As a current Community Lead / Manager myself (not of Uniswap) and having worked with top-tier projects for the past few years, I’d like to say I disagree with your pricing:
‘‘My tentative pricing plan was going to be 500 USD (paid in crypto) per month, plus 3 USD per customer helped, plus 0.04 USD per message read’’
Looking at the number of users vs the number of people that’d probably be in your team, you’d be looking at what, like $10k USD in expenses a month? Whereas, one could hire an internal team for $5k / month if not less than that. And, I’m talking 24/7 quality coverage there, not community moderators that copy + paste an FAQ.
On top of that, I’ve recommended the Uniswap team to create a Telegram channel. I’m aware there would be a lot of ‘spam’ in the Telegram channel. To combat this and ease the load of moderators, the following actions could be taken:
- Create a full custom Telegram bot that detects/removes spam (e.g. advertising, scams, airdrops, etc.)
- This bot would also offer captcha option for new users, as well as automatically trigger (with a time-out) to answer certain standard questions.
The pinned message of the Telegram channel would be the basics of Uniswap + links to the most frequently asked questions. I’d expect hundreds of users asking questions on a daily basis & thousands of messages, most of which would be easily answered through an FAQ.
Look at the big giants, live customer support for a (decentralized) platform of this scale is (almost) impossible. And therefore, things should be ‘automated’. Moderators would refer more difficult technical questions/issues to the Discord and help keep quality in the channels, rather than answer every single basic question.
It would be the most effective use of money. Typically I would always recommend a full 24/7 support team, but I just don’t see it happening here, especially because of anticipated spam & the same questions being asked over and over again. That being said, would recommend setting up a FAQ page on Uniswap with links to dedicated pages answering these questions with examples + screenshots. It would answer 90% of the expected questions. I’d be happy to help the team with this.
- Why Telegram and Discord? Many users use Telegram > Discord. Technical questions & Governance questions could be forwarded to Discord to prevent spam there. Telegram could cover basic questions via FAQ + Bot + some moderating.
- Why fixed fee > custom fee. As I mentioned pricing here in my opinion doesn’t make a lot of sense.
- Why automatization > customization here? Uniswap community and questions will most likely be too big to tackle, 90% could be answered through FAQ + Automization and 10% could be custom answers. Goal here is not necessarily to build a community, there is already a huge one and it has proven itself. Aka, it’s a decentralized community that is already moving forward.