AutoShow Dash Integration
Anthony Campolo presents AutoShow, an open-source content repurposing tool, and discusses a Dash funding proposal for payment integration
Episode Description
Anthony Campolo presents AutoShow, an open-source content repurposing tool, and discusses a Dash funding proposal for payment integration.
Episode Summary
Anthony Campolo returns to Incubator Weekly to showcase AutoShow, an open-source tool he built to help podcasters and content creators automatically generate show notes, summaries, chapters, and other written content from audio and video files using various large language models. The conversation traces his journey from building it for personal use to exploring a bootstrapped business model, contrasting that path with traditional VC funding. Campolo demonstrates the tool live, processing a Dash Core Group sprint review through DeepSeek to produce chapters, a summary, and even a rap song. The discussion then shifts to a six-month Dash funding proposal requesting 80 Dash per month, which would support three main deliverables: prominent Dash branding and discounted rates for Dash payments, a full payment integration including potential use of Dash Platform's upcoming token system for credits, and community reporting with adoption metrics. Rion Gull emphasizes the strategic value of reaching Campolo's network of JavaScript developers and content creators, framing it as both a user acquisition opportunity and a real-world test case for Dash's payment and platform tools. The episode closes with plans to submit the proposal soon and revisit the Dash SDK for broader developer outreach.
Chapters
00:00:00 - Introduction and AutoShow Overview
Rion Gull welcomes Anthony Campolo back to Incubator Weekly and asks him to pitch AutoShow, the open-source tool he has been building independently. Campolo explains that he originally created it for his own podcasting needs, starting with summary and chapter generation before expanding into a full pipeline that accepts audio or video input, applies customizable prompts, and routes them through different large language models to produce written content like blog posts and even song lyrics.
Campolo notes that the Dash community has already benefited from the tool, as it was previously used to generate show notes for Incubator Weekly episodes. Gull adds that multiple developers and content creators have expressed interest in paying for a hosted version, which sets the stage for the episode's central discussion about turning AutoShow into a commercial product with Dash payment integration rather than pursuing traditional venture capital funding.
00:04:44 - Bootstrapping vs. VC Funding
The conversation turns to the business model behind AutoShow, with Campolo explaining his preference for bootstrapping over seeking venture capital. He shares that he has watched friends go through the full cycle of raising funding, failing to hit growth targets, and shutting down their companies, which motivates him to retain control and build sustainably. Gull frames this as an opportunity for a middle-ground arrangement with Dash's governance system, which can fund projects through proposals without requiring equity.
Gull describes how Dash's superblock proposal system allows anyone to present a value proposition to the network's masternode operators, requesting funding in exchange for clearly defined deliverables. This sets up the rationale for Campolo's upcoming proposal, positioning it as a way to get early-stage funding with fewer strings attached than a traditional investment while still providing measurable value back to the Dash ecosystem through payment integration and developer outreach.
00:08:10 - Live Product Demonstration
Campolo shares his screen and walks through a live demonstration of AutoShow's web interface. He processes a recent Dash Core Group sprint review video, selecting a transcription service and DeepSeek as the LLM, then choosing short chapters, a summary, and a rap song as outputs. He explains that the tool is designed so non-technical users can operate it without any command-line knowledge, unlike the original open-source version.
The demonstration produces 14 chapters for the hour-long video along with a description and the generated rap lyrics. Campolo discusses how the processing workflow will eventually be broken into steps so users can configure prompts while transcription runs in the background. He also shows his personal website where he has published show notes from guest appearances on other streams, illustrating how the tool's output has evolved as he has switched between different models like Claude and ChatGPT.
00:12:49 - Target Market and Use Cases
Campolo identifies his primary target audience as independent content creators, particularly YouTubers and podcasters who lack the production teams that larger shows use to manually create chapters and descriptions. He explains that the tool is especially valuable for audio-only podcasts distributed via RSS that do not benefit from YouTube's auto-generated chapters. The discussion also touches on educational applications, with Campolo describing how teachers could generate comprehension questions from video lectures.
A broader use case emerges around researchers who need to process large volumes of unstructured audio or video archives. Gull adds the example of a popular five-hour weekly JavaScript stream whose manual show notes take days to produce, suggesting that even shows with dedicated staff could benefit from rapid preliminary output. This naturally connects to the strategic value for Dash, as Campolo's network of JavaScript developers and content creators represents exactly the audience Dash needs to reach as its developer platform matures.
00:18:22 - Dash Value Proposition and Ambassador Role
Gull articulates why this project offers more than a simple payment integration for Dash. He argues that Campolo's established presence among web developers makes him a natural ambassador who can demonstrate a real cryptocurrency use case to an audience that typically questions what crypto is actually good for. With Dash Platform now on mainnet and built for web developers, cultivating relationships with front-end engineers through a trusted peer is strategically important.
The conversation explores user acquisition economics, with Gull noting that fintech companies routinely spend fifty to a hundred dollars per new user. If Dash can acquire wallet-holding users through discounted AutoShow credits at a fraction of that cost, the investment becomes highly efficient. Campolo's proposal would also generate concrete adoption metrics showing how many users chose Dash over credit cards, providing the community with data it currently lacks about real-world payment preferences.
00:28:32 - Proposal Details and Deliverables
Campolo walks through the three main components of his funding proposal. The first covers placement and promotion, where Dash will be featured on the front page and set as the default cryptocurrency payment option with discounted rates. The second addresses integration and development, including building the pay-with-Dash flow and exploring Dash Platform's upcoming token system for managing user credits. Gull emphasizes that the platform desperately needs real business use cases to test and improve developer tools before they can attract paying users organically.
The third deliverable focuses on community reporting, with Campolo committing to regular progress updates, transaction data, and adoption metrics shared with Incubator, Dash Core Group, and Dash Growth. Gull briefly explains that Dash Growth is the network's marketing organization led by Joel Valenzuela. Campolo adds that he will also produce code snippets and documentation from the integration process, following his natural habit of readme-driven development, which could help future developers integrating Dash into their own projects.
00:33:47 - Timeline, GitHub, and Next Steps
Campolo outlines a six-month timeline beginning with payment flow development and product launch in the first two months, targeting a mid-to-late April release with standard startup promotion strategies including Product Hunt. Months three and four shift to user incentivization and documentation, collecting statistics on Dash usage versus other payment methods. The final two months focus on refinement based on feedback and a comprehensive report on growth and adoption outcomes.
Gull advises submitting the live proposal quickly rather than waiting for extended forum feedback, noting that real engagement from masternode operators typically comes only after the proposal hits the blockchain. Campolo highlights the open-source GitHub repository, which already has 48 stars thanks to coverage in a Node.js newsletter and consistent streaming promotion. The episode wraps with plans to revisit the Dash SDK for broader developer outreach once it is confirmed ready for external use on mainnet.
Transcript
[00:00:02.07] - Rion Gull Welcome everybody to this week's episode of Incubator Weekly. Today we have back on the show, Anthony Campolo. Welcome back.
[00:00:11.11] - Anthony Campolo What's up, Rion? How you been?
[00:00:13.20] - Rion Gull Good. Yeah, it's good to see you, a friendly face back on the show. Somebody who's been more of an integral part of Incubator Weekly in the past, and now you're back on more or less as a guest. So the reason that we have you on is you have a product/service that you've been building in the background. In your absence from Dash, you've been busy coding some things, and that thing is called AutoShow. I will let you describe what that is. Actually, why don't you go ahead and give your elevator, you know, 30-second pitch on what AutoShow is and why you're building it?
[00:01:00.27] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, AutoShow is something that I originally built for myself because I am a podcaster and general content creator, and I wanted a tool that would basically let me... First, it just started out with generating summaries and chapters, and then it kind of expanded from that into building out a whole pipeline where you can feed in audio or video files, put different prompts in front of them, and then give them to different large language models. So, you know, it's basically a way of repurposing your content to create lots of different written things, blog posts, or even create songs with it, like lyrics and stuff like that. So that's kind of the thing. And I originally was actually using it for Dash Incubator for a while. We would create the show notes with it because some people wouldn't necessarily have the time to watch all of the videos each week, and they want an idea of what the topics are, what it's going to cover, so they can jump to different parts that may be interesting to them or relevant. So the Dash community has actually already gotten a little taste of AutoShow.
[00:02:08.25] - Rion Gull Yeah. And I've seen you presenting. You've got your own channel like you said, and I've seen you presenting your tool to other people in the Web2 space. Because you do like to rub shoulders with a lot of content creators. Being a content creator yourself, you rub shoulders with other content creators and developers, and you're presenting it to other people, right? And you're asking for tips and things like, you know, JavaScript types and how can I fix this? And I've seen those where you're presenting it to other people. And one of the things that you've mentioned is that several people have said, man, this is a great little service here. I don't know how much I would pay for it, but I think that I would pay something for it. And people have been asking you, or telling you, you should make this into a product because it's really cool. But on the other hand, it's also fully open source. So that's a very cool combination, something that you've had a lot of people get excited about already, and partly because it's open source and they can see everything going on.
[00:03:21.13] - Rion Gull But you know how a lot of things work with open source: even though something's open source, people generally just want somebody else to do it for them. Like, package this up into a nice web app so I can just use it and, you know, I'd be happy to pay a small amount for it. So anyway, that's what got both of us thinking, like, if you have a digital product
[00:03:46.03] - Anthony Campolo that
[00:03:46.12] - Rion Gull would be 100% ideally suited to have digital payments if you want to make it a paid service. And there are generally two different kinds of ways you can go with paid services in general. You can go the VC route, where a VC just gives you a million dollars to develop this thing and they always tell you to offer it for free for a while, gain a big user base, and then go to the moon. Go to the moon or rug pull them and take away features or whatever they do, lock you in somehow. And so you're kind of beholden in that route. So instead of going the VC route, you're deciding to do this a different way by getting your users to actually fund you right out of the gate.
[00:04:44.07] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, bootstrapping is kind of like when they compare the two different ways of building a company. As you say, you could be VC-backed or you could bootstrap it, or indie hacker, you know, terms like that, which basically means you build it on your own time with your own money. Either you have another job and you do it on the weekends, or you fund it with your savings or something, and then you try and get users who will pay and you try and grow that and just see where it goes. So yeah, that's where I want to go. I've had a lot of friends, good friends now, that I've seen go through the entire process of creating a company, getting funding, having to shut down the company because they didn't hit the marks that they needed to continue the funding. And it's not something that I am completely opposed to doing at any point, but it's something that I want to first see if I can do like this, bootstrapping it, because I would like to have as much control over it as I want and not feel like if it doesn't hit a certain user level, then the whole thing has to shut down.
[00:05:43.24] - Anthony Campolo You know, it would be nice if I can even just get some sort of momentum with it. Then once you hit kind of an equilibrium, where it's just funding your lifestyle, that seems like a pretty sweet deal to me.
[00:05:57.20] - Rion Gull Yeah. And you have bootstrapped it for the most part on your own dime up until now. And what we're here to talk about is that you and I have talked a little bit about strategies for moving forward with this venture of yours, and I've suggested that there might be a win-win here, with Dash giving you a little bit of funding to give some perks to Dash on our side and on your side to get some funding, but not with the kinds of strings attached that you would typically have with a venture arrangement where you're giving up a bunch of equity in your company. But Dash is kind of that middle ground where, you know, we do have something like the DIF where you could give equity, but we also have this generic proposal system, superblock system, where you can just make any kind of proposition, give a good value proposition to the Dash community of here's what you will get, the value that you will get, and here's what I'm requesting in return. And so you've put together a draft proposal for just that.
[00:07:11.18] - Rion Gull So why don't we, before we go into the proposal though, I would like to give the viewers a better idea of what this product is because it is pretty close to being done, or at least a first iteration of it. So let's take a look at it.
[00:07:29.09] - Anthony Campolo The main thing I would say is the backend is kind of all built out. The frontend is still being worked on, and the actual payments integration is still being worked on. But in terms of the MVP of the product itself, it's pretty much all there in terms of what it's going to provide people. Then we'll kind of add features as it goes.
[00:07:48.19] - Rion Gull Yeah. And payments are not something that's super easy for people, generally speaking. That's why they reach for things like Stripe or PayPal or integrations, and even those aren't easy. So we're hoping that a Dash payment integration will get you started right away with accepting payments. So let's go to your screen. Is it ready to present?
[00:08:10.19] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, go for it.
[00:08:13.22] - Rion Gull Let's look at the project itself. We're here in Visual Studio Code IDE. Tell us what we're looking at.
[00:08:22.21] - Anthony Campolo Actually, I think I'm just going to show this. The frontend is going to change a lot, but this will give people a clear idea of what's going on. The way it's designed is that you shouldn't need to be technical at all to do this. The open source version, you had to know how to use the CLI and spin up a Node project and all that. I'm just going to use, you said this is a good one. We're going to do the recent sprint review for Dash Core Group, and you pick a transcription service and an LLM service. DeepSeek is what everyone's talking about, all the cool kids. So we'll just try that one out. And then you see here, this is what's currently offered in terms of what you can get in the show notes. So it can generate titles, different-length summaries, different-length chapters, key takeaways, questions. So this would be like if you want to create a test. If you're a teacher and you had a video you were going to show a class, you create 10 check comprehension questions. Just a regular old blog post. So if you're someone who creates videos every week, like you do a stream, you want to turn that into written content.
[00:09:36.10] - Anthony Campolo You do a blog. So I'm going to do short chapters, a summary, and then just for fun we'll do the rap song. And this will take a little while to process just because it's like an hour-long video. There will be kind of a different flow once it's fully built out, where you'll start by inputting the video and transcription and it'll do that first, and then as that's running you'll kind of decide on your prompts and LLMs. So this processing thing will be broken up into a few steps. So it won't be like you just stop and wait for it to do a thing. But this is just kind of where it's at right now. So any questions so far based on all that?
[00:10:17.23] - Rion Gull Yeah, I was wondering, I had a little intruder coming in, so I had to go off camera for a minute there. But is one of those checkboxes just the transcript itself?
[00:10:31.08] - Anthony Campolo This transcript comes automatically. You'll get the transcript every time because it needs the transcript to do all the functionality. Even if you don't necessarily need it, you're going to get it. The UI will be set up in a way where you can look at the transcript or not, but either way it'll be saved for you along with the show notes. Because once you have the transcript, you might want to run it on a different set of prompts if you decide, or if you don't quite like the output, you might want to try a different model. So you see it's pretty long. If we go all the way down, we'll actually see, and then it gives you the prompt in case you want to see that. But the actual important part is here. This is the LLM output. So the description is "Sprint review session covering updates on platform development, including progress on GroveDB, TenderDash, SDK, protocol work, with insights into fee systems, proofs, and future plans." So that's quite a mouthful. And then it breaks down into each of the chapters.
[00:11:41.12] - Anthony Campolo So let's see, there's 14 chapters for about an hour-long video. And then the song: "Yo, we're building blocks, stacking lines of code from TenderDash, GroveDB, watch the system explode." And so yeah, if you want, you could drop this into something like Suno. You said someone in the community actually already kind of does this. They create songs about Dash, right?
[00:12:08.19] - Rion Gull Yeah. Shout out to Black Mirror Designer. He's always dropping little songs in the Discord, and it's obviously not going to be a strict substitute for content, but it is a fun way to get the main ideas across for any block of text. So that's pretty cool. Yeah, so we just... You just started this right before we started the show, so it's pretty fast and this could be helpful. So what kind of customers do you think would use this service? And after we talk a little bit more about the project itself, let's talk about the proposal that you're making to Dash. But what kind of a demographic or target market do you have here?
[00:13:00.22] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, so right now I'm thinking other content creators, people who are either YouTubers or podcasters, because I think it's pretty common, especially for the bigger shows, to have at bare minimum some sort of chapters that break up the content, and you can get that auto-generated through YouTube. But if you don't, if you're just doing an RSS feed, if you have an audio podcast, you might not be putting it on YouTube. So it's really useful for that. And people who are kind of doing it, not necessarily people who are doing it by themselves, but not necessarily having a huge team, because that's one of the reasons why the bigger shows can do this is they usually have another person who is either listening to it in real time and coming up with chapters and descriptions, or will do it after they record it. So it's hopefully a way to help accelerate that for people who are just creating their own content and might not be able to have the time to do this. That was one of the reasons for FSJam I wanted this, because I've already put so much time just into editing the episodes themselves.
[00:14:12.21] - Anthony Campolo I didn't really have the time to do a really good transcript and all the chapters and stuff like that. So that's why, like I said in the beginning, I originally built it. And then I think it could also be useful for, like I said, teachers. I'm probably going to create more prompts to generate more material like that because, like, I do some tutoring. I tutor some Python students. And so I find it's really good for distilling down stuff into good examples. And then you can even have it start with easy examples and go to hard examples. Most people can do a lot of this just by prompting ChatGPT and giving it the right content and stuff, but it's just a lot of manual steps and there's a lot of iteration required to kind of get the prompts right. So that's kind of the value I'm offering, that I've already gone through the process of building this whole pipeline and handwriting all the prompts and testing them a lot on a lot of different content to kind of get them honed to be really useful.
[00:15:17.20] - Anthony Campolo So yeah, that's probably where I'll start out, and then maybe at some point researchers. I think this could be especially useful if you're someone who has to parse through tons and tons and tons of archival stuff, either video or audio, or even text as well, because it's already got all the LLMs there. So if you're someone who's studying some really obscure historical topic and there's like 80 hours of interviews with people about it, and it's all just raw information, this can start you off or give you just the summary alone of what all of it is. If you're looking for something specific or you're trying to research a specific part of it, then you can create kind of this human-readable way to just deal with this huge mass of unstructured data.
[00:16:09.29] - Rion Gull Yeah, okay, that gives me a good idea. I also, I think you watch this also, but every Friday there's a guy named Ryan Carniato who does this epic five-hour stream about all things JavaScript and platforms and frontend engineering in general. And I do like to watch that show when it comes out, but he has a manual person who goes through and does a really good job on it. But even for things like that, where you do have somebody, because his show is so popular among developers, it might be better to have somebody hand-curating his show notes. But it usually takes them a couple days because, you know, it's five hours long. And so just even having a preliminary thing that's like five minutes after the show is done could be helpful as well. And so I'm thinking in terms of, we'll get into your proposal for the Dash community and how that might help them, but just before that I do think that things like if you're targeting the Web2 space and shows like Ryan or other content creators in the JavaScript scene, that would help get some eyeballs on your project and because of that get some eyeballs on Dash, like, oh, Dash is supporting this and has an integration
[00:18:01.29] - Anthony Campolo with,
[00:18:04.10] - Rion Gull with this service. So that's kind of what I'm thinking of in terms of value proposition to Dash. It's not just, hey, let's have this random service accepting Dash. It's a lot more than that because of the demographic that you run around with.
[00:18:22.08] - Anthony Campolo Like
[00:18:24.27] - Rion Gull we need web developers, right? As soon as we get Platform, Platform is on mainnet now and it's built for web developers, and we're waiting on a little bit of a better SDK experience. We'll talk about that probably in later shows. But when, if, when we get to that point where we have good tools for frontend developers to work with, we're going to need that connection with the individual developers, and getting them interested in and trusting some random cryptocurrency project is not going to be easy. But I think with you and a service like this that kind of eases them into like, oh yeah, cryptocurrency actually can be useful, and here's a guy that I know, Anthony, that is using Dash both as payments and potentially even for the backend token system, which we'll talk about in a little bit, on Dash Platform, that can be interesting. So it's more than just some kind of payment integration. It's more about how you can become somewhat of an ambassador for Dash as the cryptocurrency use case that so many people don't seem to know.
[00:19:52.23] - Rion Gull Like what's the use case of cryptocurrency? Well, here's a good example.
[00:19:56.01] - Anthony Campolo That's always really hard, yeah, to get across to people for sure.
[00:20:00.01] - Rion Gull Yep. Okay, so now with that said, did you have anything else to say about like Ryan's video here?
[00:20:07.14] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, I was just pulling it up as an example because you were mentioning it, because I was on his stream. And so all the videos that I've done in terms of guest spots and stuff, I've created show notes and put them on my website right now. So this is the one for Ryan Carniato. This is also when I was using an older model. This is when I was using Claude, and now I usually use o1 ChatGPT because it follows the instructions better if you tell it, like, I want a chapter every five to ten minutes. Because if you look at this, this is a lot more chapters than is in mine, but that's partly because I was using Claude and the newer kind of reasoning models, they're better at following instructions. So if you can really specifically say I want the chapters to be this long, it'll actually write out like 20 chapters for you. Claude will kind of just write as many as it can, and then I'll tell it to do like twice as many. So this is partly what you're seeing here. This is kind of an older iteration of the tool, and if we go to a newer video like this one, the chapters you see here, they're actually every six minutes.
[00:21:16.04] - Anthony Campolo So there's a lot more chapters in this one. So that gives you just more fine-grained detail about what is actually happening throughout the course of the stream.
[00:21:28.01] - Rion Gull Yeah. Okay, very cool. Let's take a look at the... You've got a forum post for your proposal.
[00:21:37.27] - Anthony Campolo Yep.
[00:21:38.14] - Rion Gull And walk us through this.
[00:21:40.23] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, so the proposal is for a six-month period and 80 Dash per month, and you and I kind of talked about this beforehand to try and find the right number. So this is kind of where we've landed. I kind of explained what the tool is, but we already kind of went over all of that. And the goals in terms of the integration are that it will accept Dash as a payment. Dash will be kind of promoted, will be shown on the front page, and if you're going to pay with crypto, then it'll be kind of the first default option. And there will be opportunities for discounts and deals based on that because there will be ways to pay with a credit card as well, but you can kind of guide the user in one direction or the other when there's multiple options. So that's kind of the idea, is that using Dash, you can get a better deal if you use it, and then that will also kind of let people know about it if they've never used it.
[00:22:56.06] - Anthony Campolo It could be an incentive for them to, like, well, actually create a wallet and get some Dash.
[00:23:00.21] - Rion Gull So yeah, and I want to... One of the reasons why I thought this was an interesting project is, A, it's a digital product that, you know, whether this has any kind of product-market fit, we don't know yet. It's hard to say what anybody will pay for. That's just a big unknown. That's a challenge of entrepreneurship in general. But if it does, the question is: will people be wanting to pull out a credit card and use the credit card, or will it be easier, potentially easier, for them to pay with a cryptocurrency? And I will be interested to see what kind of stats you have. So I think that, yeah, you mentioned in here that you'll be able to give us statistics about, okay, how many people are using Dash, how many people have, for example, gone to the website, things like that, that give us some metrics to base our decisions on, like should we fund something like this in the future? If, for example, we find out that 50% of your users are interested in using a cryptocurrency, or actually maybe 25%
[00:24:21.18] - Rion Gull actually did use a cryptocurrency and 10% used Dash. You know, that gives us some kind of baseline to work with where we wouldn't have that kind of data if we were just working with any random person that decided to accept cryptocurrencies on their website. We need more information about what are people doing and spending, what kind of payments do they prefer? And this can be seen as just a raw kind of user acquisition for Dash. It's no mystery that every industry has a number that they put basically on how much should we pay to acquire a user for this product or service. In banking, I know that just from some research that I did a long time ago, a couple years ago, I was surprised to learn that the banking industry, or fintech, I can't remember if it was banking specifically or just fintech in general, but those industries will pay people $50 to $100, if I'm not mistaken, per user. That's what they've decided, like a user is worth $50 to us, and so we'll spend $50 per user acquisition on marketing and development or whatever.
[00:25:50.21] - Anthony Campolo So basically you open an account and it comes with money.
[00:25:53.27] - Rion Gull Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so this would be a way, even if you could offer... I don't know how much you're planning on charging people. I do know that you're going to have some kind of token or credit system where somebody pays X amount of, you know, probably a US dollar-denominated fee to get a certain amount of tokens that they can then use on your system. But let's say whatever that number is, if you had a 50% discount or a 20% discount for Dash users, that might only end up being something like $5 or something that you're actually subsidizing that user. And from the Dash perspective, that might be well worth the cost. So if we can acquire a Dash user that downloads a wallet and makes themselves comfortable using that as a payment system, and we only have to pay $5 to get that user, that's money well spent, in my opinion. I don't know how the numbers will shake out, but do you want to give us a little bit of a better idea of, do you have any kind of numbers on that?
[00:27:13.26] - Anthony Campolo Yeah. So the way it'll work is that you'll buy a certain amount of credits. So there'll be kind of a couple options to get started. It'll probably be you can buy like $10 worth of credits, and what you will be able to use those credits for is going to depend on the length of the content you are processing and the models you want to use. So there'll be versions where you could generate, you know, if let's just say you're a YouTuber and you have like 20 videos and it adds up to maybe like 20 to 30 hours, that is something that you could process for probably 10 bucks if you use one of the really cheaper models. But the output might not be quite as good as you want. So some people might just go for the best options, even if they're the most expensive. So then you might be spending, you know, upwards like a couple dollars per video. So if you're a podcaster and you have like a thousand videos, then people who want to actually process that amount could buy a whole bunch of credits.
[00:28:19.06] - Anthony Campolo But probably what's going to happen is people will just kind of try it out with just a few credits, and then if they find that it's really useful for them, if they have a lot of content, then they might be spending more and more.
[00:28:32.00] - Rion Gull Okay, so you've got three things on here that this proposal funds. You want to go through those and talk about them?
[00:28:41.06] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, so placement and promotion. So you'll be able to see that this app supports Dash, and that will be kind of on the front page. And the marketing.
[00:28:54.16] - Rion Gull Marketing for us, essentially, which is...
[00:28:56.19] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
[00:28:57.25] - Rion Gull To a key audience. I always want to remind, this is a key audience that we would be marketing to.
[00:29:04.27] - Anthony Campolo Yeah. Like you're saying, just because of the network that I have, the most people that I've been showing it to have been other developers on stream, you know, and that's why you'll probably get those types of people using it, at least at first. And then, so discounted rates, default crypto payment, we have the stuff that we already kind of talked about earlier. And then bonus credits for people who are actually doing content for Dash, then they'll probably get an even better deal as well. And then Dash integration and development. Some of this might change as we do a little more research, but the main thing is that there'll be a Pay with Dash flow, and that will give you a way to also kind of dogfood Platform because I know Platform is still relatively new. I think you're at a stage now where the more people who can build on it and just provide basic feedback or ways that it can be improved, that will be useful.
[00:30:13.25] - Rion Gull We actually really, really need that. So right now, I mean, the hope is that eventually we'll have a good enough service and good enough tools that people are actually willing to pay to use Dash Platform. That's the whole idea, is that it costs money to store data. So it will cost you money as a developer if you do end up using Dash Platform for data storage of any kind. But until we get to that point where the tools and the value proposition to developers is good enough, we do need to pay people to help us get to that point. Just like any other product, you always have to kind of pay to develop something until it gets to a point where it's worth paying for. So I don't know if you highlighted this yet, but the last bullet point on number two, create credit system on Dash Platform, that's kind of a big one. Right now we are developing the token system, so both fungible and non-fungible tokens. That is supposed to land in version 2.0, and there's some different ideas about when that's going to be coming.
[00:31:36.26] - Rion Gull But when it does come, that's part of the reason why this is a six-month proposal, because it might take some time for the Dash Platform token system to land. But when it does, we do need somebody with a real business use case to try that out, test that out for developer experience, user experience. And so this would help with that for sure. We'll never know what Dash Platform is really good for until we have somebody with a real business use case using it in the real world.
[00:32:10.09] - Anthony Campolo Yep.
[00:32:13.08] - Rion Gull Go ahead.
[00:32:14.07] - Anthony Campolo Yeah. And then the third is community reporting and collaboration. So giving progress reports on things like user feedback, data for transactions, and adoption metrics, which we also talked about earlier. So you can get kind of an idea of who is using this, how many people are actually using Dash on it, and then collaborate with the team, either Incubator, Dash Core Group, or Dash Growth. Can you say a little bit about Dash Growth? Because that's the one that I probably know the least about out of the three.
[00:32:47.14] - Rion Gull Yeah. Dash Growth is essentially Dash's marketing group. It's Joel, essentially Joel Valenzuela. And he's spent some time, a little bit of time, in the Incubator, but went on his own, and he has a team of two: him full-time and then one other person part-time, and I think maybe one other person part-time. But they basically just do all kinds of marketing. They do a lot of posts. They run the Twitter account. So yeah, they're a very important organization in Dash right now.
[00:33:32.10] - Anthony Campolo Then the last thing is code snippets and documentation to help with integration. This is something I tend to just do naturally anyway, README-driven development, where I write a lot of docs and stuff as I go that will be hopefully useful to other people as well.
[00:33:47.23] - Rion Gull Yep. Yeah. Okay. So deliverables and timeline.
[00:33:54.17] - Anthony Campolo Yeah. So the first two months will be getting the payment flow built out, and this is going to align with kind of when the product is launched. I'm aiming for kind of mid to late April is the plan for when it will actually launch, and we'll start having users and I'll be promoting it a lot and thinking about things like Product Hunt, stuff like that, the typical things that people do when they launch a thing. And so I want you to go
[00:34:23.29] - Rion Gull through that, the same process that anybody would go through, any entrepreneur, any young business startup would go through if they wanted to accept, let's say Dash, but in more general terms crypto payments. What will they reach for and how easy is that of a process? And is there something that we can improve? Right. So if you had a business partner that said, hey, I think that we should accept Dash payments, how would you go about that? So I want you to kind of test that process from the ground up. You might start by going to the Dash website and seeing what merchant services support Dash and then trying those out and seeing which, if any, work for you. And if not, then we need to improve that. So part of this whole thing is just, you know, we need to test this process of how do I accept Dash payments on my website? So that's the first month or two. Next is...
[00:35:34.15] - Anthony Campolo And then, yeah, so months three and four, May and June, will be, now that it's kind of being used, trying to incentivize more users to use it, especially people in the Dash community or outside of the Dash community. And then that will include documentation videos. And then, as we said before, that's when they'll start getting more stats and usage trends and insights into whether we're getting a good amount of people and if they're mostly using Dash or if they're doing other things. And then in the final months, five and six, now that we have some feedback and we've been using it for a while, then it can kind of improve things and make it as smooth a process as possible and then get a report at the end saying here's what we've got, here's where we had growth or not. And then probably do streams like this at different points along the way. So yeah, that's kind of the whole timeline.
[00:36:41.08] - Rion Gull Yeah. And I would guess that in months five to six, or maybe even the months three to four range, that would be somewhere where you'd be starting to look into the Dash Platform for tokens side of things. So I'm just envisioning: I go to your website, I think that it's a service that I want to pay for. I see some payment options. I do that payment option and let's say it's like, oh, I can spend $5 using whatever payment method I want, credit card, crypto. I spend $5 or $10 and I get some credits. How do you, on the backend, build that token credit system is the question. And I don't know if you have the answer to that, but it would be cool if we could do that on Dash Platform if and when it's ready.
[00:37:37.23] - Anthony Campolo So yeah, I guess that would be the main question, what is the timeline for the functionality required to do that on Platform?
[00:37:45.02] - Rion Gull Yeah, yeah, so we'll look into that as well. But that is further down the road in the schedule for you anyway. You've got plenty to do before that, so it's not something that would be pressing, but it is something that I would like to align the timing on. And then let's scroll down a little bit further and see if there's anything else. Okay. So have you got any feedback that you wanted to go over right now? I do want to say something about forum posts and pre-proposal process in general after you say anything else that you wanted to add.
[00:38:21.14] - Anthony Campolo No, go for it.
[00:38:22.25] - Rion Gull So my experience has been with forum posts for pre-proposals is you do get some valuable feedback, but generally speaking, not nearly enough to be too helpful. So I've kind of thought that it's a better approach to just make the proposal live as soon as possible. That's really when you get eyeballs on things because it's actually hitting the budget. It's being broadcast on the chain and people are seeing it on the various places like MNO Watch and Dash Central. And that's when it really becomes like, oh, this person's serious about this. Let's look into this. And this being a six-month proposal, which may or may not start this month, I think that you should get the proposal in as soon as possible. And then you could still tweak what you're offering even if the proposal's live, because the amount doesn't necessarily have to change. But if somebody gives you some feedback on a live proposal that says, hey, I really like this, but I think I would vote for it if X, Y, or Z, then you can still change that.
[00:39:47.23] - Rion Gull It's not like things have to be set right in stone when the proposal is submitted there, because that's when the most valuable feedback comes, when it's actually live. So I would say don't hesitate to put the proposal in as soon as you want to, because the value proposition, what you're actually offering to people, that can change even if the price doesn't. So that's what I'd have to say about that. Anything else? Let's see, Black says, "Good morning, Ryan and Anthony." Morning to you too. It is morning for us.
[00:40:29.29] - Anthony Campolo Any other... the GitHub repo. I don't think we've shown this yet, so github.com/ajcwebdev/autoshow. At this point, the entire thing is open source. Everything that we've shown and we've talked about, people can look at the code for themselves and see what's going on. As the app starts getting built out, especially with the payment functionality, there'll be a private repo, but it's probably going to basically use this as the backend. If someone were to want to spin this up themselves and get all the same functionality, that would still be a thing that they could do, but you won't be able to just clone the entire app.
[00:41:14.17] - Rion Gull Yeah, yeah. And that's fine. I do see that you have 48 stars already, which is actually very cool. That's more than most of Dash's repos outside of Dash.
[00:41:29.18] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, I think I got a first bump because I was in one of Peter Cooper's newsletters, like the Node newsletter. Because I also have a blog post that I kind of wrote when I built the very first version of this. So this blog post was shared in that newsletter, and then it takes you to the GitHub. So I think that got me kind of the first bump. And then I've shared on Twitter and I've done a lot of streams, so I think it just kind of gathered a little bit of momentum that way. So yeah, most stars I have on any of my repos, except for one, which is the Docker integration for Create T3 App, because that was just such a popular framework for a while.
[00:42:11.05] - Rion Gull Yeah, yeah. And Theo, the creator of that is probably one of the top three most influential JavaScript creators in the space, so
[00:42:19.25] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, he's now super into AI. He's building his own chat thing basically called T3 Chat.
[00:42:26.14] - Rion Gull Yep, yep, yep. I've seen that. So yeah, 48 stars is really good. You're doing the right thing by just creating a user base as you're creating the product. It's not like you're just in super stealth mode and then you release it to everybody all at once. You're building a community as you go. So that's awesome. Anything else? We've gone for about 42 minutes now. So what else did you want to say about this? Yeah, I would welcome everybody to give some feedback on the video here or in the forum post. That's the only two places. You did have a Google Doc, but it's the same as the forum post, so just those two places basically would be good.
[00:43:18.05] - Anthony Campolo Or on the Discord. We posted it in the pre-proposal channel in the Discord, so there's a couple places people can comment on it. But like you said, I'll probably get the actual proposal up pretty soon.
[00:43:32.27] - Rion Gull All right, well, I'm looking forward to this and thanks for putting this together. I think this will be valuable for us. I really do. And if people, you know, with the six-month proposal, people can decide in subsequent months whether this is continuing to be... I think the nice thing about a longer proposal for relatively lower cost is that it's not like a big gamble for the Dash community. It's 80 Dash. People know you. People know me right up front. And then they're getting that feedback monthly of like, what's going on. So I think that's the right approach. All right, Anthony, thanks for coming on. We'll probably have you on other streams as well because I do want to get people looking at the Dash SDK once again at some point. I did hear from Sam that he thinks it's ready for people, even external developers, to start using. He thinks it's been ready for a while now. I'm a little bit more hesitant on that myself. I've talked with Mikhail about it. He says there's some issues with it still that we might want to wait on.
[00:44:57.01] - Rion Gull But as soon as I get the go-ahead from him, and you're looking at it as well, you're updating the blog post that you had on the first look at Dash, you're updating that on your site. So we'll be looking at using it as well. And when we feel comfortable, let's introduce it to some more people now that we're on mainnet and, if and when the SDK is good enough to use, let's introduce it to some more, or some of the same people that we introduced it to last year on testnet.
[00:45:37.06] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, I'm looking forward to digging back into that. I actually really enjoyed doing those streams. I thought it was really fun. So that'll be cool to kind of get back into working on it.
[00:45:46.17] - Rion Gull Yeah. You and I, who have been in crypto for a while now, tend to forget sometimes how cool it is. It's very cool to just be able to send payments back and forth, magic internet money. And being able to actually do some useful things on servers that you don't really control, but you can pay for a service without having to give any kind of personal information, that's a very cool value proposition. So I'm looking forward to that too. All right, thanks everybody for joining in and we'll see you next time.