DAOhaus Roadmap Session 10-6-21

Purpose

This post aims to summarise the Roadmap Session on 10-6-21, where we discussed the other DAOhaus alternatives (such as Gnosis' Zodiac), how DAOhaus intends to set itself apart and our direction moving forward.

Context

More DAOs, more alternatives
Over the past year, more communities have come online and are looking for better ways to organise, given the Covid-19 social isolation, as well as the boom of crypto, NFT, DeFi and DAOs. With a new persona of communities looking to DAO-ify, new products such as Juicebox, Mirrora and Orca have risen to solve this need.

Each DAOhaus alternative bring out different solutions to cater for the needs, wants, savviness of their community persona. For instance, Juicebox is a token-based solution focused on financial transparency, returns and tokens. Mirror is publication-first tool that makes things simple enough for any creator to form & build their community via features like "Crowdfund" (aka CCOs), "Auction" (aka NFT Sales), "Token Races" (aka Governance).

The increasingly crowded space & clear positioning of these alternatives makes us consider why would a community choose DAOhaus when wanting to DAO-ify?

Gnosis' launch of Zodiac
Next, Gnosis' Zodiac is as a strong alternative to DAOhaus because of its feature parity with Moloch DAOs, and DAO composibility. First, new Zodiac modules have started to achieve feature parity with Moloch's offering (such as RageQuit via Exit, Grace Period via Delay). Building on top of that, Zodiac's composability should kickstart a wave of use cases/ DAO legos built by the community, especially with Gnosis' standing. For instance, the Seele module built by Tokenwalk team can introduce powerful capabilities such as different modes of voting.

Given the prominence of Gnosis Safes, feature-parity with Moloch and the composability of Zodiac modules, anyone starting out with a Gnosis Safe will likely have a Zodiac-based DAO solution on the top of mind.

Discussion

With the above context, we kicked off the discussion around topics, such as:

• Understanding Zodiac:
  • How does Zodiac (the core product) work?
  • How do Zodiac legos work?
  • Who is it for?
  • DAOhaus Safe Minion
• Zooming into DAOhaus: Community Personas & Our Niche
  • Why are we different from other alternatives?
  • A year from now, why would someone choose DAOhaus versus some other alternative?
  • Who are we building DAOhaus for?
  • What is our unique value proposition?

Understanding Zodiac

How does Zodiac work?
Zodiac is Gnosis' way to DAO, showcasing their belief that every DAO should start with a Gnosis safe (i.e. the bank account). As a feature, Zodiac is an App where users can click to view an iFrame UI of the Zodiac modules.

Here, DAO 'summoners' can pick and choose DAO legos built by different developers to empower their DAO in membership, governance, and other applications (e.g. DeFi, etc.). Currently all legos are built by Gnosis Guild, with the exception of Seele (by TokenWalk, but is not live yet)

How do Zodiac legos work?
Users can add any Zodiac Modules via the Contract Address and no signing is required when adding Modules. It seems like based on the Contract Address, some fields and basic UI should be generated for users to configure and use the Module

Who is it for?
Existing projects with a safe. Not necessarily communities, but signers to a bank account

What about our Safe Minion?
There are 2 ways DAOhaus has 'integrated' with Gnosis:

1. Safe Minion: A Minion that uses Gnosis Safe as the vault
2. DAOhaus app on Gnosis Safe: DAOhaus is an app on Gnosis Safe, where users can click on the App to open an iFrame of DAOhaus

The Safe Minion allows us to focus on what we do best (governance), while keeping our vaults to a high standard. The DAOhaus app on Gnosis Safe enables interoperability and easy onboarding for Gnosis signers who want to evolve their set up to a transparently governed DAO.

Analysis & Discussion
When the Zodiac ecosystem Modules grows, it is likely that Zodiac functionalities will exceed the DAOhaus (& Boosts) offering. That said, given our experience connecting these composable parts, it is going to be hard to create an interoperable and yet user-friendly UI for users.

While Tokenwalk is still an early product, it's the first attempt on creating a user-friendly UI connecting the interoperable Zodiac components (i.e. mirroring a DAOhaus explorer on Zodiac). They are currently only on Rinkeby, but we should observe what they are doing for further learnings.

As we started comparison between DAOhaus & Zodiac, the discussion shifted to look inwards at DAOhaus: who is our user? what do we want to be?

Zooming in: Community Personas & Our Niche

What are we solving for?
We want to empower communities to coordinate better together.

Who are we solving for?
First, we want to build for communities with a strong purpose and are actively involved - commonly categorised as project, product or service DAOs. These DAOs are internet tribes that share a common goal, identity and vision. These members embody community as opposed to audience that can be seen in projects with many token-holders that do not really participate, collaborate or identify with the DAO.

Coincidentally, our permissioned shares-based voting is better for running purpose-driven communities as these DAOs have clear objectives to organise processes around or Web2 organisational structures that they can model. Our shares & voting processes are effective in modelling these social processes. A juxtaposition would be sporadic communities that are 'fun' without a clear purpose - these organisations have a formless or non-existent governance, so an ERC-20-token governance system might be a better start.

We are not saying that we don't want to serve current ERC-20 token-based communities. In fact, they represent a big part of existing DAOs today. We will need to figure out ways to onboard them into DAOhaus such as getting sub-teams with a clear purpose (e.g. Product teams) to use DAOhaus for more focused collaboration. We should also explore increasing transferability and fluidity of voting power within our permissioned governance system.

What is the DAOhaus product?
DAOhaus' 'product' is not just the DAOhaus user interface and features, but also the community around DAOhaus.

On a product front, DAOhaus' main focus is in providing a human, fun and simple user interface to navigate technical concepts such as shares, governance, treasury. To provide upgrades to the core DAO experience, DAOhaus also has Boosts and Minions.

Beyond the UI and features, the community around DAOhaus is not just some people on Discord or Snapshot hanging out, but contributors and collaborators who constantly create new initiatives that add value to DAOs. These initiatives typically help onboard new DAOs, faciliate DAO-to-DAO interactions and create new DAO use cases (such as LP DAO and Meta-X-lerator) which can be productised in the future.

What makes us unique?
After discussion on our approach, the main value propositions of DAOhaus are:

	Our UVP	Why are we uniquely positioned to do it?
1	Heavy focus on governance & active collaboration for a purpose	Our product starts governance first (proposals, membership, voting, etc.) as compared to bank/treasury first
2	A** user-friendly, human and fun way** to navigating technical concepts	We design for cool & fun communities, rather than for IBMs
3	A wider community that creates new initiatives & services for DAOs (e.g. UberHaus / LPDAOs / Meta-X-lerator)	DAOhaus is owned, built and governed by DAOs - the entire community is DAOing together in a meta way
4	A social way to discover, manage and follow all DAOs in the ecosystem	We already have social aggregation features such as the Hub, Explore
5	An ecosystem of Boosts to expand DAOhaus functionality	We have an existing Boost marketplace

Strategic Direction
Given the above UVPs, DAOhaus' strategic direction remains being focused on community governance in a fun & human way. However, in order to adapt to the evolving DAO landscape, we should add the following focuses :

• Community initiatives and products
• Social Features
• Boosts

This way, community initiatives push the boundaries by testing emerging DAO-DAO interactions and meta-DAO use cases, while magesmiths can productise those that work well. Social features will also help DAOhaus users better navigate, explore and be active in different DAOs. These 2 features are possible only because of the community unique to DAOhaus, giving us a superpower that is not easy to replicate.

Finally, Boosts will help to continually upgrade the functionalities of a DAOhaus DAO.

Refer to Appendix for a diagram on how these strategic focuses can practically lead to the benefit of DAOhaus

Positioning in relation to Zodiac

When thinking about how we navigate the eventual overlaps with Zodiac (especially in DAO functionality & Boosts), the analogies of Android and Apple are useful to consider.

Zodiac Modules' strength in composability and customisability will be great for power-users to customise legos for advanced use cases. While this attracts power-users, this is not the best starting point for most communities first entering the DAO space. Hence, we thought the Android analogy represents Zodiac's position in the space well.

With a user-friendly, simple and fun user interface, DAOhaus wants to follow the Apple approach, where we provide the easiest way for anyone to summon and participate in a DAO. This should show in how we design our core interfaces, features, copywriting and even best practices for Boosts. We do not need to be at the bleeding edge or have the most use cases, but we make sure that all use cases in the DAOhaus ecosystem are intuitive, simple and work well. If more advanced DAOs need more functionality, we should have custom Boosts and Minions for them to DIY.

While Apple represents our ethos well, there are some things we don't need to learn from Apple. For instance,

• Interoperability between all platforms, so that DAOhaus can benefit and work with other ecosystems and builders
• Openness and fairness in app curation (perhaps borrowing from Mirror's $WRITE Race mechanic)
• Positive sum game thinking

Another analogy would be WooCommerce vs Shopify

Ask

The focus here is to discuss and align on the strategic directions and focuses before we can look at the executional steps and priorities.

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Appendix

Executionally, this is how the strategic direction may be executed

	Our UVP	Magesmiths' initiatives
1	Heavy focus on governance & effective collaboration	Continue doing this & explore greater transferability of shares
2	A user-friendly, human and fun way to navigating technical concepts	Continue doing this
3	A wider community that creates new initiatives & services for DAOs (e.g. UberHaus / LPDAOs / Meta-X-lerator)	Continue incubating initiatives via community, while magesmiths productise those that work (e.g. LPDAO)
4	A social way to discover, manage and follow all DAOs in the ecosystem	Build more social features (e.g. profile pages, follow DAOs, favourites, messaging, etc.)
5	An ecosystem of Boosts to empower expansions to DAOhaus functionality	Reduce barriers to Boost creation & incentivise Boosts development via Grants

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Meeting Notes

Direction for today

Regroup around DAOhaus' strategic vision

• collaborate w/ "competitors" that share our mission to empower people everywhere to create and contribute to DAOs
  • the real competitors are trad orgs

Agenda

1. Other DAO projects and Zodiac
2. What's our niche?
   3. What do we offer these other projects?
3. Other topics
   1. Design System (Booststrapping)
   2. L2 governance controlling a Safe on other chains (eg mainnet)
   3. Types of DAO knowledge and commuication

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0. Context

• Other DAO Projects Analysis document
• Forces of Change & what they mean for us

	Forces of Change	Implication
1	New types of communities want to be formed	New products are built to solve this need (e.g. Juicebox, Mirror)
2	Hype cycle of DAOs leading to more funds flowing into DAO-related products	More competitors to DAOhaus core product & community builders for Boosts
3	Zodiac & Gnosis	Strong challenger, given Gnosis composability & community

• Some uncategorised thoughts
  • Where do we want to go from here?
    1. Priorities: How do we balance between
       • (A) summoning 99% of yet-to-be-summoned DAOs
       • (B) empowering the current DAOs to do more advanced stuff (i.e. 1% of all DAOs, but producing 99% of value now)
    2. User Persona: Who is our user now? Who do we envision our future users to be?
       • Quick notes from Plausible Analytics:
         • Most users are from USA, UK, Germany, Australia, canada.
         • DAO Power users are MetaCartel xDai, MetaCartel Ventures, Raid Guild, Genesis L1, iROBOT.
    3. Problems: What problems do these DAOs face? What do they care about?
       • e.g. more financially-related (Juicebox/LPDAO/CCO); more active, direct and engaged community (Mirror/Discourse thread in DAOhaus, etc.) or something else (mainnet execution + L2s governance)
  • Where are we now? How do we synergise / drop current workstreams to go to where we want to be?
    • Where we're at now: Boosts marketplace, NFT updates (Rarible, Tributes, etc.)
    • What's coming up: Productising LPDAO+CCO, Hub/Explore redesign, Developer Grants

1. Other DAO projects and Zodiac

• Juicebox ==> CCO "alternative"; maybe also LP DAO "alternative"?
• Tokenwalk ==> super serious "competitor" with a big strategic advantage (Zodiac)
  • DAOhaus but for Zodiac - A year from now, would you use TokenWalk or DAOhaus?
  • How feasible is composability? (Aragon, DAOstack) - Balance between composability & usability
• Mirror
• Orca
• Myco
• Syndicat.es? An all-in-one Discord, voting, etc solution
• Token communities & CollabLand - What's the minimally viable way to DAO?
• Web2 tools (Loomio and Polis)
• Zodiac
  • Everything should start from a Gnosis safe via Zodiac. DAOs pick & choose DAO legos over time
  • Risk (proxy via Tokenwalk) vs Favour (why do DAOs choose DAOhaus over all alternatives)

2. What's our niche?

• Are we the glue for multiple DAO protocols (BYOG, Bring Your Own God)? UX
• Or are we an opinionated DAO service? i.e. doubling down on Moloch
• Do we want to be the indie/cult following DAO product or do we want to be come The Web3 DAO protocol?
• Why are we different?
  • Community-first & the communities around us
  • Simple & fun user experience (e.g. customising UI)
• Fun communities vs quasi-investment/company DAOs? Not mutually exclusive
  • A lot of fun DAOs are token DAOs - easy to create, coordinate & plug in with other tools such as CollabLand. Fun communities will look more like token DAOs (e.g. Bankless)
  • Moloch DAOs are incredible for running purpose & product-oriented organisations (vs loosely-associated token DAOs)
  • Challenge: Most project DAOs come from traditional position of control, hence choosing Gnosis safes instead of starting more decentralised
• Enable devs to spin up & choose their own components/FE (A DAO Stripe)
  • Start with a need to coordinate: Discord > Token/NFT > Now what? Launch on DAOhaus OR Spin up Gnosis Safe
  • DAOhaus in its current form could be too big to fit into the 'Now what' stage - How can we help these communities grow when they are small AND big
  • For summoners who start from 0 (no social 'relationship'), it's harder to start
• Service DAOs as a good use case for Moloch DAOs & more effective for member onboarding
• Fractionalisation of larger (token?) DAOs into DAOhaus-DAOs for better coordination
• Permission is key for Service/Product DAOs (humans want to choose their tribes)
• v3: Is there a more fluid / natural way to pass the baton? Rather than RageQuit
  • How can we enable transferability of shares?
  • Token communities typically start because it's a formless & easy way to start governance OR they are focused on financial incentives
  • How can DAOs enable tokens to do governance, without allowing people to buy power?
  • How do other non-DAOists perceive shares vs token as being part of the community? As compared to just a user
  • The hollowing & rediscovery of belonging, acceptance & purpose. Other communities seem nihilistic
  • DAOs as purpose-driven web tribes (web2: startups in the super early days vs big corporations)
  • Audience vs community
• How do we update our Boosts strategy in view of Gnosis Apps?
  • Developer relations & empowering others to build rather than us building the UI
  • Make it easier for other developers building on DAOhaus boosts infrastructure
    • Some things we can learn from Gnosis: Easy transaction builder + iFrame
  • Position DAOhaus to take advantage of broader ecosystem developments / integrations (e.g. Boost/Zodiac/ other interoperability)
  • Can a Minion Safe use Zodiac modules? Deploy Minion Safe > Go to Gnosis > Use Zodiac modules
  • If the infrastructure is available, do we want to build the UI for DAOhaus to use Zodiac modules?
• Things we can do that Gnosis aren't positioned to do
  • Community-first initiatives like LPDAO - We could productise this ?
  • MetaXLerator
• How can Zodiac replicate the staged voting of MolochDAOs?
  • Functionality should be possible via different modules, but UI is questionable (probably what TokenWalk is trying to use
  • DAO-first personas vs bank-first personas -> Android (Zodiac) vs Apple (DAOhaus).
  • What do we borrow from the "Apple" approach?
  • More opinionated core product / basic building blocks vs more flexible Boosts?
  • DAOhaus v3
• How can we enable token communities to "convert" into permissioned DAOs?
  • facilitate token tributing for shares?

3.1 L2 governance controlling a Safe on other chains (eg mainnet)

3.2 Types of DAO knowledge and commuication

• Async
• Long form
• Content
• Project Management

V3

• We have completley new contracts, new code design patterns. We're making a new design system.
• The complexity of this new system is at least 10x of what we were doing before (especially if we choose glue route)
• This requires a higher ratio of engineering vs. hacking.

Current Snapshot

Community Formation

Community can start with any need to coordinate.

Path today

discord
haz token/nft

what is their next step?

Next Steps: Summarise document & dicussion

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