Welcome to our first newsletter! DAOs are about community, we’re dedicated to #buildinpublic. Each week we will walk you through what we’ve been working on!
Season 2’s focus (November 23 - December 17, 2021) is on sustainability: how can we build a self-sustaining DAO? This newsletter will follow our journey 🚀throughout each season — our learnings, our challenges, and how to get involved — with breaks during the off-season 🥬.
Want to know what's going on with DAO Masters every week?
Now, let’s begin…
There are a number of initiatives happening across the DAO Masters universe. Here's what’s happened in our various pods this week.
#content-reviews 📖
For Season 1, we reviewed the first 20 tools to onboard the next million DAO operators. We selected them based on what we heard from our community members. Our goal is to bring awareness to how to build a DAO and this is just the beginning.
Following up on the review of our first 20 tools in Season 1, we are reviewing 20 more tools for Season 2. Thanks to those who voted after seeing our tweet! 🌈
These are the tools that we will be writing reviews for Season 2:
Our writers are off to the races! The window for writing reviews is December 6 - December 8. We’re also going to be crowdsourcing updates for the first 20 tools we reviewed in S1.
#community-ops & onboarding 👥
We’ve made some changes from Season 1: Initially, anyone who contributed to the Mirror campaign became a DAO Masters token holder. We automatically assumed every token holder would be a contributor. However, we realized that not every person who contributed to the campaign wanted to be a contributor.
Starting Season 2, we made the distinction between “token holder” and “contributor”. Token holders only had read-access to Discord for all Season 2 Channels on discord.
The idea is that the quality of the community is based on mission alignment and putting effort into learning and building. We realized that token holders were making a simple purchase, however, that didn’t mean that they would significantly contribute to DAO Masters. (We put this to a Snapshot vote to arrive at this decision.).
Managing a scaling community is challenging. While employees go through a rigorous interview process and onboarding that can take a number of months at companies, DAOs onboard hundreds of contributors in a span of weeks.
So, how have we embedded contributors into the community?
From the beginning, we required that contributors have a 1:1 onboarding call with an existing member. This was pioneered by our own Tyler Whittle who was a part of a few communities where onboarding… didn’t go so well. When dropped into a Discord and expected to navigate the different channels, most members struggled. While we appreciated all the new members who wanted to contribute, we quickly noticed it wasn’t scalable.
We’ve since made two decisions:
We’ve decided to onboard contributors at the beginning of the season and paused onboarding contributors mid-season. We believe it sets a good starting point for contributors when they join at the same time as others and reduces the workload of pod leads between onboarding new members and also managing projects.
We ask that new contributors fill out an application. This adds some additional friction to contribute. Those that make more effort now by filling out the application will more likely be the ones who contribute to the community going forward.
#product 📷
Our website is the first impression people get of the community. We want to continue making a good first impression with potential members. As we add new content and build new DAO Masters projects, we will need to update the website accordingly to best highlight all of the new work being done.
We’re also adding functionality to support our monetization efforts, including:
Deploying a survey for our consulting pod to receive consulting requests from other communities
Adding bronze, silver, gold sponsors to the website for those that purchase NFTs we’re making this season
#join-a-dao 🔐
We’re excited to get more people into DAOs: to suggest the right DAO for folks to join, depending on their interests.
Next week, we’re drafting the DAO Discoverability Landscape with an overview of the existing DAOs and outlining our vision for taking the engagement of people new to DAOs to the next level.
#editorial 📑
From our Editorial squad, we plan on sharing a recap of what we did in Season 1. We'll be doing this on Mirror and exploring how to use Mirror as a publishing platform for longer-form content.
And right here on your phone (probably), we kicked off our other major editorial initiative and launched this newsletter with weekly insights into what DAO Masters is up to. We’re a meta group: build a DAO to learn about DAOs.
#monetization 💰
With our focus on sustainability this season, we’re thinking about how we can financially sustain this community to reward contributors, pay for our infrastructure, and potentially build a treasury over time.
#nft-monetization
One focus we have is monetizing through DAO Master NFTs. We are looking for sustainability but also building a brand through strategic partnerships and mission-aligned sponsors. We’ve had some fun jamming with @RaDLabSpace who has some great initial designs. Get excited. We will be sharing more publicly by the end of the season
We’re also exploring what utility the NFT can provide and an idea that we have is that it can unlock co-creation benefits, whether that manifests itself as a consulting project we’ll help you with, review a tool for you, or something else.
#consulting-monetization
Another route we’re taking for monetization is taking on consulting projects to help other DAOs.
We believe there’s a huge opportunity in this space. Most consulting projects have their own token and/or huge treasuries. The limiting factor is talent and work, not capital, so they are more than happy to pay individuals or DAOs to do work for them. Given the nature of these community-led projects, most have grant programs – anyone can request a grant of X amount for doing Y work.
An example of a consulting project is Other Internet for Uniswap. It is slightly different since they are an academic think tank, with a focus on governance and participation.
We are going to be experimenting with consulting other DAOs on how they grow. We’re conducting outreach with plans to have ~10-15 interviews carried out by EOD December 8.
Are you interested in having DAO Masters as a consultant? Fill out this form and we’ll see if you’re a good fit!
Why choose us?
We have a wealth of expertise and actionable insights in how to set up and operate DAOs, not just from the DAO Masters project, but also from its members who are involved in many other DAOs.
We do so in the spirit of learning by building in public with the intent to help everyone in the broader DAO ecosystem.
#research 👓
As mentioned in #monetization, we’ve started forming our own point of view on subjects related to DAOs. Our research pod is more open-ended and our general goal is to be exploratory, write for an audience of DAO contributors and operators with our own insights and learnings from building DAO Masters.
As a start, we’re building out a long-form research report on DAO Onboarding Practices: Learnings from Existing DAO Communities. This report will include what we’ve learned from building at DAO Masters but also from other DAOs, such as Friends With Benefits, Krause House, Seed Club, etc.
That's a wrap for this week…we'll see you soon! Shout-out to all the contributors who helped us with this first newsletter 🦄
Want to know what's going on with DAO Masters every week?
Interested in joining the conversation? We have an open channel for new members #dao-general-chat where you can ask any questions.