DAO Masters - Newsletter #2
DAOs are about community, and we’re dedicated to #buildinpublic. Each week we will walk you through what we’ve been working on!
In Season 1, we focused on building out how to onboard operators into DAOs. Here’s a quick recap. 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 🥬.
Wanna catch up on last week’s newsletter? Newsletter #1
Now, let’s begin…
Member spotlight 🔎
Every week, we’ll feature a DAO Master contributor for our Member Spotlight, starting with @TaylorRose! He’s been invaluable in his contributions to the projects on NFT sponsorship and onboarding page. Without further ado…. 🥁
1. Why did you join DAOMasters?
I joined DAO Masters because I had a specific question about how to do Token Gating. When I got to the Discord, everyone was so friendly and helpful that I wanted to be part of the community as a contributor. I was honestly blown away.
2. What’s one thing you learned about DAO’s recently that surprised you?
One thing I was surprised to learn when contributing was how most of the decisions and collaboration didn't happen through formal voting. All of the really big shifts and decisions do, but my expectation about DAOs was that they would be much more programmatic and systematized. What I found was a lot of bustling energy where problem solving and collaboration happened much more organically and serendipitously.
3. What is one DAO project that you're particularly excited by?
Another contributor at DAO Masters turned me onto RTFKT, which I just learned was acquired by Nike! Crazy.
@TaylorRose leads product for a web2 FinTech organization and is trying to figure out everything he can about web3 by dabbling with DAOs.
#content-reviews 📖
We have 16 writers writing reviews for 20 tools; contributors have been claiming tools on a first-come-first-serve basis on Notion.
The team, led by jdubbs1381, has been working at a rapid pace! We’ve finished all written drafts and next and we’re making an accompanying Loom video for each review.
As a reminder, these are the tools for which we will have reviews by the end of the season:
We’ve also invited the creator of the most voted-on tool, Juicebox, to our Discord as we think about how we can mint tokens that we own, set up liquidity, and manage our treasury with Juicebox.
#onboarding
We’ve been thinking about a potential DAO member’s journey with our product hat on. Their journey likely starts on our website, so we’re adding a page dedicated to onboarding new members.
To begin, we broke our audience into 4 different personas:
Investigator: Someone who wants to solve a problem
Sponsor: Someone who wants to support the community
Observer: Someone who wants to see DAO best practices in action
Contributor: Someone who wants to gain experience, build connections, join a team at DAO Masters, and earn money
Next, we’re building a lightweight onboarding resource using Notion. Our goal was to optimize the layout and surface direct links to resources new members are most interested in. Check it out here! What do you think?
#product 📷
As we’ve mentioned in Newsletter #1, we’ve been exploring ways to become sustainable as a DAO. One of our first experiments is going to be minting NFTs to bring in sponsorship for our community.
This raised an interesting question. When someone sponsors DAO Masters by purchasing an NFT, how much data should we display on our website? Should we include their Twitter handle or ENS domain to represent their Web3 identity?
In addition, as we think about bringing our onboarding page from Notion to our website that is built on Webflow, it’s ignited conversations around the advantages (no-code) and disadvantages (centralized, monolithic) of Webflow….
Lastly, we’re considering how effective the current homepage is. As our teams grow in scope, we have added more sections and subpages to our website to guide you on your journey down the rabbit hole.
#join-a-dao 🔐
With the DAO discovery process being so time-consuming, a lot of people who feel motivated to dive in, feel overwhelmed and are deterred from joining a DAO.
In the first article that we will publish in our join-a-dao series, we plan to cover a series of popular and up-and-coming discoverability tools and processes and provide our perspective on what is missing. We believe that we will see certain tools evolve to make it easier to discover DAOs.
Right now, the landscape supports DAOs in“degen mode,” where it’s easy to ape into DAOs but difficult to find ones that suit your interests before you begin participating (meaning you have to start contributing just to figure out if this is the right DAO for you).
This is where DAO Masters comes in: we will answer the most common questions that folks have when looking for a DAO to join.
#monetization 💰
#nft-sponsorship
We have some beautiful, animated NFTs that we’re ready to reveal shortly… I could not be more excited to share them with you. Special thanks to RadLab and TaylorRose for the beautiful art.
We’re considering merging our research and NFT-sponsorship pods longer term so that people can 1) buy NFTs to support the research and 2) buy an NFT that acts as a pre-payment for a service related to the research, e.g. "Set up a playbook for running Coordinape and teach your team how to use it".
We’ll be sharing the Mirror post announcing our NFT sale, so stay tuned!
#consulting-monetization
We’re exploring consulting on the topics of compensation, governance (e.g. sub-DAOs), and contributor management. We believe these areas will allow us to dive deeper and find opportunities where DAO Masters can leverage our domain knowledge and content, such as best practices for onboarding, common pitfalls to look out for before designing compensation with Coordinape.
One key topic of conversation this week was pricing. We don’t want to bill hourly. Instead, we want to price to value, so we’re considering accepting governance tokens or potential swaps between DAO Masters to another DAO’s tokens as the means of payment to expand our network while aligning on our respective missions and values.
We’ve started some conversations already with a few DAOs (like Commonwealth and Juicebox) and are exploring how we can support them.
#research 👓
We’re in the final stretch and are putting the final tweaks on our Onboarding Practices research paper! We’re going to be hosting a Twitter Space every time we publish a piece, both to discuss learnings and answer questions people may have.
This will be a great way to set DAO Masters as a thought leader in the space. We're thinking more critically about DAOs, and hosting Twitter Spaces will give us an opportunity to dive deeper into the nuances and push the conversation.
Details for the Twitter Spaces to come! 🐦
Wanna catch up on last week’s newsletter? Newsletter #1
That's a wrap for this week…we'll see you next week for our final newsletter with links to all the exciting content we’ve published and events that we will be hosting!