I’m actually somewhat familiar with Questbook as we ran a pilot with them earlier in the year . After running the pilot we did not continue with Questbook due to poor results compared with our existing technology stack (Airtable with integrations + automations) and the experience highlighted the value of the setup we had built along with being in control of it.
Review times took longer and we did not see any engagement from the community. With the current amount of applications we receive (~30 a week) the Questbook UX was not a sophisticated enough tool to manage the tracking, reviewing, and interviewing of applications.
I’m Subhash from Questbook, the author of Questbook’s pilot proposal. We would like to thank the AGD team members and @0xbilll for sharing their valuable and actionable feedback through the pilot. The suggestions shared by the AGD team during the pilot have played a significant role in enhancing Questbook as a grants orchestration tool, resulting in the new version releases and product improvements.
Some of the major improvements include:
1. Allowing anyone from the community to comment, and share their views on the submitted proposals
2. Conducting objective reviews through a customized evaluation rubric and rubric scores in a transparent manner before making a decision
3. Empowering review teams to propose, setup interviews with proposers by sharing Calendly links through encrypted comments
4. Performing batch actions such as accepting, rejecting, requesting resubmissions, and making payouts for multiple proposals at once
5. Making milestone-based payouts to accepted proposals in stables, native token directly from the multi-sig safe
While we respect AGD’s decision to not go ahead with us after the pilot, we have made significant efforts towards incorporating their feedback as part of our subsequent version releases and continuous improvements. In terms of scale, TON grants team uses Questbook to manage 30+ proposals per week and the Polygon Grants team used Questbook to evaluate more than 200 proposals per month.
Furthermore, following the pilot phase, we have led Compound Grants Program 2.0 and will soon invite proposals for the Arbitrum Community Grants Program. We are open to receiving further inputs from the AGD team and collaborating with them to fund public goods, and grants in a manner that prioritizes community involvement, transparency, impact, accountability and efficiency.