this area, I could use some help.

• SEO

• Paid Advertising on Instagram, Facebook, and Reddit.

We’re not investing any time or resources here at the moment.

Seminars, Webinars, Presentations, and Events.

We’re hosting an event on Oct 8th at SFTechWeek and on Oct 15 for LATechweek.

Official calendar links will be posted in early Sept.

We also hope to attend Techcrunch Disrupt in late October and Norrsken Impact Week in November.

Bringing interns on board for the summer and using an Eisenhower-style prioritization system allowed me to clear some traffic jams.

For example, we can now more quickly filter accelerator programs by relevancy:

And build a ranking system for influencers based on social media data points:

I’m directing the interns to focus on projects that enhance our online visibility, public awareness, and any techniques for acquiring new users.

Recent testing and feedback uncovered bugs, confusing UX decisions, and legibility issues we needed to address before we broadened the cohort.

Our Discord is running and will be shared with anyone accepted into a beta cohort. I’ve been sending out batched invitations to anyone who expressed interest in participating in the past.

You can see our intake survey HERE to get a sense of how we vet candidates for the beta.

• In all transparency, the last month hasn’t been replete with wins. But we’re making steady progress on other high-leverage projects, the app is improving, and the feedback we’re getting is (mostly) positive.

• We have a far better strategic understanding of which communities will be receptive to Spartacus.

• We’re building a robust content library.

• We’re in touch with some potential high-profile users and benefactors who, if things work out, could significantly promote the project.

• We have a new supplementary funding campaign going on at Manifund! (See below)

I made a commitment that this section should never sugar coat our challenges, and I believe in brutal honesty as a matter of integrity and as a ward against self-deception.

• Our recent efforts to spin up marketing and social media outreach have been a sequence of false starts, wrong turns, dead ends, and wasted time…more charitably put - trial and error. At the very least, we’re learning what doesn’t work. I’ll be getting more advice from experts instead of becoming an expert in social media gamesmanship, which is a terrible expenditure of my time and sanity.

• We encountered enough usability problems that we thought it best to truncate our outreach to beta testers until they were addressed. We need the first impression of using Spartacus to be primarily positive, not tainted by missed expectations. They should be largely resolved by the time this is published.

• I underestimated the time investment required to personally manage and plan projects for our two interns, dragging out the onboarding process. I’ve since standardized that process to ensure it goes much more smoothly in the future.

• I missed application deadlines for some fantastic grant programs and accelerators - I only learned of them after it was too late. Opportunity cost is inevitable when your nose is at the grindstone, but it still sucks, and it’s hard not to be obsessed by FOMO when time is not on your side.

• After my 30+ meetings from the Netroots Nation Conference, only a tiny handful were curious about becoming Spartacus users. The reasons for this are interesting, though.

  • Independent activists generally didn’t respond to my outreach—responses came mainly from employees of other vendors, non-profits, consulting firms, universities, foundations, and various levels of government.

  • Many of them already use solutions for group organizing and mobilization, but none of them have reliable methods for forming those groups in the first place, only for managing, engaging with, and growing them once they are already formed.

  • It reinforced to me that Spartacus is just one link in a chain of effective collective action - maybe the hardest one to forge, but also, there are several established, robust, and feature-rich platforms that handle other aspects of organizing really well - and it makes no sense to compete with them on their strengths.

  • We have to focus on what we can do better than anyone else - cracking bad incentive structures and enabling the initial formation of value-aligned groups.

• Seeking out new technical and policy advisors.

• The search for a full-time committed co-founder is ongoing.

• Part-time volunteers and interns for the Fall. 

Last month, we set the following goals:

Our rough milestones are as follows:

• More than 1,000 social media followers by Sept 1.

• Shepherd the first cohort of 10 campaign creators to completion by Aug 15th.

• A waiting list of 100 or more campaign creators by Sept 1.

• Posting revenue from early users.

This proved to be overly ambitious. So, I’m pushing out the deadlines to:

• More than 1,000 social media followers: Sept 30

• Shepherd the second cohort of 10 campaign creators to completion: Sept 30

• Posting revenue from early users: Sept 30

• A waiting list of 100 or more campaign creators: Oct 30

We’ll continue to invite more folks into the beta cohort once the issues mentioned earlier are fixed.

We’ll resume building the “Chain of Trust” feature and a few others on the roadmap once we have validation that our beta testers aren’t encountering any deal-breakers in the current release.

• Accelerator research and applications.

• Grant research and applications.

For anyone involved in the Effective Altruism movement, there's a community-driven funding drive for EA-related projects on Manifund right now.  Details are here:  

EA Community Choice is a $200k funding round for EA community projects, where the grant decisions are made by you. You can direct $100-$800 of funding towards any of the projects that signed up for this round. Your choices then decide how $100k in matching will be allocated, via quadratic funding!

If you qualify, you get free(!) money to contribute to projects of your choice.

Spartacus is one of the projects you can fund

We’re seeking supplementary funding to extend our runway for another 9-12 months. I encourage everyone to look at the proposal. Feedback is welcome. If you decide to donate, you have my everlasting gratitude.

If, by chance, you’re interested in supporting Spartacus through some alternate means, contact me directly.

We still need help growing an audience and becoming known in relevant online communities and groups. Please let me know if you’re active in any space you think would be receptive to Spartacus’ mission.

We would greatly appreciate a warm introduction to anyone you know who might be interested in learning more about Spartacus or using it.

Specifically, if you know people affiliated with:

• https://survivalandflourishing.com/

• https://lightspeedgrants.org/

• https://www.norrsken.org/

• https://www.escapethecity.org/organisation/unreasonable-group

• https://futureoflife.org/

We want to hear from anyone with thoughts on coordination problems they care about. These can range from trivial group decision-making paradoxes to moonshot global-scale problems. We also want to engage with skeptics sensitive to user concerns or problem areas we may not be giving sufficient attention to.

We can’t currently deploy or support Spartacus outside the US. Still, we would be open to working with a partner who could take the initiative to help bring it into compliance with local laws and regulations.

We always want to hear from anyone who wants to contribute, especially in unique ways. If we don’t have a specific need for your skills now, we may soon! Please inquire at jordan@spartacus.app

• Thank you, Tetra Jones, for your indispensable work.

• Thank you, William Bookman III, for your insights and enthusiasm.

• Thank you, Matthew Braunstein, for lending a hand!

That’s it for now! Expect the next update by Sept 15th.