Description
Rooftop is a community equipping women with confidence, community and experience to leverage emerging tech for financial benefit. Our community is particularly focused on women over 40; bringing their experience to blockchain, and giving them the skills they need to access investment opportunities and provide capital to women-led projects via our DAO, Rooftop Pool.
Vision
A world where women are confidently and actively building financial strength throughout their lives.
Problem
- Lack of women over 40 working within emerging tech, especially blockchain.
- Lack of capital invested in women led projects.
- Broken venture capital models, executed with a distinctly male lens (due to investors/fund managers being predominantly male) and promotes burnt out, disillusioned founders and gender rigidity.
- GenX women are the demographic with least investment confidence and least retirement readiness.
Solution
Rooftop Community
Rooftop is focused on equipping our members to benefit financially from emerging tech. We are also bringing diversity to Web3:
- Gender - Our target audience is women and those who identify as women.
- Age - Rooftop is open to women of all ages. However as GenX women ourselves, we are particularly focused on bringing the GenX demographic on-chain as we are under represented within the ecosystem and control significant financial assets.
- Skillset - We are onboarding high caliber professional women working across various industries. They bring invaluable business experience to the nascent web3 ecosystem as we strive for mainstream adoption.
- Geography - Our physical locations and broad networks give us an opportunity to appeal to and onboard geographically and ethnically diverse women globally. Sally is based in New Zealand and her professional network is extensive in Europe and Australia from her marketing career and she is building a strong U.S. network in web3. Lana is based in Seattle and currently works with and/or has recently consulted entrepreneurs throughout Africa, MENA and Vietnam in addition to the U.S.
The web3 ecosystem will benefit from the career experience of our members. Women within this age demographic are typically ‘time poor’ due to work and family responsibilities. So we have designed our educational components to be delivered creatively, both live and async to help them negotiate the time barrier enough to move forward. Rooftop is accomplishing this as well as providing a supportive environment which feels comfortable to our members to work together and individually to reach their goals.
We onboard our members to web3 from the first moment they join our community. We require a wallet to buy our membership token (in USDC) using Unlock protocol. This token is used to access our Discord via Guild. Most of our members have limited prior knowledge of purchasing crypto or buying NFTs, so while it’s a hurdle we are asking our members to get over, they experience how things work in web3 and are grateful when they join for the applied knowledge. We’re providing guidance through our tech-support for this onboarding process, and replicate this learn-do model throughout our community. Our members are not just learning about web3, they are doing web3.
Rooftop DAO
Another aspect of Rooftop is a strong desire among our membership to support women-led projects. Rooftop Pool is our DAO formed by members pooling their time, money and experience to invest in women-led projects and share in the financial success. This is another way Rooftop is onboarding more of this under represented demographic to web3. Our members may not have particular curiosity around emerging tech but want to be part of our inclusive capital philosophy and investment collective. By joining, they learn how DAOs work and use the tech that enables them.
Our vision is that Rooftop Pool is not just venture funding for women-led projects. We are developing collective funding models that nurture founders rather than burn them out, and empower success regardless of stage of life. Funding options might include equity, low interest lending and grants.
Validation / Traction / Progress so far
*Proven the MVP with 10 women based in 3 countries onboarded and retained, paying monthly recurring membership fees to Rooftop in our 4th month.
- For 9 of our members, our token was their first NFT purchase and first experience bridging or swapping assets.
- Held regular educational and community sessions including introductions to Layer 1s, Stablecoins and DAOs.
- Completed (and Lana co-facilitated) Season 1 of Colony Club DAO accelerator - Cohort 4.
- Developed and launched a new brand to scale.
- Built Linkedin following to 124 (key social platform for our target audience).
- Have two panels featuring Rooftop up for selection at SXSW 2024.
- Secured two conference speaking invitations in the remainder of 2023.
Team
Lana Zumbrunn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lanazumbrunn/
Lana has consulted founders and worked in startup communities in 25 countries + many U.S. states. She has experience as a community builder, running two innovation center projects and currently leads her company LevelUp Economy based in Seattle. LevelUp provides innovation consulting including strategy, mapping and research for organizations to apply the entrepreneurial mindset, and Lana consults and advises startup accelerators and funded startups. Current relationships include Guzakuza Ignite in Africa and Colony DAO Club web3 accelerator.
Sally Hodges
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sally-hodges-12068990/
Sally has a background in marketing and FMCG strategy stretching from the multi-nationals like Unilever and BP to operating several of her own ecommerce ventures. Her focus is now 100% community and DAOs, specifically leveraging DAOs for impact. Since 2022 she has been on the core team at two North American Impact DAOs & one locally in her home country, Aotearoa (New Zealand) with a focus on DAO Operations and Community management.
Grant Amount Requested
$10,000
What it will be used for?
$1069 - Operational costs (per annum):
*Wix - $127
*Canva Pro - $180
*Social media manager (ex: Loomly Base) - $312
*Zoom - $212
*Google workspace - $238
$1000 - Marketing
*Social media boosted posts
*IRL events (meetings with members and prospective members)
$7931 - Legal & Governance framework
Professional fees for developing legal framework and advice so we can deliver the following in a way that ensures members are regulation compliant :
- Investing in on-chain and off-chain projects
- Allowing for accredited and non-accredited investors to participate
- Lending
- Grants
For example, we need to understand the legal implications if the DAO invests as a whole versus if the DAO acts as a funnel for opportunities and members retain control over their personal investment decision. We then need to establish the governance frameworks to deliver it.
Attach any additional documents/resources about the project if you have any.
How did you hear about MGD’s Funding program?
We learned about you from Lisa Wocken in her work on leadership in DAOs. We then researched your work and found and followed MGD months ago. We admire your work, share complimentary vision and would love to pick up the baton from you and continue the good work of funding women-led projects.