Submitting to the SCF: Tips & Tricks from the Stellar Community

There are less than two weeks left to submit your project to the Stellar Community Fund! Make sure you apply on communityfund.stellar.org/current, work with your team on the worksheet you received in the email after applying, and copy and paste your drafted answers in the submission form and submit it before November 21st.

After you submit, a panel of community members will review your application and participate in Community Vote from December 6th to the 15th. To help you to figure out what they’re looking for, I’ve asked them to write down a few things about what they think is important when submitting to the SCF:

nesho#4899: “Be yourself and be honest when submitting the application. The panel loves it when an application is creative and you explain everything step by step on how to achieve your goals. It’s ok to have dreams but keep them as realistic as possible with the amount of lumens, time and skills you have :) My final words can be summarized in the gif below.

earrietadev#9365: “I will advise them to focus on what they like to do, not on what will give them more profits. I’ve seen many good projects die just because of that.

And something I always check is the details of how the money is going to be spent. For example, saying they need the money to get a license or start a business is not enough for me since those two examples are two things that can be handled in multiple ways and different costs. If they can’t specify how the money is going to be spent it is because it is an arbitrary number and not a proper budget.”

spintax_#4748: “I noticed some of the submissions had generalized goals for their projects and did not communicate a clear path to those goals in their pitch. Like saying they want to increase access to a certain type of market for everyone, but not explaining why or how they plan to do that.”

KanayeNet#1839: “My two points I’d like to share:

1️) Set well defined goals you want to achieve with the money gathered this round. Like: We’d like to pay an external to do a security audit of the application in its current state and estimate $<XXX> for that. And not something like “We’d like to build a magic unicorn! Our estimated steps. 1: get money from SCF, 2: ???, 3: A magic unicorn!”.

2️) Keep your initial budgets small! The next round of SCF will come and even if your project only accomplished small initial steps, like an enhanced prototype because your budget didn’t include more people working with you: that’s fine! I’d love to see your project and it would be way easier if we can fund the initial budget for more of them. And we can see how far you’ve come and allow for a bigger budget next time.”

scottfry#0581: “Credentials of the people behind the project are important especially if they are new to the community.”

markus_+10🌱#0926: “Discuss how your project is uniquely beneficial to the Stellar ecosystem. I see a lot of projects that completely gloss over this. You should be able to answer 1. Why Stellar? And 2. Why does Stellar care?”

To talk with the community and participate in the discussion, join the SCF Discord server. We look forward to seeing your submissions!

Submitting to the SCF: Tips & Tricks from the Stellar Community was originally published in Stellar Community on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.