Feb 8, 2021

6 min read

DAO Maker Products (1/4): Governance Technology and Community SaaS

DAO Maker has rapidly released entire product lines since its founding in 2018. A series of four articles will take a dive into each product line, starting with our technology products for governance and Community Relationship SaaS.

The company’s first product line is a software suite that enables one of the most advanced forms of community governance. Social Mining creates DAOs or semi-community governed ecosystems called HUBs.

Its next upgrade, which will include a rebranding to dTeams, will make the software suite compliant for equity-funded ventures, opening room for rapid expansion beyond tokens.

A technology that makes a DAO. It’s the company name.

This technology has played a key role in DAO Maker’s growth, has been a foundation for many top-100 and top-200 tokens, and it will soon empower hundreds of startups across the globe. Its success demands exploration.

A. Governance Technology

There are several options at hand when tokenized projects consider to launch a DAO. Unlike offerings like Aragon, Social Mining has enabled the community to go well beyond mere proposal voting.

The norm has been to let holders decide on simple factors such as protocol fee structures.
Meanwhile, our technology has automated and organized community-led business expansion, tech development, and advocacy of some of the largest layer-1s in the space.

Social Mining has provided 50x more functions for community governance, validation, and treasury management than any other industry protocol or tool.

The yield farming boom has clarified to projects the need to settle community incentives. We published years ago a draft paper on Social Mining and how it combats the free-rider issue in crypto. Years later, the industry has caught on.

In the meantime, our technology has maintained its lead to a point where our struggle is keeping up with demand — a challenge we aim to address by becoming permissionless; more details on this below.

Additional changes are in the pipeline to streamline functionality.

We’re enhancing the technology’s UI & UX to provide existing functions in new formats. The example below shows how the simplest function, proposal voting, will move from the news feed to a dedicated module.

The formal governance system and a gamification module are in line for the next Social Mining update.

B. Permissionless Offering

Social Mining/dTeams is far more advanced than any governance tools in the space. The limitation has been that we have kept it as a permissioned product for projects that we accelerate or consider of excellent potential for greatness.

This has effectively made the technology a recurring variable in the most successful developments in the space, but has forced it to be cut off from the wider market, especially small caps.

We are in the process of launching a permissionless version of Social Mining: a limited format called “Express”

Unlike existing permissionless governance solutions and protocols, Social Mining became blockchain-agnostic since 2019. It is compatible with any blockchain, and already has native support for projects on Ethereum, Binance Chain & BSC, NIS1, Symbol, Avalanche, Elrond VM, and more.

The move towards making access permissionless will make one of our key technologies a critical piece of not just DeFi protocols, but blockchain projects at large.

An essential technology in the blockchain space has to be layer-agnostic.

C. Beyond Governance

Community Relationship Management SaaS

Customer relationship management software, or CRM for short, are critical enterprise products.

In fact, it’s the CRM product line that has shot Salesforce to a $200+ billion market cap. Traditional CRM are not optimized for tokenized developments. Crypto is home to both communities and customers.

The most successful projects in crypto are those that effectively turn customers into communities.

The “customer” -centric nature of traditional CRM has to be replaced with a “communty”- centric nature.

Existing CRM are not fit for the crypto space.

A community relationship management (CRM) SaaS became part of our software suite in a 2019 update. This key functionality provided teams with a powerful panel to:

assess ecosystem data
communicate with the community
gauge community sentiment and needs

A CRM customer-made for the crypto market, built with clear feedback on the needs of both communities and project teams.

The Community Relationship Management SaaS also captures data on:

codebase growth led by community
global business development initiatives taken upon by active members
awareness led by outspoken community members

All presented in a convenient panel. This comes with resources to assess the aggregate health of the ecosystem and to even provide a nudge to the community’s direction.

Teams that have been given access to it, love it.

We believe crypto is going to continue its momentous growth. With it, will the need for the world’s only community relationship management software.

D. The Future of Social Mining: dTeams

dTeams is accompanied with a UI revamp, to modernize the software suite’s layout

A technology that has been a component of networks that have risen from seed stage to unicorns is powerful. Decentralized networks are built upon communities, and advanced governance tools are the foundation to empower communities.

Not only has Social Mining been a pioneering technology as a governance solution, but it has enabled far more power to the community than any competing tool. The associated CRM has furthered its impact by allowing teams to be in sync with their network’s community.

We believe such a technology can have an even more momentous impact on the space if it moves from being permissioned to permissionless.

This major update will be part of dTeams.

Equity-Venture Expansion

The update towards new features, including a new framework that enables equitydrops, are going to pave the way for dTeams to expand into the equity-funded startup space, where the concept of communities is also gaining prominence.

A great portion of 2020 was spent assessing the viability of equitydrops, which would be the fuel behind creating incentives within the customers of a non-tokenzied startup. A must to turn the customers in to a community.

Equitydrops are legal, but require a jurisdiction-specific framework for execution. Hence the release of dTeams will be gradual, region by region.

dTeams is the final fruit of three years of development; the technolgoy behind it is battle-tested through use from the largest communities in the space, which have built many of the most successful tokenized projects.

It is now ready for great expansion, even beyond the token market.