DAO Masters - Newsletter #3

DAOs are about community, we’re dedicated to #buildinpublic. Each week we will walk you through what we’ve been working on!

Season 1, we focused on building out how to onboard operators into DAOs. Here’s our Season 1 recap. Season 2’s focus (November 23 - December 17, 2021) was on sustainability: how can we build a self-sustaining DAO? This newsletter followed our journey 🚀throughout each season — our learnings, our challenges, and how to get involved. After this newsletter, we are going to go on break during the off-season. 

Member spotlight

Every week, we’ll feature a DAO Master contributor for our Member Spotlight, and this week is @frankismartinez! He’s been invaluable in his contributions to the tool review project. Without further ado…. 🥁

1. Why did you join DAOMasters? 

Tools are the critical phase that feeds an emerging technology cycle. DAO Masters made the smart move to focus on all tools; instead of one tool that may or may not have product-market fit.

2. What’s one thing you learned about DAOs recently that surprised you? 

The cultural primitives need IRL moments to form and be sustainable. I used to think this could be achieved 100% online [delusion from the pandemic].

3. What is one DAO project that you're particularly excited by?

buildspace. Their ‘Build your own DAO’ with JS project; which I believe will launch a wave of micro-DAOS, i.e. instead of large communities, form a DAO for smaller goals, activities. 

As Season 2 wraps up, we wanted to share links to all of the great artifacts that we’ve built over the last couple of weeks. We also believe it’s important to take a break and recharge during the off-season so you won’t be hearing from us for a while. Onboarding for Season 3 starts January 20, so we will see you in a few!

#content-reviews 📖

We wrote, edited, and posted 20 brand new Tool Reviews, along with 13 video tutorials. This team did an amazing amount of work in a short timeframe, including researching and experimenting with each new tool that we reviewed as a team. We hope our community finds the insights shared in each review and tutorial to be helpful in the DAO journey.  

Fundraising: Juicebox

Contribution & Compensation: Opolis, Wonderverse

Treasury Management: Utopia, Superfluid, Parcel

Token creation: POAP, Roll, Coinvise

Knowledge management: Clarity, Bip

Community management: Radicle, Mee6, Astro 

Token gating: Guild, Unlock Protocol

Contribution & compensation: Disperse

Multi-feature platform: Myco, Upstream, Sobol

🌟Special thanks to Fudgy in the Product guild for uploading all of this team’s new content to daomasters.xyz.🌟

#community-ops & onboarding 

We achieved four major milestones in community-ops and onboarding this season:

• Created a contributor application process for S2 and beyond. Onboarded non-$DAOMSTR holders via POAPs. 

• Overhauled the landing page for new members interested in learning about DAO Masters. 

• Interviewed core contributors and converged on 3 key community values for DAO Masters.

• Proposed and implemented changes to DAO Masters community channel structures and permissions. See the post here!

🌟Huge shout out to everyone who contributed to this amazing work this season! 🌟

#product 📷

During Season 2 we have added 20 new tool reviews, video tutorials, and new resources to our learn page.  Additionally, we have created a consulting page with a form to collect inbound interest in our consulting services.  As we release our new research articles, we will be adding a module to our site to feature these articles.  

Finally, we will be launching an NFT Sponsors page in recognition of all the new supporters who have donated via our NFT release after the NFT launch in January.

#monetization 💰

#nft-monetization

We have our Mirror post drafted and designed our NFT, we're just waiting for everything to go live so we can link to all our deliverables in the post. We’ll launch the NFT fundraise in early January, during planning season, when people are back online.

#consulting-monetization

We talked to DAO founders and studied diverse challenges faced by DAOs in different stages and domains to tap into "a consultancy service for DAOs" as a possibility.

Tl;dr:

• According to DeepDAO.io, there are approximately 115 active DAOs that have treasury size > $30K. Protocol DAOs are the majority (55%) and Service DAOs are followed (17%).

• There are more mature DAOs among Protocol DAOs (mostly DeFi) than other DAO types. Most DAOs in Service, Social, and Media domains are in the early stages.

• Early-stage DAOs typically face similar sets of challenges as they start and grow, such as tooling decisions, onboarding process design, contributor management, org design, knowledge management and archiving, and governance design and engagement.

To help other DAOs figure out these challenges, DAO Masters will continue to publish research articles and share our experiences around these topics. We will soon launch a pilot program to provide a consulting service to more DAOs, so stay with us! 👀👀👀

#research 👓

This season we achieved quite a bit on the research front!

DAO Essentials: 6 Key Onboarding Practices: We wrapped up a research project that explored DAO onboarding and have written up our takeaways in Mirror

Keep your eyes peeled on our Twitter! We’re going to be running a Twitter Spaces session Thursday, January 13th at 1.30pm ET where we’ll discuss more on the onboarding research piece. 

We also wrapped up a deep dive into the Coordinape process on Mirror: We used Coordinape to pay our DAO. Here’s what we found.

Finally, we have drafts of three articles examining DAOs as a new organizational form that sits between corporations and communities. Those articles will be popping off in early January!  

🌟Thanks to everyone on the research team for the awesome thought, writing, and revising this season! 🌟

#editorial 📑

On the editorial side of things, we’ve accomplished some major milestones:

• We’ve published our Season 1 recap. We learned that the high volume of conversations in Discord is difficult to keep up with (and ephemeral!), and we wanted a persistent artifact that captured all of the great things that were done in Season 1 on Mirror. Similarly, we wanted a regular cadence of sharing for the community that also worked for those who were new to DAO Masters (or who were DAO-curious), and decided a weekly newsletter was the right approach; we chose Substack as our newsletter platform.

• We published on a weekly cadence (here are the week 1 and week 2 updates, and the edition you're reading now is our final one for the season!)

#marketing 🐦

• We’ve crossed 2k followers on Twitter! We’ve asked you to help us decide on two tools that we’ll include in season 2 and we’ve also shared our newsletters and insights on onboarding and compensation. Thank you for all your support and we’ll continue to share news and DAO resources next year. 

• Kicked-off cross-team contributor submission process - It’s important to have an accessible way to contribute and allow info to be shared throughout the community. We needed a more systemized process to capture & archive lessons learned or key findings from each pod over the course of the season, which is why we’ve worked with other teams to start a contributor process that we can use to capture insights and share this with others on Twitter. 

• Completed forms for publishing featured tools - We want to continue sharing tools and resources to DAO operators, so we also created a process for contributors to write threads about these resources so we can publish them more quickly in the next seasons

That's a wrap for the second season of DAO Masters! Shout-out to all the contributors who helped us with this final newsletter 🦄

Tool review writers (15)

Lucaspon @lucasponn, Kohei @koheingt, Sicario @noncesicario, Jman @jman4190, Kishan @kishan22504, Ryan Heger @rheger7, Joer @joerhew, Dylan @DAOlan_, Werlda Hert @nullspacer, Roy3 @royking3, Mark Tan @marktanft, Sam @snedsas, MJ (Jon) @jhruth, Namita @namita_r, Sahaana @sahaanasuri

Tool review editors (5)

Justine @j_humenansky, Yu @yoyothesheep, Frank @frankismartinez, Justin @jdubbs1381, Antoine @antoinesakho

Videographers (5)

Jabe Mannelly @jman4190, Ryan Heger @rheger7, Sahaana @sahaanasuri, Roy3 @royking3, Mark Tan @marktanft

Resource Reviewers (3)

Carllyn @carllynyy, Namita @namita_r, Joer @joerhew

Onboarding & Community Ops (5)

Angela @jeune_sage, MJ (Jon) @jhruth, Nelson Jordan @nelsontjordan, Taylor Rose @taylorrose, Tyler Whittle @tylerwhittle2

Product Squad (4)

Aileai @radlabspace, Fudgy @fudgy0, Stank @bpktj48v8f, Hirsh @henryhirshland

Research (9)

Angela @jeune_sage, Behzod @beh_zod, Kassen @kassenq, Julia Lipton @JuliaLipton, Joycelyn @jocelyntypes, Nelson Jordan @nelsontjordan, Rob Bremner , Ron Tidhar @RonTidhar, Tyler Whittle @tylerwhittle2

Editorial Squad (5)

Angela @jeune_sage, Antoine @antoinesakho, Carllyn @carllynyy, Chris @ccarfi, Jocelyn @jocelyntypes

Marketing Squad (4)

​​Alex @acfgroves, Pranav @checkfit, Sam @snedsas, Mark @marktanft

Consulting Squad (8)

​​Dylan @DAOlan_, Hirsh @henryhirshland, Jango @me_jango, Keeevin @kevinngo_la, Maryam @mmaryam, Ryan Heger @rheger7, WillyWonka3 @DaoScout3, Chris Kim @kim_christoph

NFT Squad (6)

​​Aileai @radlabspace, Taylor Rose @taylorrose, Julia Lipton @JuliaLipton, Knome, Bernacreates.eth, MJ (Jon) @jhruth

DMGs (4)

Julia Lipton @JuliaLipton, Hirsh @henryhirshland, Nelson Jordan @nelsontjordan, Tyler Whittle @tylerwhittle2

Interested in joining the conversation? We have an open channel for new members #dao-general-chat where you can ask any questions.