Over the past 3 months, I've made it a point to talk to any DAO tooling startup that reached out to me. I truly believe that for DAOs to work, we need solutions tailored to our industry.
That does not mean we need to reinvent products that work great and put a web3 label on it.
DAO tooling is a buzzword. If you were at one of the overhyped big name DJ parties in ETH Denver, chances were that you rubbed shoulders with 67 DAO tooling startup CEOs.
DAO tooling should not be about rehashing great products for the sake of it. Twitter works, Discord is shit, yes, but you don't need a DAO specific version, Google Docs ain't all that bad except the doxxing part, don't fix what ain't broken.
What these companies should focus on is what makes DAOs different from any other organizational form. For that, I came up with the WARTULL theorem on DAO tooling.
DAO tooling companies should explore the following areas:
Work
Admissions
Rewarding
Task Management
Utility
Leisure
Legal
Work:
DAOs have a hard time recruiting the right profiles or completing tasks. Make sure that people can find your DAO and can apply for projects or tasks that are outstanding. Visibility on these tasks now is buried in notions/google sheets and the heads of DAO members.
Admissions:
The onboarding process can be significantly improved and streamlined in DAOs, we see very creative solutions already, but a service that would make this process better can be a real key to grow the participation of the larger public in DAOs.
Rewarding:
In my opinion, the most important. Please someone, make an all encompassing tool where DAOs can pay their contributors in a fair, easy and streamlined manner. We shouldn't be using 5 tools to do something this indispensable.
Task Management:
If someone ever mentions Jira to me again, I'll slap them. Make a simple easy to use and share task management product that you can integrate with discord or notion, make sure you can make parts visible to the outside world. Not only devs need these boards.
Utility:
Collaboration tools that actually work for teams would be nice. A gnosis safe that doesn't fuck up the gas for multi-sigs, an usable platform to do proper documentation on crypto projects where you can show a graph of all the contracts and explain them in an easy way,..
Leisure:
DAOs are not just about work, but also about having fun with each other. Make a simple solution where DAO contributors can have fun together like you would after hours in a normal company. Some crypto native team building for example would be a good offering.
Legal:
How do you make sure your contributors aren't fucked by their own governments when they do taxes, how do you manage liability as a DAO. How do you pay for audits if you don't have a legal entity,.. All these things are hard for DAOs but aren't sexy to build for.
The naming of these domains are a bit of tongue in cheek, yet I hope it's clear that not the most obvious areas are highlighted. That's because obvious things are already done to an 'OK' level. It's the hard things that still need solving.
If you are building something in this space or if you have any questions, I'm more than happy to have a chat on what is really needed in the industry as opposed to what 10 others probably are already building. DM me!