thanks for your questions! I'll do my best to answer them below and then atmos may also have perspectives to share.
How much development would you see as really necessary at the current point?
Consider that we only launched a very MVP version of the product at the end of March. Since launch, we have been using the MVP to engage and learn from customers and users while in parallel building a more feature complete beta application (major feature areas I highlighted in my comment above). The next quarter and first half of 2024 will be focused on delivering on the solutions we have validated with customers and users. These include broad themes such as overall redesigned user experience in Carbonmark (beyond an MVP), improved onboarding (KYC/KYB/AML), asset management (custodial wallet, fiat on-ramp and off-ramp), registry aggregation, and additional platform integrations (includes API enhancements). The other significant and critical activities over the next 3-6 months is the substantial technical work to integrate new credit supply into Carbonmark (related to KIP-37, KIP-39, KIP-41 and more to follow).
Beyond that, important to recognize we are very much still in the realm of finding product-market fit in a rapidly changing and nascent market. We will need to continue to learn and pivot to build a product that solve customers problems better than our competitors. That is how we will dominate market share and win. How long that takes is unknown, nobody has that crystal ball.
Isn't the current main challenge in engaging with customers the legal problem, which is unrelated to product features? In other words, if Carbonmark becomes a private company with its existing product, would this already attract customers and start generating revenue?
It is both. By working with customers with our MVP, we have learned that traditional web2 organizations are very challenged to commercially engage with our solution given our DAO status. So there are organizational changes that are required (the primary focus of this KIP) but also additional features we need to provide (outlined above), generally to eliminate web3 frictions. Our hypothesis is that with these changes we will be able to unlock the huge potential of the KlimaDAO / Carbonmark ecosystem and move towards a self-sustaining revenue model.
Do you think it would be possible to build features in a much leaner fashion and directly derived from the customer experiences?
As eluded to above, our engagement with customers and users is already being used to validate the bets and feature development we work on and that will continue.
To be honest, we are already very lean. We have one PM, one designer, an engineering lead and a handful of developers (working at various levels of FTE). These are the core roles required for a product team to function. Most product teams would also have a dedicated QA role but we manage that using existing contributors (including myself).
For some additional context, I've been leading product in various startups since 2019 and have been working with software development teams for over 20 years. While there is always room for productivity improvements, and we welcome feedback on pace of delivery, code quality, etc., based on my experience this is a very high performing and efficient team. Overall I'm very proud of culture of professionalism, transparency, and accountability that we have been able to foster with a global remote team within a very challenging DAO organization structure.
To what extent would you see customers to be able to put funding into the development of their individual features wishes, which would still be part of the open source code?
I'm not a lawyer so I won't comment on funding. However, we 100% welcome ideas from the community and would be happy to include them in our portfolio of bets ideation and prioritization process. Another approach to this could be regularly scheduled and funded hackathons to encourage new ideas from outside of our internal team.
I hope this helps, let me know if any follow up questions and thanks again for your participation in this process and support of the project.