tags: notes

DAOhaus Product Roadmap: Notes

Overview and Framing

• Increasing awareness of other products that are beginning to explore our space — how to approach this?
  • Shy away from zero-sum mindset — approach from place of care about the DAO ecosystem and space
  • Think about why would a community choose DAOhaus over other products and what can we do to make DAOhaus a great option in addition to others that are emerging?
• Double-down on why folks use DAOhaus and focus on this niche area
• Going back to composability and integration with these other products
  • Composability is key
• Collaboration — Jord's example about craft brewers (even though they were making same products they saw that their existential purpose was to make better beer than the large breweries and they collaborated frequently since they saw that this was the larger mission)
  • Had a healthy sense of collaboration, not focused on rivalry — realized they had a bigger mission ahead of them
  • Traditional orgs are who we are competing with, not necessarily other products in the DAO space, especially since we may end up using their tech — focus on composability!
• "Larger narrative of building better methods of organization between humans"

"Competitor" Product Analysis

Zodiac

• Puts a Gnosis Safe at the center of DAO world — every DAO starts with a safe and then via Zodiac that DAO can pick and choose other "DAO legos" to create a DAO that works for them
  • Flexibility and portability over time as needs change and DAO evolves

Potential Threats and Challenges

• Could impact the Boosts store — Zodiac has several Boosts built in
  • Could be a hit to our potential revenue model via Boosts

Potential Upside

• Frees us up to think exclusively about how we can be so valuable to DAOs that they choose DAOhaus in addition to other alternatives
  • Pick and choose what we work on and set our strategic goals and vision (and governance and coordination)

Tokenwalk

• Effectively DAOhaus but specifically for Zodiac — aiming to create the connective tissue that allows a DAO to use all of Zodiac's options (and future ones built by the DAO communities at large)
  • Need to take this very seriously as this can also impact our revenue model (Boosts as revenue stream)
• Is this interface more or less complex than ours?
  • Likely more complex given that different governance models (such as quadratic voting) can be integrated
• Tokenwalk Seele module
  • Uses the Zodiac interface — metacontract for governance
  • Can add in timelock (simulates grace period) and Zodiac exit module (simulates rage quit)
    • Tokenwalk could make this easy for folks and offer lots of voting and governance options
• Who is their team? This is an incredibly complex vision
  • Gnosis/Zodiac team is competent — if the Tokenwalk team has support from Gnosis/Zodiac they could (likely) execute on their vision
• How feasible is the composability?
  • Aragon, DAOstack have tried this before

Potential Threats and Challenges

• In a year, with Tokenwalk being more mature and DAOhaus being as it is now, which would folks choose?
• Flexibility to extend Zodiac
• How does DAOhaus fit in if they're able to execute on their roadmap

Myco

• Planning on building on top of Gnosis Safe — this is an interesting trend and seems as if people are accepting that communities start with Gnosis Safes and are focusing on building governance models on top of safes
• Seems to have pivoted to LLC wrapping — communities needing protection via LLC
• What are they using for their base DAO contracts?

Token Communities & Collabland & Syndicate(s)

• What is the minimum viable coordination tool?
  • Offer streamlined token-gating options for a community to start with
  • Minimally viable way to DAO
• Syndicate(s) is an all-in-one Discord with voting and other solutions

Questions and Observations

• Zodiac breaking things into composable building blocks — maximum composability but difficult to compose
• We've identified and vetted what communities are using
  • Ease of usability but less composability vs. max composability but difficult to use
• More composability → more complex UI to build to wrap it
• What direction are folks going?
  • We don't know, so the composable direction makes sense
• Why are folks looking to replicate Moloch with multi-sigs

Discord as an existential threat

• Discord sending out the crypto survey — currently seems centered around NFTs, but what if they realize the role Discord plays in DAO coordination and decide to roll something out
  • Already have a lot of infrastructure and payment rails set, but they're a massive company with lots of overhead

From the User's Perspective

• A lot of newer communities are forming because they see the need — may not be aware of what's out there
• Different purposes — Mirror is for publication and writing, but then realizing they want to form a community
  • A year from now, what would people want to use to form their communities? How can we empower the summoning of upcoming DAOs?

What is our niche? What is DAOhaus?

• What are we throwing into the ring that they would compose?
• What is our niche? What do we do well that we want to focus on?
  • What do we offer to these other products?
• Is DAOhaus the connective tissue making it easy for individuals to use pieces together or do we double-down on Moloch DAOs specifically (making a bet on Moloch DAOs being the way to go for communities we're focusing on)?
  • This may look similar in short and medium term, but deviate in longer term focus
• As the connective tissue:
  • Value we bring as a DAO and a product platform is focus on UX
  • May involve us looking much harder on how we deal with interoperability — can we position ourselves to take advantage of flurry of open source develop? OR
• Doubling down on Moloch DAOs:
  • Use Zodiac stuff around edges but focus on Moloch DAOs
• Are we comfortable being underground/indie and having a cult following?
  • With whatever we choose we have to throw something else out
• Our niche:
  • Early on, envisioned being the community first platform
  • Fun-focused communities likely bigger market longer term, but this currently has been dominated by token DAOs
    • A lot of the "fun" DAOs having been created are token DAOs — easy to coordinate around this "single genesis action" and then you can utilize Collabland to token-gate Discord
      • Magic the Gathering DAO could likely look a lot more like Bankless DAO
    • Our model is an incredible model for building new things that are purpose and product oriented
      • Would love to see more product and business-adjacent DAOs using DAOhaus and MolochDAOs to run their organizations
      • This would take convincing but this could become easier as folks see the power of decentralized organizations achieving a lot — can we capture this wave when it hits?
  • Purpose-driven platform while still being fun and simple
• What's not available in the ecosystem and what is our fit?:
  • If you want to use a Moloch best approach is to use DAOhaus
  • What if we had a Zodiac-like Moloch set up? Decouple our UI so that folks can use Molochs as their backend and then do whatever else
    • Building their own frontend — "like a DAO stripe"
    • Who is our target user? → We're in discovery mode
      • Here to help communities coordinate
  • Begin with need to coordinate → Now what?
    • Are we too big to fit into this now what stage?
• Service DAOs are analogous to real-world agencies with a slightly different model
• How do we replicate token DAOs with Moloch?
• Fractionalization is the logical conclusion if you give people control over who they associate with
  • Humans like being in tribes and enjoy choosing who to associate with — larger organizations start fractionalizing into smaller DAOhaus DAOs
  • Permission is key for Service/Product DAOs
• Moloch v3: Is there a more fluid and natural way to pass the baton rather than rage quit?
• How can we enable token communities to "convert" these into permissioned DAOs?
  • Concept of shares can be difficult for people to understand, but our competitive advantage can be that we find the middle ground between token DAOs and permissioned DAOs — v3 can likely address this
  • Token communities quick way to start (airdrop tokens or allow market buy) and then the community figures out governance or focuses on financial incentives (similar to Bankless DAO)
• Does owning a token make you feel like part of a community?
  • User vs. part of community
  • How do non-DAOists perceive shares vs tokens and community?
    • Belonging and acceptance and rediscovering community
• DAOs as purpose-driven — web2 startups comparison — startups in early days contrasted with mega corporations
  • Community vs. audience: In much of web2, users are the audience — who is the actual community?
• Developer/Contributor Experience in the DAO space
  • Gnosis competitive advantage focusing on docs and extensions instead of emphasis on UI
  • Empowering others to build — what does devrel and dx look like in the DAO space?
  • Positioning community to leverage and integrate with advancements outside of what we're directly doing — how to position to take advantage of broader ecosystem?
  • How can we position ourselves in a similar way? Getting our Boost configs to be similar to Zodiac module configs?
  • We already have this infrastructure — do we want to formalize how we think about this and think about how much we want to build out UI to relate to this?
    • Compare to the developer experience between building a Gnosis Safe module (or Zodiac) compared to our Boosts?
    • Custom Module is focused at the contract level — does the module exist?
      • We're also focused on the UX, so we'd need to also focus on the UI — this is the same idea as our Boost Marketplace
        • Their integrations are iFrames that connect with the Gnosis Safe, so Gnosis didn't need to create additional UI