Creator Economy - Practical Lessons from Building a DAO
Dear subscribers, Let’s talk about what it’s actually like to build a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) from scratch. I’ve been building Odyssey DAO over the past six months with a community of 6,000+ members. Together, we have:
In this post, I want to share 7 practical lessons from building a DAO. By the end, you may realize that “decentralized autonomous organization” may not be the best name for what actually happens. Today’s post is brought to you by Influencers Club Influencers Club helps startups partner with creators to reach new customers on leading social platforms (e.g., Instagram, TikTok, YouTube). Top companies like Linktree, Pearpop, Moment House, and others use Influencer Club’s database of 55M+ creators to find the right partners. If you’re looking to work with creators, check out Influencer Club via the link below. Here are my 7 lessons from building a DAO: 1. Define a clear mission and set of values
Odyssey’s contributors are united by our mission to onboard one million people to web3. Our growth lead Adrie, for example, is a single mom who wants to use education and on-chain proof of work to help people find the best web3 jobs. Having shared values is also important. Odyssey values “quality over quantity” in our content and a community that “pays it forward.” These values apply to everything that we do - from keeping our guides concise to organizing free community bootcamps. 2. Build a strong core team
Although Odyssey’s community has 5,000+ members, a core team of 10 people drives most of the work. Think of it this way - If you’re leading a startup with limited resources, would you hire 5,000 part-time contributors to work on 20 projects at once? Whether at a startup or a DAO, it’s hard to build shared context and forward momentum without a core team. I think other DAOs are similar - that’s why many have full-time job listings. But wait, you may be wondering, how is this decentralized? Number of contributors is a terrible metric for measuring success of a DAO
I'm more bullish DAOs with *fewer* contributors that have:
- Shared context
- Psychological safety
- High levels of autonomy 3. Decentralize through small, empowered teams
Some DAOs have a bounty board with a list of tasks that any member can work on to earn tokens. I don’t think this actually works in practice. Consider a task to write a blog post. If any member can take this task:
Instead, I think DAOs should decentralize slowly through empowered “two pizza” teams. Consider this example from Odyssey:
This bootcamp couldn’t have happened without Mark’s leadership and a small team of contributors stepping up to do the work. 4. Choose your owners wisely
Odyssey’s first crowdfund sold out in 24 hours and raised $100K+. That success was quickly clouded when some token owners started showing up to ask “when liquidity?” In hindsight, we should’ve prioritized finding owners who:
5. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel
In some ways, a DAO is like a company that’s more open, remote-first, and flat. Therefore, many company best practices apply even more to DAOs:
6. Do everything you can to retain talent
The promise of DAOs is that they can democratize access to work. A person from Indonesia could join a DAO, design a website, and earn crypto while building an on-chain resume for her next opportunity (true story for Wenda, our product lead). However, DAO onboarding is hard. At Odyssey, we’ve tried:
I’d be lying if I said that we’ve figured it out. Because DAO onboarding mostly sucks, it’s even more important to retain great people in your DAO. For example:
7. Remember why your DAO exists
DAOs, like companies, should exist to:
Everything else - tokens, governance votes, treasury management, etc - should simply be a means toward the goals above. To recap, here are my 7 lessons from building a DAO:
As you can see, many of these lessons apply to building a company as well. A DAO is not some magical entity. It all still comes down to great people working together to achieve a shared mission. 📣 Speaking of which, we’re creating a course to give you hands-on web3 experience (NFTs, DeFi, and DAOs). If interested, please fill out this short 10 question survey so that we can build an amazing course just for you. If you liked this post from Creator Economy by Peter Yang, why not share it? |
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