DAO Masters Season 1 Recap

DAO Masters was launched as a crowdfunded research project with 122 backers in September 2021 with a mission to onboard the next million DAO contributors & operators. Season 1 ran for six weeks during September and October, 2021. The DAO Masters Discord now has over 1,800 participants, and its first product, a review of the top DAO tools, can be found at daomasters,xyz.

What happened during DAO Masters Season 1?

DAO Masters accomplished a lot in 6 short weeks. It all started when Julia fired off a tweet looking for contributors to crowdsource DAO market research. The internet came up with 40+ DAO tools, 80+ DAOs, and 30+ high-quality DAO write-ups for review.

With an overwhelming list of tools provided, the team quickly organized core teams: product, content, and community-ops. 

Let’s dive in and celebrate what we accomplished in Season 1!

Product team

The Product team is primarily composed of contributors who helped shape the DAO Masters website — from design and layouts to tech stack and development. 

In Season 1, the team settled on a sprint structure and laid out a roadmap timeline. One of the first goals was to secure a domain. (thanks to @DAOofSteve, we secured daomasters.xyz!) The team then shared ideas for web design and selected a website-building platform. Webflow was the top choice and was selected. The team also leveraged Zapier to populate content from Notion to Webflow. 

Once the website was up and running, the Product team added a section for tool reviews, which includes video tutorials and the ability for people to add their own reviews. Check out an example here. They also added a resource library, along with easy ways to navigate based on your level of expertise and what you’re interested in.

With everyone’s help, the site went live on Oct 15!

Special shoutout to @hirsh @fudgy @mattflanagan and @DAOofSteve for product awesomeness in Season 1.

Content team

As noted above, there were many, many tools nominated for review in Season 1. The ever-diligent Content team focused on trimming down the list of suggested tools and started reviewing each one.

The tools reviewed during Season 1 were:

  • Aragon
  • Boardroom
  • Collab.Land
  • Colony
  • Coordinape
  • DAOHaus
  • DeepDAO
  • Discord
  • FairMint
  • Gardens
  • Gnosis Safe
  • Guild
  • Llama
  • MintGate
  • Mirror
  • OpenLaw
  • Orca
  • Rabbithole
  • Snapshot
  • SourceCred
  • Syndicate
  • Tally

You can check out the tools above and our ever-growing list of new tool reviews here. And, above and beyond written reviews, in Season 1 the team additionally created video tutorials. @liamherbst_ created the first video tutorial of Guild and @justin completed 6 reviews in a week! Amazing.

With all these reviews and more to come, @pheor0 & @Annika took the lead on creating a taxonomy to keep all current and future reviews organized and easy to find.

Moving beyond reviews, the Content team compiled a list of DAO Resources (which you can add to by sharing new tools in #add-a-resource in the Discord) and started a list of DAOs, led by @pheor0. This is the beginning of our current #join-a-dao project.

Community & Ops team

The Community & Operations team set up the core foundational tools for DAO Masters in Season 1. The key tools include: 

  • Coordinape to manage contributions and compensation
  • Notion to organize documents and track team progress
  • Snapshot to vote on key decisions

We also launched our token, $DAOMASTR, and @merkle created a step-by-step guide for buying the token. Anyone who now holds a $DAOMASTR token can join DAO Masters!

With all these new members, @twhittle took the lead on creating a DAO Masters onboarding program for the community, and @kassen started a new project to interview other DAOs and outline best practices for DAO onboarding.

The Community team also brainstormed the DAO Masters vision and mission, and reached consensus on the mission of onboarding the next million DAO contributors and operators.

Marketing team

Marketing is an important subteam that helps bring DAO Masters mainstream. The team worked out the mission/vision of DAO Masters and from there, defined a set of values, identified the audience and its positioning and which channel to use for launch and its overall approach. @justin and @mark drove the planning and successfully launched a social presence for DAO Masters on Twitter (@daomastersxyz) at the end of October.

What's on the roadmap for Season 2?

After the conclusion of Season 1, the team took a short "off-season" to reflect, regroup, and recharge before hatching the approach for Season 2. During the off-season, a number of questions came up. What was working? What wasn't? And, most importantly, what do we want to collectively accomplish during Season 2?

After many conversations, the team decided the theme of Season 2 will be "Sustainability: How can we build a self-sustaining DAO?" This includes thinking through what we need to do internally to operate as a DAO, what core activities we need to maintain, and how we can build an organization that encourages and enables new experimentation. Key activities for Season 2 include:

  • Building out processes to facilitate the maintenance of existing products and content (including the DAO Masters website and DAO tool reviews) in order to expand our brand/footprint in the DAO ecosystem
  • Defining internal processes for scaling our community, including onboarding, governance, and compensation
  • Exploring how we can build funding mechanisms to sustainably fund the DAO into future seasons
  • Defining 1-3 new experiments to expand the value DAO Masters adds to the DAO ecosystem

While we are just getting going into Season 2, DAO-oriented resources we are creating over the next few weeks that we intend to release into the world include:

  • Tool reviews
  • Video tutorials
  • Overviews of monetization models for DAOs
  • Resources for DAO onboarding, governance, and compensation
  • Original research
  • Long-form editorial
  • And a newsletter

DAO Masters Season 2 will run through December, 2021.

How to get involved or learn more

The best place to get involved is in the DAO Masters Discord. The tools and general chat channels are open to all. 

If you want to see the resources that were created during Season 1, check out the tool reviews and other resources on the DAO Masters website

Or, if you want DAO Masters delivered to your old-school inbox, you can sign up for our newsletter here.

Acknowledgements: DAO Masters Season 1 Contributors

Julia, Nelson J, Pheor0, justine, Hirsh, twhittle, jdubbs1381, Flanny, liamh, Fudgy, Kass, Bernacreates.eth, modernchaosmj, LarryFlorio, Seanmc.eth, jman4190, merkle_, bvajresh, Alex, annika, DAOofSteve

This Season 1 recap was written and edited by @jocelyn, @carllyn, @antoine, and @ccarfi

Subscribe to DAO Masters
Receive the latest updates directly to your inbox.
Verification
This entry has been permanently stored onchain and signed by its creator.