Welcome to everyone who has joined us since last Sunday! If this is your first time reading, you can join hundreds of other smart, curious, and nounish folks by subscribing here:
gm, y’all!
The start of the new year is a good time to reflect on the past year—what went well, what didn’t, and what can be improved (aside from Alameda’s backdoor).
I thought this would be a good time to highlight a bunch of the amazing accomplishments and Lil builders from last year, since the launch of Lil Nouns in May of 2022 (feels like it’s been 8 years, not 8 months, doesn’t it?).
But first, I want to thank each one of you who reads this every week. We now have 250 subscribers, continuing to grow week-over-week, and still maintaining an open rate above 50%. What’s most exciting: this was 100% done through organic growth. And we have some upcoming plans to increase this growth trajectory. 👀
Here’s what we cover in this week’s post:
→ 2022 Highlights!
1/ On-chain Proposals
2/ Lil Funding
3/ Prop House
4/ Nouns Acquired
5/ Other Projects
6/ The Lil Nouns Vision: Graduating Builders
→ Props finished + 2 new Props
→ Prop House: Marketing Round
Alright, let’s dive in.
→ 2022 Highlights!
It’s easy to get caught up in the small optimizations within the DAO (and yes, there are plenty to make). But it’s important to occasionally zoom out and appreciate all the incredible progress we’ve made since the launch of Lil Nouns! Thank you to every builder who has been along for the journey so far, can’t wait to see what the future holds.
7,189 Lil Nouns have been minted, generating over 2,000 ETH in treasury, of which we’ve deployed 1,600+ to fund builders.
There’s SO much to cover, so let’s hop down memory lane…
1/ On-chain Proposals
49 Proposals were passed on-chain, giving out 1,695 ETH to builders.
→ Explore each Proposal in detail (including defeated props)
Here are some highlights:
Funding Prop House, Lil Grants and Data/Content Pods
Residency for the legend, LilAl409
3,000 Water Purification Educational Kits & Workshops for Students for 20 ETH
Started the Lil Sisters Fund with 38 ETH to support women and non-binary builders
Prop Lot v.2: a token-weighted bulletin board for ideas, as an experimental approach to activating members, by giving them a place to post ideas and receive feedback in the form of up/down votes from other members.
We funded the revamp of our onboarding experience with Nouns101.wtf - An Onboarding Experience
lilsandbox.wtf was created to test out an innovative VRGDA minting mechanism for Lil Nouns
Lil Nouns Show (go follow them on Twitter and join their weekly Spaces) and The Weekly Newsletter (that’s this! 👋)
And at the end of 2022, we renewed LilAl409. We brought Dot on as our Resident Engineer. And we brought Brook on as our DAO Operator.
2/ Lil Funding
There was 55 ETH and 29 Lil Nouns given out via Lil Funding in 2022.
Fun fact (I had totally forgotten) - I was the first one to be funded with Lil Funding—for the Newsletter!
→ Here is the entire list of 80 builders who have been funded by Lil Funding!
Some of the notable projects funded:
Lil Nouns Glasses AR on IG
Lil Nouns Blinker Animations
Trait Hover on Lilnouns.wtf
LilNounsMetrics.com by Data Pod
Meet the Lil Nouners Podcast
Lil Sidenouns GIFs
Sea Launch Dune Dashboard Updates
Upvote Interface Design
Lil Splats
Greta Gremplin stickers
PropLot v.1
Governance Research Report → DAOresearch.wtf
Twitter Spaces with Toady
Music video by Arash
Motion tracking suit to improve character animations, for MotionDesign
Retro comp to: Brook, Mfrs, Solomon, SQ, Baba, Bk, Al, Dot, and Lil Pizza
3/ Prop House
There have been 11 Prop House rounds with 110 ETH given out to over 100 builders.
→ Explore each Prop House round in detail
Here are some highlights from Prop House-funded projects:
Lil Nouns Coffee
3D Animated gang
100 Nounish hoodies for homeless people
Lil Noun Pet - a virtual pet app for iOS
3D animated video
Lil Nouns prop.house winner @psychdre just dropped an awesome new 3D Lil Nouns animated video. Very Lil ⌐◨-◨ish!Lil Nouns Metaverse Museum
Auction Tracker Chrome extension
Nounify Children’s Hearts
Lil Nouns cc0 music library
A Lil Help From The Skies - By Lil Nouns ⌐◨-◨
Nounified skatepark in Rio
Wakeboarding proliferation
Lil Nouns resin toys
Perpetual POAP Program
1 Million views on TikTok - find the stickers ⌐◨-◨
Care packages for the unhoused in PDX
Tool for ROI/ROA measurement
4/ Other Projects
Lil Sisters funded → 38 ETH
Content Pod funded → 11 ETH
Data Pod funded → 15 ETH
Lil Reps was started
The Inaugural Lil Golden Globe Awards took place
5/ 15 Nouns Acquired
I remember the excitement and buzz when we acquired our first Noun. Fast-forward to today and we have 15 Nouns in our Treasury. That’s some serious firepower.
The last 5 Props on Nouns have had an average of around 225 Votes. So 15 Nouns give us 7% weight in any given Nouns vote.
Lils are coming out of 2022 with the ability to have a big impact.
6/ The Lil Nouns Vision: Graduating Builders
It’s been fun to see folks like Victor Solomon pass a Prop on-chain at Nouns. He started in Lil Nouns with a couple of projects.
A big focus for Lil Nouns in 2023 is graduating builders up from Lil Nouns, helping refine their idea, and supporting them as they go on-chain at Nouns, using our 15 Nouns to vote.
It’ll be fun to see this unfold. If this sounds exciting to you, we’d love to have you come build with us this year! The best first step is to join our Discord (it’s not token-gated).
Let’s quickly recap everything else that happened last week, and we’ll be back to the deeper weekly dives next Sunday.
→ 2 Props finished + 2 new Props
Last week, we had two Props finish and two new Props put on-chain.
Proposal 91 [Active]
Unique IRL Proliferation at 420 Tasty Trivia Events
6.9 ETH to sponsor and brand 420 Tasty Trivia Events as Lil Nounish
Proposal 90 [Defeated]
Extend Nouns Acquisition Commitee Mandate (60 ETH)
Proposal 89 [Succeeded]
Community-Scripted Lil Nouns Video
Proposal 88 [Succeeded]
→ Prop House: Marketing Round
Marketing Round
.80 ETH × 3
Ideas that get us exposure are what this round is about! Hit us with your best marketing ideas that you can crush this month! You have 1 Week to think up a potential campaign that will run for the following 1 month after voting ends. Sponsorship to run each campaign will be .8 ETH. Podcast? Meme a day? Newsletter? Spaces? SEO? TikTok? YouTube Shorts? IDK . You do YOU marketers, proliferatooors, and memeooors!
The deadline to submit is tomorrow (Jan 9th)! So get your ideas submitted ASAP!
We will be back to our regularly scheduled posts next Sunday. But I hope you enjoyed this mega post highlighting 2022 within Lil Nouns.
Thank you for reading until the very end. As a token of my appreciation, I am doing a secret giveaway—the first three readers to reply back to this email with their ENS will be sent a Nouniversary 0.
See you next Sunday,
Lil Saturn