AutoShow + Dash | March Update

Episode Description

Rion Gull and Anthony Campolo discuss the AutoShow AI content platform's Dash integration proposal, covering payment flows, credits, and platform strategy.

Episode Summary

In this episode of Incubator Weekly, Rion Gull and Anthony Campolo walk through the details of the AutoShow integration proposal now live on Dash Central. AutoShow is an AI-powered content creation tool that transforms audio and video into summaries, chapter titles, social media posts, songs, and educational materials using transcription and large language model services. The proposal, spanning six months at eighty Dash, aims to make Dash the default cryptocurrency payment option within AutoShow's credit system, where users purchase credits to generate content. The conversation explores the technical considerations of implementing Dash payments—including real-time transaction detection, QR code flows, and avoiding the cumbersome forms typical of traditional payment integrations—as well as the strategic value of offering steep discounts to Dash users as a user acquisition tool. Rion frames the broader opportunity around Dash Platform, arguing that a long-term partner like AutoShow can help refine developer experience for storage, payments, and authentication while producing real-world adoption metrics. They also discuss keeping the backend open source while closing the frontend, experimenting with storing data on Dash Platform, and generating community reports on transaction data and user feedback throughout the six-month engagement.

Chapters

00:00:00 - Introduction and Proposal Background

Rion Gull opens the episode by welcoming Anthony Campolo back to discuss the AutoShow and Dash integration, noting that the previous appearance covered the pre-proposal phase. He shares his screen to walk through the proposal's history, starting from the January pre-proposal on the Dash forum through to the now-live proposal on Dash Central. The proposal was submitted a month early, a practice Rion advocates for giving voters adequate time to evaluate before the first payout cycle.

The discussion covers the mechanics of submitting proposals through the proposal app built by AJ, explaining how creators can set start cycles, payment amounts, and durations. Rion highlights the benefit of linking the forum pre-proposal as the proposal URL, giving voters two discussion venues. He notes that the proposal is set for six months at eighty Dash and that the first payment deadline is sixteen days away, setting the stage for a detailed walkthrough of the proposal text.

00:06:48 - AutoShow Overview and Open Source Strategy

Anthony provides a high-level overview of AutoShow as an AI content creation application that uses transcription and large language model services to transform audio and video into various outputs—summaries, chapter titles, social media posts, songs, and educational materials. He explains the business model around a credit system where users purchase credits and spend them based on the length and complexity of their content generation requests, with different LLM and transcription services carrying different costs.

The conversation turns to the open source versus closed source distinction. Anthony explains that the backend will remain open source, allowing developers to self-host, while the official consumer-facing frontend application will be closed source. This approach preserves transparency and community contribution on the technical side while maintaining a proprietary product that justifies paid usage. Rion reviews the GitHub repository and its documentation, including the expanding list of prompt types organized into categories like summaries, social media, songs, and educational content.

00:14:12 - Technical Architecture and Dash Platform Experimentation

Anthony walks through the technical stack, including Prisma for database management with PostgreSQL, which stores show note metadata, prompts, transcripts, and LLM outputs. He describes the transcription options—local Whisper for free processing, or Assembly and Deepgram for API-based transcription with features like speaker labels—and the supported LLMs including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and open source models through Fireworks and Together.

A key discussion point emerges around experimenting with Dash Platform for storing user data and documents. Anthony has begun exploring saving show notes as documents through data contracts, though he notes challenges around privacy since user transcripts shouldn't be public by default. Rion discusses potential solutions like client-side encryption and frames two value propositions for Dash Platform: user-driven demand for data sovereignty and developer-driven demand for simpler infrastructure, summarizing the platform's appeal as "storage, payments, and authentication for single page applications."

00:25:40 - Dash Integration Goals and Discount Strategy

The conversation shifts to the proposal's specific objectives: prominent Dash branding, discount rates for Dash payments, default crypto payment positioning, and community reporting. Rion emphasizes that the proposal isn't just a technical integration but also a marketing vehicle, exposing developers in Anthony's network to a cryptocurrency project offering tangible utility rather than speculation. They discuss the mechanics of pricing, with Anthony estimating roughly ten dollars for a thousand credits and approximately one dollar per show note.

Rion raises the strategic question of how steep a discount is needed to motivate non-crypto users to go through the friction of setting up a wallet and purchasing Dash. He suggests experimenting with various discount levels—from ten percent to fifty percent or even ninety-nine percent—to generate data on user acquisition costs. The discussion weighs whether proposal funds should subsidize loss-leader discounts, with Anthony noting his plan was to keep discounts within his existing margins. Rion argues that even small transaction amounts are valuable if they get users through the payment flow and generate insights about crypto adoption barriers.

00:40:18 - Timeline, User Experience, and Community Feedback

The pair reviews the six-month timeline: months one and two focus on building and launching the Dash payment flow with real-time transaction detection and QR code payments, months three and four shift to tutorials and Dash-themed incentives including promo codes for the Dash community, and months five and six center on reporting adoption metrics and compiling a final experience report. Rion stresses the importance of a frictionless payment experience, contrasting it with legacy crypto checkout flows that unnecessarily replicate credit card form requirements.

They review community feedback on Dash Central, where commenters express enthusiasm and one community member requests long-term support—which Anthony has committed to indefinitely. Rion briefly explains the Dash Investment Foundation for anyone interested in larger-scale equity-based funding. The episode closes with a lighthearted mention of community members creating Dash rap songs using AI tools, illustrating the creative potential of AutoShow's infrastructure, and Anthony invites viewers to reach out on Discord with questions or feedback about the proposal.

Transcript

[00:00:02.14] - Rion Gull Welcome everybody to today's episode of Incubator Weekly. Welcome Anthony, how's it going? Going good, how are you? Good, good, good.

[00:02:04.09] - Anthony Campolo See it over there? Yeah.

[00:02:06.01] - Rion Gull The way that's shown on this is that there's this little, you know, new icon. Dash Money is doing the same thing. I would like people to get in this habit. I think it's a good thing for the Dash DAO in general to have proposals start as not paying out, giving voters over a month before the proposal is slated to start paying out. I think that's a good...

[00:02:38.27] - Anthony Campolo approach.

[00:02:40.28] - Rion Gull So I'm just kind of making that known, that I think that's a good habit for people to get into in general. This month it's active, so in 16 days that will be the first deadline for the actual payout. I also wanted to mention real quick here that I thought this was a good approach: to put the forum post for the pre-proposal as the URL link. That way you have two places for people to discuss the proposal. Some people prefer the forum, Dash.org/forum, over Dash Central. But in either case, it's a good way to start a proposal as a pre-proposal on the forum, and then when you put this link as the proposal URL, they have the two places. So I don't know, there are pros and cons, but I...

[00:03:39.25] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, there wasn't a Dash Central link at all when I first was creating it because I was creating it through that proposal app that AJ built.

[00:03:48.05] - Rion Gull Yep, and I wanted to make mention of that as well, so thanks for mentioning that. If anybody... again, one of my purposes in Dash and in the incubator right now is to help people make their own proposals. So this is the app that you're talking about that you submitted your proposal through, and it makes it really easy for you to do what we just discussed, where you say, I want this proposal to start either right now, in the next proposal cycle, that would be putting a one here, and then the number of payments, let's say three, and then the payout amount, let's say five Dash. But if you wanted to push it out a month so that the payment starts a month from the next payment cycle, you just bump that up to two, and now you are submitting a proposal that starts on 4/20 instead of 3/21. That's how this app works. So your particular proposal was six months and I think 80 Dash. Yep. So that's how this would be, and what you're saying is the proposal name... there is actually never really a Dash Central link until the proposal is submitted. However...

[00:05:15.09] - Anthony Campolo However, if people update them afterwards, I guess you can just guess it.

[00:05:17.23] - Rion Gull So it's based on... yeah, the way that Dash Central does their proposals is they always have this /p/ and then some unique name. So that's what you would do if you did want to just put your proposal as a Dash Central proposal and only do that. That's how you would do it, and that's how other proposal tools would do it as well. Then you have your payment address and whatnot, and then you can just pay the application, and the application forwards it on and makes your proposal. So for anybody that's watching that wants to submit their own proposals, this is a really easy way to do that. All right, getting back to your actual proposal, here we are at Dash Central, and as you can see there is the link dashcentral.org/p/autoshow-integration-proposal. But like I said, the benefit of having that forum link is that now you have it, and it'll show up here as well. So anyway, let's go through it. Anthony, why don't you give us an overview of your proposal, and then I suggest that we go through your proposal text line by line because I personally think this is an important proposal and I will discuss why as we go through the text. Why don't you give us an overview?

[00:06:48.18] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, so AutoShow is an app that I'm building, and it's a content creation app that uses transcription and large language model services to basically take audio and video content and turn it into other things, whether it's things like summaries or chapter titles, or things like songs, even social media posts, create images now, something I couldn't do last time I was here. And yeah, so it's for content creators or even like teachers. It can be used to generate kind of like learning material or check for comprehension material around different lesson material. And the plan is to— right now it's an open-source library, so anyone can use it if they want and look at all the code. But the plan is to make it an app that will be just like kind of an easy drag-and-drop, click-and-choose-your-thing app that anyone who's a non-technical user could use so that they could generate their own content. And Dash would be, if this proposal goes through, one of the payment options. So it will be kind of the default crypto payment option if people want to go that route. Then there's the potential to leverage Dash Platform for the credit system. And I don't know if you want to get into that too much now, but just at a high level, it would be a way to track when people are using the app. They are going to buy credits and use the credits to generate show notes. Because depending on what different LLMs or transcription services they use, it'll cost different amounts. So different amounts of credits will be used so people can do that. And that could be tracked on Dash Platform, where when people buy credits, then we save their credit amounts. And then when they create show notes, we deduct those credit amounts, and there will be this kind of distributed ledger keeping track of all of that.

[00:08:55.02] - Rion Gull You want to get into a little bit more detail on that later, but yeah, that's a good overview. There are some devils in the details there, and I'll talk about that later as we go through the proposal text. But yeah, that's a very good overview. As another little preamble to your proposal that I'd like to add, it is a six-month proposal, and I kind of helped recommend a somewhat longer-term proposal for a reason. Obviously you agreed with that, or otherwise you wouldn't have made the proposal. With Dash Platform being live now but not having any production use cases for it yet, I personally think we need a partner that we can work with who's sympathetic to our cause, and that we're sympathetic to your cause, and that we can work together to make sure we have a good system that we can rely on for people who aren't quite as sympathetic to our causes. For example, if somebody doesn't really like cryptocurrency but wants to do something in an easy way, people reach for SaaS all the time, software as a service, right? They do that not because they like Amazon or they like Google. They reach for these things because they're easy. They're just easier to work with, and they solve a problem that you have. You might even hate these companies, right, but you still use them because they solve a problem for you. That's the same thing with Dash Platform. I would like it to get to the point where it is just an easier way to do things in the web application development scene, and easier to use than even some of the things that have millions of VC dollars dumped into them, like Google Cloud Platform or AWS or Azure or something like that. I think we have a long way to go before we can compete on that level, but that is the hope: that people can just follow a few recipes, insert some very small ten lines of code, and be up and running with storage, payments, authentication, and even user management. We'll talk about the user management that you have planned, but yeah, those are the three main things. I like to think of it as SPA for SPAs: storage, payments, and authentication for single-page applications. That's the two SPAs. Any kind of application typically needs those things, at least the ones that we're targeting. We're not targeting blog posting particularly, although you could do that on Dash Platform. But things that need more than just content, things that need storage, persistent globally accessible storage, that's what Dash Platform is made for. Things that need payments, e-commerce, which is what your project is. It's a digital product, so it's an e-commerce product. Everything that needs those things typically also needs authentication, because you're not going to be able to access any kind of user data without knowing who the user is and knowing what those users are allowed to do in your application. So: storage, payments, and authentication. We need somebody like you on a long-term basis, six months in this case, to help us refine our tools and libraries and documentation and just the overall developer experience of using Dash Platform, so that in the future we can target the audience that might not really care about cryptocurrency, might begrudgingly use it, but thinks, yeah, this is a very simple way to do storage, payments, and authentication. So that's my preamble again. Now let's go through the actual body of your proposal here, and we'll talk more about the details as we come to them. AutoShow: you gave the description, so we won't go over that again, but I did want to show briefly the source code that's linked from this link right here. Here you are on GitHub. Like you said, it's an open-source project, but parts of it will be closed source. Do you want to tell us about what's open source and what's closed source, what's public and what's private? Yeah...

[00:14:12.20] - Anthony Campolo Yeah. So, basically, the backend will be open source. And the repo right now, it does have a frontend. It's a very simple little Astro app. That'll probably stay there if people do want to spin up a quick frontend for themselves if they're running this locally. But the app that'll actually be the official AutoShow app that people will be using for payments and all that, that'll be closed source. That's going to be just what's interfacing with the deployed version of the open-source repo, basically. Someone could, if they wanted to, host their own version of the backend. But they wouldn't be able to wholesale clone the frontend. So, I think that's kind of a good compromise in keeping the project mostly open source while still trying to have some sort of, you know, secret sauce or differentiator that allows the app to be, you know, something that people want to actually pay money to use.

[00:15:17.05] - Rion Gull Okay. And so when you're saying this, this site that I'm at right here, for example, the web SRC pages, this is a front-end application, but this isn't the app. You, you would basically create a bigger, better version of this simple front-end and have that closed source, and that's the paid product essentially. Is that right?

[00:15:41.19] - Anthony Campolo Exactly.

[00:15:44.05] - Rion Gull Do you have— is this sample frontend web user interface hosted somewhere right now that we can see?

[00:15:59.26] - Anthony Campolo No, it is not. We looked at it last time. We ran through the example using this. It's not hosted right now. Actually, I'm at the point now where actually I could start hosting it because the main thing was if you just have it up, then people can just hit it. But I set it up so that OpenAI's API keys and stuff are not actually in my backend. You need to send a request with an OpenAI key. I actually probably should actually just deploy it now because that's pretty much someone could technically use it if they want to. They would just have to bring their own LLM keys.

[00:16:50.18] - Rion Gull Yeah. Okay. Let's at least get on the screen your extensive documentation here. Do you want to talk about anything here? That, uh, is it?

[00:17:01.06] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, I added a new section here where it lists all the different stuff that you can kind of create with the prompts. So there's a lot more prompts now than when I first started doing this. It's probably even a couple since the last time we met. But, um, let me get on here myself. So, um, it's kind of in 4 categories. So, um, you have summaries and chapter— actually, you scroll back up to the the prompts real quick a little further. Yeah, where it lists all those right there. Yeah, so summaries and chapters. So summaries like your whole transcript, chapter descriptions, you get like a bullet point summary instead of like a prose summary. And then chapter titles with timestamps, which could be useful for YouTube videos. It automatically creates like the links to the chapters. And then social media posts. So if you want to like blast something out to your X, your Facebook, and your LinkedIn, you can get something different for each of those. That's kind of tailored to their different kind of, you know, people tend to create content differently on different apps. And then things like songs, so rap song, rock song, country song, and then educational and informative content. So key takeaways, comprehension questions, FAQs, curated quotes, and blog outlines and drafts.

[00:18:20.26] - Rion Gull Yeah, this section seems like it has a lot of potential. So you're an entrepreneur, you're basically, you've got a product. People have told you, you were basically building this as kind of like a passion thing. You're really into AI. And then as you, as you, um, as you were talking to people, they were like, hey, I'd pay, I'd pay for this, you know. And so that's why you're making it into a product. Who knows how successful it is going to be, but, but this does seem like it has some legs. Like, if you can, if you can tap into some kind of, um, educational content that, that people are willing to pay for, that does seem like it would be an interesting thing beyond just YouTube chapter titles and things like that. But yeah, so there's other key features. People can set this up on their own. It sets— this is, this is your CLI. I'm just assuming this is AutoShowAS. So, there's lots of different ways that you can— people can use this already right now as an open source CLI tool. Then we talk about the project structure. You're using Prisma. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

[00:19:38.07] - Anthony Campolo Yeah. So, that's to interface with the Postgres database. So, when people create a show note, there is front matter metadata that's created based on, like, if you use a YouTube link, it can automatically grab things like the title and the date. And if you have a cover image for it, it grabs all of that. Then it will save the prompt you used to generate the show notes, because you can pick different prompts and mix and match them. It will save the transcript, and then it will save the actual LLM output you get. All that stuff is saved in the database, and Prisma is for migrations and easy kind of database client work.

[00:20:27.21] - Rion Gull As a user, I can not only use the tool, but I can get back to the history of the outputs and stuff. That's going to be stored on your service and persisted so that users can keep...

[00:20:43.25] - Anthony Campolo a history of those prompts, like how every time you have a conversation with ChatGPT it creates a thing on your sidebar on the left with a running total of all your conversations.

[00:20:58.03] - Rion Gull Yep. Okay, um, we got some more process commands and process steps. Uh, feel free to just talk about any of this if you would, if you'd like. We'll get to the body of your proposal because I'm sure that the Dash people probably want to know a little bit more about what they're getting for the proposal funds itself. We'll get there. But I just did want to—

[00:21:19.17] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, we can just hit on real quick the different services. So for transcription, if you want to do this locally, you can use Whisper and then transcription is free. For the app, it'll be Assembly and Deepgram, the two you can choose from. They are transcription services that offer an API and things like speaker labels and some of the higher-level things that you wouldn't get from Whisper. And then for the LLMs, if you want to run it locally, you can use Ollama for any kind of local model. And then the third-party integrations are ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, which is the new hotness, and then Fireworks and Together, which host various open-source models like Llama.

[00:22:10.16] - Rion Gull Anything to say about the utility files?

[00:22:14.01] - Anthony Campolo There's one for Dash now. So, I kind of want to see what it would be like to just try and integrate the whole thing with Platform. So, I just like have it now save your show notes in a data document or a document with a data contract.

[00:22:31.01] - Rion Gull Oh, very cool. Okay, so not only— we had talked before, and we'll talk more about this later— but not only will you be experimenting with putting people's account credits on Dash Platform, but also the documents and the output of the LLMs themselves, right?

[00:22:50.02] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, I was kind of just curious to see if I could, like, what it would be like to do it. Um, the only issue with that really is that, um, if people are uploading their own files from their own computer. They could be uploading anything. And I don't know if you wouldn't— you wouldn't want their transcripts to be public by default. So yeah, there, there may be other things that would be worthwhile to have it save onto platform. Um, if you want to, like, you could have it saved in some sort of, you know, IPFS system that has some sort of like Git authentication. There's, there's ways to do this in like a decentralized way that also keeps things private. But I don't think you could just do that with Dash Platform itself, right?

[00:23:30.14] - Rion Gull Yeah, I think you'd have to encrypt it before you put it on Dash Platform and then have them decrypt it client-side to be able to view their material. Something like that would be possible. But there, as you were talking about that, I was thinking there are kind of two angles to this. The value proposition for Dash Platform, on the one hand, users might demand something like this if they, if they really needed to have the assurances that their data is accessible even without the application, for example, or needing permission from the application developer. That might be something that's a user-driven demand for specific kinds of applications, but I think the bigger value proposition that I see is trying to make things easier for developers. So user-driven value proposition versus developer-driven value proposition. You're going to go through the whole process of setting up your databases and, you know, have a backend service and everything. But like I said, it would be if Dash Platform were proven to be more like stable and performant and easy to use, and we were all, you know, we had gotten all the way through all that already, it would be potentially easier to do a lot of this stuff without having this for the developer themselves, not necessarily for the user, but for the developer to have these kinds of services at their hand, at their fingertips for storage, payments, and authentication. So just wanted to mention that one more time. But you're going to— you're experimenting this with this in a You're doing both, essentially. You're not going to rely on this. But as part of the proposal, you do want to help us to have the developer experience get fine-tuned a little bit more. Anything else to say about any of this stuff? There's a lot here.

[00:25:40.13] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, that's the Astro frontend. But yeah, that's probably enough on that.

[00:25:44.23] - Rion Gull Okay. Now let's go back to the proposal. And we talked about the summary. Why vote yes? Supporting this proposal integrates Dash into an expanding AI platform for creators and businesses, increasing its visibility, offering user incentives and valuable monthly feedback, and driving long-term growth through ongoing development and marketing. So yeah, I have something else to say about this as well. This is not just people in Dash paying for us to be on another service and have a technical integration; it's also about marketing to developers. The developers that you know and that you will be presenting your product to... there are a lot of developers that will be looking into what you're building, and it will be marketing to them to see that, hey, here's a cryptocurrency that I might hate. I may hate cryptocurrency, but look at what they're doing. They're actually providing a service, and they're actually doing something valuable. It's not just gambling and meme coins and stuff like that. Here's an actual tangible valuable thing that they're building. And you'll be able to show that to lots of different developers as you're building this. So I think that's a very interesting value proposition here. Okay, so how it works. We went over that a little bit as well. The Dash integration goals. So the key objectives: actionable feedback for the Dash community, provide insights on crypto payment flows, user experience, and ways to improve Dash development tools. Yeah, so that's something that I find valuable. And like I said in my preamble, I think that that's something that we need for the long term. The sooner that we can get an actual in-production use case for Dash Platform and be able to say, "Hey, Dash Platform has been serving this customer for six months or three months," the sooner we can get that, the better we'll be able to market our product with. But yeah, we need to pay for that before we can expect anybody to be doing this on their own dime and for free, because it's just a good tool for them to use. Accepting Dash as a payment? Yeah, that's obviously an important part of this. It lets users buy AutoShow credits with Dash at a discounted rate. I have some things to say about this, but why don't you talk about this for a little bit and then I'll add to that.

[00:28:27.01] - Anthony Campolo Yeah.

[00:28:27.07] - Rion Gull That's obviously an important part of this. It lets users buy AutoShow credits with Dash at a discounted rate. I have some things to say about this, but why don't you talk about this for a little bit, and then I'll add...

[00:28:40.17] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, this is one of the things that could both incentivize users to pay with Dash even if they have never used Dash before. They may want to save a little bit, especially if they're going to be generating a lot of show notes. And it would be kind of a thing for Dash to be more inclined to want to fund the project, because they'll hopefully be getting some people actually paying with it. And yeah, also, if you're using Dash you don't get things like credit card fees, so you can actually make it where you have better margins, allowing for the discount.

[00:29:22.00] - Rion Gull Yeah, and beyond that, it's user acquisition, right? So there are a lot of people that have not even touched Dash, don't know anything about it. But if they saw your service... and let's just make up some numbers real quick, or maybe you can give me some prices to work with. So how much do you think you'll be charging, or do you have any idea of that yet?

[00:29:55.12] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, so I think... what was it that I was thinking? It would be like $10 for 1,000 credits, and then generating a show note, depending on the length and what you're using, would be anywhere from like 50 to 100 credits. So people would be spending about a dollar or so per show note, maybe a little less if they're shorter or a little more if they're longer, because transcription cost is one of the biggest drivers of how many credits it'll be. Okay, yeah.

[00:30:37.05] - Rion Gull Okay. Yeah. And I don't want you to have to narrow down your prices at this point, but, um, let's just say for a video that's about an hour long and they want chapter titles and all the bells and whistles to share that on their platforms or whatever summaries, let's just say that it's a dollar or something, or $0.50. If they could then get that same thing instead of getting 1,000 credits for $10, if they could get that same 1,000 credits for $5, you know, a steep 50% discount. Um, I kind of wonder, just from a business and marketing and user acquisition standpoint— that's not technical at all— but from a business standpoint, like, how many users could we acquire by giving a 50% discount? How many users could we acquire by giving a 10% discount? Um, how many users could we get by even a deeper discount? Like, I'm just kind of curious about that. Because if we can— if it's a discount, a 50% discount that brings their price down from $10 to $5, and that's what makes them decide to go through the whole process of like, okay, looking into cryptocurrency and downloading a wallet, buying some crypto, buying some Dash on Coinbase, like I don't necessarily expect them to do that for a $5 discount, but there is probably some number that they would do it for. Um, and depending on how much they used your service, I don't know what that is. But when you look at other companies that try to acquire— basically pay to acquire users— they're spending a lot more than that. So I, I would be interested to see what kind of users you can acquire for a steep discount like that. And I don't know if that's like part of the funds— would part of the funds go to pay for that discount? Is that what you're, um, is that what you're suggesting here, uh, or proposing here? Is that part of the, part of the proposal funds would be to kind of help subsidize, uh, that kind of, that, um, what's the, what's the term for that, the, the loss leader of giving people discounts beyond the cost of your service?

[00:33:08.09] - Anthony Campolo Um, I mean, it would probably depend on how— obviously we're saying how big of a discount to give. Um, I wasn't planning on it. Um, the plan was just to use that money as, you know, funds for myself as payment, and then, um, I would have the, the discount be something that wouldn't necessarily mean that it's causing that such that it requires me to actually take a loss on it because, you know, I've, you know, got margins worked out. So there may, you know, I wouldn't necessarily need to.

[00:33:46.15] - Rion Gull Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And these are all things that we'll be discussing and kind of fine-tuning through the process. But that was just one idea that I had. Promoting Dash on the AutoShow front page, there again, is strictly marketing essentially, which is valuable. Dash as the default crypto. Discount credits for Dash-focused content. There you would be giving the Dash community, at least, steeper discounts, and I think that would be interesting. You could give it to the Dash community for free, obviously, because they're paying part of your development costs and you could just throw that in. But I think it would be even more interesting if people still had to go through that payment flow just to get the experience. Whether it's a 90 percent discount for, say, Dash Incubator or Dash Core Group, that's not going to be a very big amount to pay, but getting that experience of going through the process of paying would be valuable for us. Support for Dash payments will continue indefinitely beyond the six-month funding phase.

[00:35:19.05] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, that was something someone mentioned in the comments. They're saying people have dropped support as soon as their thing ends. But yeah, I definitely continue to support it. I see no reason why I would take it out at any point, even if no one's really— even if no one is abusing it, then it won't be that much of a— there's really no maintenance burden for it being there because hopefully the blockchain does not change.

[00:35:45.04] - Rion Gull Well, there would be some, some small amount because, um, depending on how you— how we structure this technically, like, I don't know if you're going to be running your own full node. I don't know if you're going to be using a third-party service or an open-source service that's like using rpc.digitalcash.dev, for example, and you're just doing API calls and that, that service is already subsidized by the DAO elsewhere with, with one of AJ's proposals. Like, we haven't worked out these details, but there is, there is a scenario where, you know, if you were running a node, for example, that would be a cost. And if you weren't getting any paying customers, then that would be a little bit of a loss.

[00:36:31.05] - Anthony Campolo What would be the benefit of running a node versus just querying the blockchain?

[00:36:37.09] - Rion Gull Uh, yeah, exactly. Um, querying the blockchain using— like, what would you use, for example, to query the blockchain?

[00:36:44.26] - Anthony Campolo Query the blockchain? Right now it's just the JS SDK running on a Node...

[00:36:50.21] - Rion Gull Yeah, and so there are some things to work out, like which is the best... what's the best way to do that? The JS SDK is going to give you certain things, but it's not going to give you other things. It will give you the account balances for an address or whatever that you put in there, and that's fine. But it wouldn't necessarily give you... what's the term I'm looking for? The payload that is sent from a service. I'm blanking on the name right now, but when a payment is made, when a user makes a payment and then a service sends you a notification that the payment has been made, you can do that in a very difficult way or in a very simple way. The payment gateways of the world that are like RPC services will help you along with that, but I don't know what we have in terms of that. So, like, doing notifications that a payment has come through. Anyway, if I remember the name, I'll be able to explain that a little bit further. But let's go through what this proposal funds. Dash placement and promotion: we've gone over that already. Prominent Dash branding on AutoShow's homepage and documentation, discount rates for those paying with Dash, default crypto payments option set to Dash, and credit, that's a little bit of a review there. Dash integration and development: building and maintaining a Pay with Dash flow, with an emphasis on implementing real-time transaction detection and automatic credit allocation. That's what I was talking about just then. You can probably implement that with the SDK, but it might be a lot of work, and this would pay for that work. Or potentially we could find a service to do that with less work. Continuous upkeep and troubleshooting for the Dash module over the six months. Create a credit system on Dash Platform. We did talk about that a little bit. Community reporting: regular progress reports on user feedback, transaction data, and adoption metrics. Talk to me a little bit about that. That seems interesting to me.

[00:39:51.00] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, so that would be just essentially what is the usage and are people having issues with, you know, using Dash with the platform. And then, you know, kind of how many transactions are coming in, what amount of users are using Dash versus other things. So, and then maybe like if we end up tweaking the discount at some point, how much of a difference that would make.

[00:40:18.27] - Rion Gull Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah, cool. Collaboration with Dash Growth, the incubator, Dash Core Group for best practices. Makes sense. Sharing code snippets and developer documentation to help future integrations. Yeah, exactly. Perfect. Okay, let's look at the timeline. So right now it's the beginning of March. So Dash payment flow implementation, that's what you'd work on first. Develop and launch the Pay with Dash feature for credit purchases. Integrate a Dash discount mechanism to ensure smooth user experience. Yeah, this smooth user experience is something that I've very rarely come across in crypto. What you usually find is that you'll have, you'll have like everything that's needed for a credit card payment. And then like, so you like, people will have to enter like your, your name and your billing address, and all that stuff, just to get to the point where you don't really even need that. But the way that, the way that websites are usually set up is they're set up for that credit card payment flow. And so you kind of have to go through that. Even if you're going to not need that information, um, to do a crypto payment. And that's how, like, things like— I, I've run into that a lot with, in the earlier days, with like BitPay, where I see a website that's, that accepts crypto, but you still have to go through that nightmare of like filling out this huge form about who you are. And, uh, that's, that's the kind of thing that I want us to dial in and just say like Hey, you want to purchase these credits? Bam, here's a QR code payment. Um, send this amount and you'll, you'll get these credits and, and they'll automatically show up and you don't have to fill out anything. So yeah, totally.

[00:42:21.20] - Anthony Campolo That's how the proposal app works. You know, you had the QR code on there. Once you're ready to send your proposal, you just get the, the QR code and pay it straight through that. So yeah, probably do it exactly like that.

[00:42:35.20] - Rion Gull Yep, cool. Um, let's see, where were we? Uh, months 3 to 4, Dash-themed incentives and tutorials. This is what you're, you're famous for, uh, is making really good tutorials and sharing those throughout your developer community. So I'm very excited to see that. That would be, that would be really cool. Uh, Yeah, when do you want to talk about some of these other things?

[00:43:04.14] - Anthony Campolo Uh, yeah, I mean, for people who are actually in the Dash ecosystem, you know, it says discounts here, but probably what I'd also do is, um, I can just create like, um, you know, a promo code so people could, could use that and, you know, share that like the Dash Discord. So if we want to get like, you know, a couple hundred free credits, just like try the platform out that could be a good thing as well.

[00:43:30.08] - Rion Gull So yeah, and that's what I was thinking with the— instead of, instead of totally free, just like a very steep discount, even 99%, because I still want people to go through that payment flow just so they can get that experience. And that's something we all need. Like, if we really think that crypto is going to be something that people use on a on a real, you know, in, in a real daily basis kind of way, we need to get them— we need to get that user experience dialed in. Like, what's the best way to pay? Is it, is it expecting users to have a web wallet or a wallet extension, an extension wallet, browser extension wallet, or Do we— is it better for that to present a QR code for them to pay from their mobile device, or is it better to, you know, have some kind of URL that they click and it opens up your desktop wallet? Like, there are different ways that you can pay with crypto, and, you know, maybe, maybe it's supporting all of those, or 2 out of the 3 of those, or, or whatever. But it's getting that, getting that that user experience dialed in. And then that's why I think instead of just offering free credits, it would be better to have a 99% discount on credits so that we take them through that process. Even the Dash community. And, you know, it's not going to be— the main hurdle there won't be the cost of the service. It'll be the user experience of the service. And so having them go through that will help us develop a better user experience. Roll out user-friendly documentation and video tutorials on Dash using Dash and AutoShow. That'd be cool. And then, like we said earlier, stats, usage trends, key insights. Like, hey, we ran this for 2 months with a 10% discount or a 5% discount that just covered that just covered the savings that you'd get from the credit card fees instead. And that bumped up our Dash user base from, you know, 3 users to 6 users. I don't know. But then we implemented a 50% discount and subsidized that. And all of a sudden we got 10 users over the next month. That paid with Dash. And, you know, that's an insight that would help us to know, like, how much did we have to pay for it to acquire a new— a completely new Dash user. That's the kind of thing that I hope that this will result in as well. So it's much more than just technical integration work. It's also business insights and marketing insights, like how much do we have to pay people to, to get over their fear or hatred of, of cryptocurrency, uh, just so that they can have a discount or a better user experience.

[00:44:46.13] - Anthony Campolo That.

[00:44:46.17] - Rion Gull User experience dialed in, and that's why I think instead of just offering free credits it would be better to have a 99 percent discount on credits so that we take them through that process, even the Dash community. It's not going to be... the main hurdle there won't be the cost of the service, it'll be the user experience of the service. So having them go through that will help us develop a better user experience, roll out user-friendly documentation and video tutorials on Dash using Dash and AutoShow, and then, like we said earlier, stats, usage trends, key insights. Like, hey, we ran this for two months with a 10 percent discount or a 5 percent discount that just covered the savings you'd get from the credit card fees instead, and that bumped up our Dash user base from three users to six users. I don't know. But then we implemented a 50 percent discount and subsidized that, and all of a sudden we got 10 users over the next month that paid with Dash. That's an insight that would help us know how much we had to pay to acquire a completely new Dash user. That's the kind of thing that I hope this will result in as well. It's much more than just technical integration work; it's also business insights and marketing insights, like how much do we have to pay people to get over their fear or hatred of cryptocurrency just so they can have a discount or a better user experience.

[00:46:49.19] - Anthony Campolo It's a 99% discount, probably a lot.

[00:46:51.27] - Rion Gull Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, but a 99% discount on a $10 service, that's still a very low user acquisition fee. So that would be worth it.

[00:47:03.19] - Anthony Campolo The amount of money people will be paying will be dependent on how much they want to use it. So if someone wanted to, you know, run their whole YouTube channel, they have hundreds of videos, so that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[00:47:18.07] - Rion Gull Yeah, and I, and I don't like— I, I don't have any kind of grandiose visions. It's no, no, no, uh, no offense to you, obviously, but entrepreneurship is hard and startups are hard, so I don't really expect explosive growth here. But I do want to have— I do want to use this project as a way to determine what kind of user experience and developer experience and price points and discounts do we need to attract people. And yeah, like I said, I hope that this is a great thing that actually makes you some money, but there's a chance that it's not. But even if it's not, you know, we would have learned some things that we would not have learned otherwise through this whole process and this proposal. So that's what I'm kind of excited about here. Let's see. Continue coordinating with the Dash ecosystem teams to share insights, code recommendations, improvements. And then a final report that sums up the whole experience after 6 months. Blockers, things like that. Yeah, you'll have personal support for any of this. Yeah, I think we covered it. You've got some good feedback so far on here.

[00:48:48.26] - Anthony Campolo People seem excited about it.

[00:48:52.04] - Rion Gull And Name 3: Absolutely yes, it's exciting, exactly the type of thing that we should be building. Fantastic use case. We talked about how there is the CLI, but there's a UI in development. Here's the Quantum Explorer's comment about, Let's have this available for five, five years, ten years. You made it indefinite Dash support, so that's great. Infinity, infinity is better than five. Yep. Deemo's got his comments, he's everywhere. Yeah, that was... I was...

[00:49:37.05] - Anthony Campolo Like, this is some deep Dash lore that I don't understand, so I'm not going to worry about it. Yeah, I mean...

[00:49:43.14] - Rion Gull Yeah, I mean, he has some really good comments sometimes. Other times it's kind of like, I don't know where he's coming from, but—

[00:49:49.10] - Anthony Campolo What is DIF? That's my only question.

[00:49:51.22] - Rion Gull DIF is the Dash Investment Fund. Or Dash Investment Foundation. It's a place that you would go to if you wanted to do this at a bigger scale and exchange equity for funding. So, yeah.

[00:50:11.18] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, I know, like the Ethereum Foundation and stuff. So that makes sense.

[00:50:14.02] - Rion Gull Yep, exactly. Let's see. [unclear], good. Quizzy. Yeah, so all these questions are answered. Anything else to say? What else did you want to talk about in terms of this proposal, or just anything in the Dash community that you are seeing right now? What else did you...

[00:50:39.29] - Anthony Campolo Well, you would show this to me. That someone in the community has been creating like Dash rap songs. Yeah, I thought that was pretty cool. And that is something that you could definitely use AutoShow for. Like, we could turn every Incubator weekly episode into various types of songs. That would be a very easy thing to do. So you can do it with this one.

[00:51:01.12] - Rion Gull Yeah. Or you could just take the You could take— sometimes people will be away for 5 months or something, and, or, or, or a week even, and there's a bunch of Discord comments. Maybe there'd be a way to like import some data, summarize the key points. Yeah, something like that. I don't know.

[00:51:25.11] - Anthony Campolo Yeah, no, that's totally doable.

[00:51:27.16] - Rion Gull There are all sorts of options when you've got the infrastructure in place. So I think, yeah, 50 minutes, we've gone long enough. Unless you have anything else, let's close it out. That's good. Yeah, and we'll say thanks to everybody for taking a look at the proposal. Personally...

[00:51:43.08] - Anthony Campolo It's important for me. AJC Web Dev on the Discord if you want to message me, or if you have questions, or if you want to comment on the proposal, go for it. Okay, thanks...

[00:51:52.25] - Rion Gull Anthony, we'll talk later. Bye-bye.