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

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.

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.

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

Saying you’re building DAO tooling is like saying you’re building tools for corporations. It doesn’t really mean anything. There are protocol DAOs, social DAOs, NFT collector DAOs, service DAOs, grant DAOs, and more.  So the first step in building DAO tooling is to clearly define the target audience.