By: DAOwl
At tomi we are so excited by the leading proposals on the DAO. The Tomi Army Proposal is the first to pass the quorum, and we wanted to find out more. The proposer, SuperBullish said it’s time for all the “soldiers” to prepare themselves. The tomi team interviewed SuperBullish to get all the information about how you can join the army and why you should bring your friends along.
tomi: Your proposal is the first to pass the quorum on the DAO, and the most common question we see on Discord is how people can join the army. Please tell us!
SB: My team has been working behind the scenes to launch the army.tomi website. Basically, everyone will need to either create or join a squad. Anyone who wants can declare a squad and give it a name, for example, you might choose a name like “Reddit English Speakers” or “Indonesian Business Squad.” Obviously, you should be someone who is an expert in whatever you choose, or at least an expert at organizing people for that topic. If someone wants to join the squad, they reach out to you on Discord or Telegram, and you can give them a secret key to join your squad. When you log in to your Squad, there will be Squad chat as well as missions and tasks for the squad.
Also, if you want to be a squad, it would be terrific if you just post some information about yourself and your squad in the comments section of this blog post. That will allow you to already get some publicity and have people know they could join your squad. Once we have some squad leaders with ideas, I’ll create polls on Discord to determine the best ideas and squads, as well as the budgets for different bounties. Even though I’m commander in chief, I want to stick to democratic principles so people can bring creative ideas targeted to the demographic that they understand.
tomi: What are missions and tasks?
SB: The commander in chief, which is me, will hold the funds for the missions and tasks, and there will be different levels of tasks. Some might be individual tasks that don’t need a squad, such as following tomi or responding to a post on twitter. Those obviously are very small individual tasks.
The missions will revolve around creating the real tomiNet. So, for example, a mission might be to get 10 businesses to build an e-commerce site in your language with a .tomi address. A task might be getting the site owner to buy the NFT in the tDNS, then for them to build the website, and then for them to integrate the tomi wallet so they can accept $TOMI as payment. That’s three of the tasks in the Mission of getting 10 ecommerce sites. The Squad leader can accept missions from the commander in chief and post progress in your squad’s private area. You can choose to carry out missions as a squad or as an individual on the squad. Once you’ve completed the mission, you submit evidence of completion to the squad commander, and the squad commander submits it to the commander in chief.
At first, the payments will be bounties, which means that you get paid only after you prove that you have completed the tasks and missions. As the squads develop a history, I can allocate funds in advance instead of based on the mission. Because the entire squad history is listed in your private area, I can see what each squad is capable of doing. So, for example, you might want to do a user meetup in your country. If the squad already has gotten 200 websites to sign up, we know that’s a great team and that they have the connections to pull it off, so we might give them a budget in advance to put a downpayment on a venue and that sort of thing.
tomi: What if the squad has an idea of something where there isn’t bounty, for example that event? Or maybe they want to do something that is popular in their country but that you never heard of, how can they get funded?
SB: Great question. Actually, I don’t want to be the commander in chief for very long. This is really just the start, and the treasury is going to have a lot of funds. If a squad has a great idea, they can just publish their idea to the DAO and ask for money directly to the Squad Leader. If the squad has earned a reputation by completing tasks, they can make that public to everyone. Even if they don’t have a reputation, maybe they are willing to expose their LinkedIn proposals or even do the activity and request the funds after it’s complete. It should resemble a DAO as much as possible because I’m limited in how many geographies I understand. I don’t speak Thai or Russian. I can’t really be the commander in chief for those countries. They need their squads to become independent and prove their work to the DAO. That’s how we grow.
tomi: Why would I join the army if I could ask for my own funds?
You don’t have to, and we definitely encourage marketing people from all over the world to compete with the army. The more marketing teams, the better for the project. My goal is to make the tomi Army website the best tool for managing your squad and making public your accomplishments. Maybe someone will use other tools or build something better, but we really want to create the foundation for this. You can use the Army website and ask for funds either from my allocation or from the DAO directly. You can manage your squad there and use the communications tools or you can use telegram. Right now it’s all free, because tomiDAO is funding it. It’s my job to make it so great and transparent so tomiDAO will want to continue to fund it.
Ultimately, the Army website is meant to be a management tool, but it’s also a great place to get started. If we succeed with our first missions and show that we did a good job, next time we can ask for a bigger budget and create more ambitious missions.
If you are a new squad and you know the Army has a bounty or a budget, instead of going to the DAO, it might be easier to make a proposal to the Army or take on one of our bounties. After you prove yourself, then you can ask for your own budget directly from the DAO. I talked to the tomi team about that concept and everyone was excited because they really want to recruit the best sales people and marketers from all around the world, and this was my idea of how we do that in a decentralized way. The Army is kind of like training wheels. I have a certain budget I can allocate to give people a try. We don’t need to know them at first, but if they can prove results, then they can become independent.
tomi: What if there are too many squads who want to do the same thing? For example, what if there are four squads who want to do social media?
SB: I hope that there are tons of squads! At first they might all take on a smaller mission. I think what will naturally happen is that people will gravitate towards the squads that prove themselves. If a squad leader is difficult to work with, people will leave. If a squad doesn’t accomplish much, people will lose interest. The best people will stick together and the best squads will know how to accomplish bounties and write great proposals.
tomi: What if a squad wants to change leaders?
SB: You can’t elect a leader in that way. The functionality is simple. If you start a squad, you are the squad leader. But if a squad really wants to elect a new leader, that new leader would have to open a new squad and the rest of the squad would have to join the new squad. In some ways, that’s a lot better than voting. You vote with your actions and the best leaders will have followers. If nobody follows you, it’s fine. I can even imagine something like a marketing agency in the real world submitting work as if they are one squad, even if there is only one wallet address there. Theoretically you could elect a new leader and I wouldn’t need to know about it, but only the designated squad leader can submit work for review.
tomi: You call it an army but that sounds pretty flexible.
Right. Basically, we are creating something that is very simple and could be used different ways. We don’t want to tell people how to run their squad. We just care about outcomes. If we decide that we are going to get 1000 websites in Russian on tomi this quarter, we don’t want to tell people the best way to do that. Maybe you are really well-connected and you can just call up your friends. Maybe you know how to use social media there. Maybe you knock on doors. Maybe you make a conference. We want to unlock people’s creativity.
This also creates the most bang for the buck. Maybe the bounty for a mission has to be ten tokens in one jurisdiction and fifty tokens in another. We don’t really know yet but we do know that when the squads compete with one another, we will be able to see the results and the free market will determine the prices for it.
tomi: Are you worried about fake accounts?
SB: We definitely have to think about that. There might even be a bounty for validating the work of other squads. I could totally imagine a squad with the job of deciding what constitutes proof of accomplishment. Then I would be the commander-in-chief but I could sit around and do nothing all day because they are doing my work for me. Haha.
But seriously, the real measure of success won’t be hard to track. Either you put up a website or you didn’t. Either that website has traffic or it doesn’t. If it’s an ecommerce website, either people are buying real things with real tokens or they aren’t. You can’t really fake an ecommerce site that is selling stuff to the citizens, or a fake user-generated content site. Yeah, it sounds like a lot of work to check everything, so obviously the army is really just the start of a marketing effort. The real vision of tomi is to become the alternative internet. Nobody markets the internet, so that’s the goal. Within five years there won’t need to be an army, and there will be other tools for dealing with fakes.
tomi: How did you manage to get the trust of Pioneers to be the first past the post with a quorum on your proposal?
SB: I have been working behind the scenes for a while because privacy is very important to the type of business I’m in. I am a marketing guy and I’m a Pioneer myself, of course. I was on the short list to buy Pioneer NFTs.
When I found out about Pioneers, I wanted to get a bunch of other people in on it. So I started promoting buying Pioneers, which means I know these guys personally, sort of. Of course they don’t know my real name. They just know I brought in a good number of early adopters, so they know I’m good at marketing. We kind of planned this from the start. I told them if they bought into the Pioneers, I would be responsible for making sure that the marketing efforts started out properly. That’s really how it happened. I brought a bunch of Pioneers on board, because of my marketing skills, and those same Pioneers trust me to take this first step. Maybe for some people, 100,000 TOMI seems like a lot, but if you look at marketing budgets for crypto projects, especially something global like tomi, it’s a tiny budget. The Pioneers are clear that this is just to prove I can deliver on my first set of marketing goals, and then we can ask for more once the army proves itself.
tomi: What is going to be the top focus for those first milestones?
SB: I have to prove myself if I want to get more funds, so people who want to create squads have to be serious. You have to be able to show that your actions really helped us. Yes, we will do some small bounties for things like followers and retweets, but the bulk of the budget has to be for growing the network. That means increasing the number of people using the tomi wallet, buying a tomi hardware node, using $TOMI for their transactions, and most importantly, people buying the NFTs for the tomi addresses and building active websites on the network. We love getting great publicity and articles in newspapers, but at the end of the day it has to show on the network.
tomi: That make sense. Anything else you want to add?
SB: Well, obviously, we are recruiting. If you are in a country where you know that the free internet is restricted, this is a great opportunity for you. We want to hear from you in the Discord channel and also in the comments below.
The first squads are going to be those who get a team together quickly and show that they can be a real influence in their country of origin. If you are in a low cost country, the budget we have is significant, and you can get together great marketing people who you know and bring them into the project. Definitely use the comments in the blog because I’ll be reading all of them, and definitely join the Discord channel to discuss your ideas, find team members, and bounce marketing ideas around.
tomi: Thank you SuperBullish. We’re also super bullish about tomi!
