Thoughts on DAO Tooling

When every DAO tool is competing over the same handful of DAOs, you need a distribution advantage. One of my favorite approaches is to start by providing services to different DAOs so you can develop expertise in a specific domain, build relationships with core teams, and eventually productize your service. A great example is Llama DAO... They... See more

Although there aren’t any best practices yet, there are a few potential ways that DAO tools could monetize such as a monthly fee in USDC, an NFT subscription, or a utility token.

You could integrate Stripe and take a fiat transaction fee but many DAOs aren’t incorporated and don’t have a bank account which could limit your potential market size. The other downside of a fiat transaction fee is that you don’t generate on-chain revenue which will limit your ability to eventually deploy a protocol, launch a token, and give owne... See more

If your DAO tool is a protocol (i.e., smart contracts deployed to a blockchain network), the obvious business model is an on-chain transaction fee. But most DAO tools are just UIs that write to a database. For the latter, there aren’t clear business models yet.

It’s challenging to build a generic DAO tool because different DAOs prioritize different features. So narrow the focus, become the dominant solution for a specific use case, then expand from there.