Societal has not applied for treasury funding before and has a small amount of VC backing. We are asking the treasury to support our project so that we can finish off our product and start onboarding Polkadot users. We believe that after we do this we will be in a strong position to seek more VC funding, as the fundraising environment is currently at a stand still for early-stage crypto projects.

My concern here is that the treasury is being used as a stop-gap until you can get another round of VC funding

Hello Graeme, nice to meet you. I will leave my questions and concerns here, hoping for an answer from you to clarify some points.

1. My first concern is that you call yourself a Parachain, but AFAIK you don't have a slot yet?
2. You said you wanted to provide the community with a platform for community operations and governance, but what do you mean? This is a really wide term and it can mean anything
3. "As it stands today, the Polkadot ecosystem does not have the creation, governance, and treasury management tooling products that the other major blockchain ecosystems do." Can you quote the tooling that other major ecosystems have, taking into consideration that Polkadot might be one of the most --if not the most-- advanced ecosystem in terms of Governance.
4. What tools do you think the ecosystem needs or is asking for?
5. You said "We believe that after we do this we will be in a strong position to seek more VC funding", but why not start the fundraising now? Many of the Parachains in the Polkadot ecosystem were VC-backed even before starting to code.
6. What do you mean by usable applications? "We strongly believe that the Polkadot ecosystem needs more usable applications, as most projects in-production today are DeFi or smart contract infrastructure platforms." The ecosystem has plenty of usable Apps.
7. "Societal has already completed most of the work required to be the homebase for decentralized communities in the Polkadot ecosystem." If the work required to be the homebase for decentralized communities is done, can you show us your stats on the user-base? How many people are using your product? Do you have a white list?
8. I haven't been able to understand who is your final user? The Parachain teams? The token-holders? DAOs?
9. What kind of Community Management tool are you creating? I'm particularly interested in this one.
10. Have you discussed with teams such as InvArch or Subsocial about what they are building?
11. This is a personal opinion, but we all know one of the main challenges is onboarding users, What's your plan to do this?
12. And last but not least, why did you decide to go for the full amount at once instead of dividing it by milestones?
13. PS: Have you seen the loan-model Bifrost has taken? You could do the same, get a loan, and then return the money when your product is up and profitable. If you wouldn't consider this, why not?