As discussed in the growth meeting, summarizing key points on how the newsletter would work. Please comment with your feedback and ideas!
Target Audience and Purpose
The goal of the newsletter is to provide a window into what’s happening at Arrow, formatted in an accessible and easy-to-digest way and written in clear, concise language. There will be technical elements but the tone is not overly technical – keep it light but not silly.
Typical readers would be:
Prospective clients
Engineers who we hope to get involved with the community (a sort of recruitment tool)
People already involved with Arrow (a tool to easily stay updated)
Potentially, people with a general interest in VTOL, eVTOL, open source hardware, DAOs, and/or Ethereum
Anyone I’m missing?
Platform
I most recently used the Ghost platform. It’s not the most customizable, but does a fine job of publishing a running archive of posts on a website (for example https://www.poap.news/). Whenever you publish a new post, you can email it to a list of subscribers.
For now I think the $9 a month plan would be fine, could eventually upgrade to the $25 a month plan if I find some additional customizations we want: Ghost(Pro) - Official managed hosting for Ghost
Open to other platforms if people prefer something else.
Newsletter structure – just throwing out ideas, and I’m sure things would change as we see what works well. Thinking the newsletter would be a combination of short bullet points, links, embedded videos/social posts, and longer pieces (2-5 paragraphs, sometimes more) highlighting anything especially interesting/important. Would include images and graphics and different section headers based on topics to break things up (somewhat similar format to https://www.poap.news/):
Short mission/vision statement at the top of each newsletter (summarizing/combining some of the statements on https://arrowair.com/), and often weave in how the newsletter content relates to this mission
Engineering updates
Product launches (and literal “launches” including both successes and failures ), new prototypes
Roadmap updates
Links to top social content/announcements, such as Twitch streams and other videos discussed in the growth meeting today
Important content updates, such as to website, developer docs, API docs, GitHub
Recaps of major events, community gatherings, conferences
Community/DAO updates, such as new AIPs, grants/bounties, important Discourse threads
Ideas for further down the line: interviews/profiles of DAO members, highlights from across the VTOL industry, highlights from others building open source hardware
What else?
Misc
Plan to publish once a week. Tuesday seems to be a good day to publish, allowing time to properly collect everything from the previous week etc. But depending on typical meeting/work cadence, perhaps another day would be better.
Can we break down the “prospective customers”?
At this stage, are they SEZs, or hobbyists, or farmers with lots of land…?
DAOs might be different, but in a startup the first customers are the investors, then the early adopters, and finally the distributors
Never heard of Ghost, but in the web3 space the players are https://paragraph.xyz and https://mirror.xyz, which I thought were free … similar features expect the readers can mint the article if they like it ^^
I always tell everyone once a week is too ambitious, it usually works for a few weeks and then something happens … I don’t believe readers would expect updates every week about Arrowair Fornight or even month should be fine.
It’s also good to define how many articles are in the buffer in case nobody can write for a while.
Agree it’s good to further refine who is meant by prospective clients. Since I’m just initiating myself on this project, I’d defer to others on who that is at this stage, and who it may be in three months, six months, a year (if it may change).
I’ve used Mirror and Paragraph but not for the purposes of sending an org newsletter. I’m open to trying it out and agree they could be good options, and free. I’m not sure if there may be some limitations with customizations that we may want but couldn’t do. Initial ones I can think of: I don’t believe you can have shortened custom URLs, custom fonts or colors.
Re: cadence, the last newsletter I did I published every week for 2.5 years so I’m up for doing it weekly if we think there will be enough info to share. It doesn’t always have to be long, some issues could be mostly short bullet points with engineering updates. Or maybe it makes sense to publish less frequently. It also depends on the time commitment that would yield the best return on investment. I defer to you all who have been here longer than me (and understand the current state of project and needs better) on that decision as well!
I agree with monthly publish plannings due to there’s probably lack of information density in a single week… And maybe we can try some innovation such as 3-week-channel, please hate me
Another set of important prospective readers are government officials and Aerospace industry consortia/associations.
The groups control access to important certifications and opportunities in one way or another.
Having the news letters operate as a sort of rolling record of work for the DAO rite large could make packaging documents and generating an easy to grasp development track record to provide to these groups much easier.
Absolutely on the rolling record of the DAO, this is one of the key value propositions of the newsletter in my mind. And yes, having this information already documented in one place, in a consistent format, makes it easy to repurpose it for other uses.
The rolling record is also one of the reasons why I think having biweekly would be preferred over monthly, because it showcases recent activity on a more frequent basis. It also lends itself to being a bit more detailed and granular since you are not distilling everything into just one edition per month.
I like the biweekly publication. If it becomes more difficult to find enough material for the newsletter, you just have to ask people directly to give an update
I like your newsletter structure. If you think you can gather enough content for once a week publications that would be great. We can always change the frequency later and I don’t think biweekly would be a bad start also. Seems like you have a good idea on where to gather our content from but I do agree we can use content from eVTOL media.
For reference, we just reviewed in Mon Dec 2 growth tagup meeting this doc, which outlines this proposal in a more formal way. Please review and leave any comments, and then if everyone agrees we should proceed I will start a new, formal AIP thread for the newsletter:
Since its intended a permanent piece of DAO infrastructure, a project grant for the whole thing might not be the best option, it probably makes more sense as an AIP cause it wouldn’t have like a definite end point. .
But it could remuneration wise be done through a grant submitted for each letter.
could it perhaps be split ? with the concept of the news letter enshrined as an AIP but then each content submission made through a grant .
I agree with the split approach. I personally would not include any specific tools, personal or timeline for the publishing in the AIP.
Leave that for the Grant. The Grant could also be for several month, each published newsletter as a milestone.
Thanks for the input on grants vs. AIP. I will read up a little more on how grants work and follow up here and/or on a Growth call about it, and will plan on editing the AIP as appropriate and drafting a grant proposal next week
Projects or pods can publish specific roles or expertise they require through a time commitment grant. For example, if a project needs an expert in parachute systems, they can outline the role, required expertise, and estimated time commitment. This information can then be shared in the newsletter to reach the broader community and attract suitable contributors.
), new prototypes
Fornight or even month should be fine.
.