Mission Mainstream: We’re All Gonna Make It (Literally)

SETTING THE STAGE

Before we became Dapper Collectives, we were a team of creatives, engineers, artists, writers and producers, working together to tell the story of Miquela and the characters of the Brud universe, across the internet.

Like so many other creators and companies, we spent years trying to make our business model work in an industry that favors platforms over people, creators and artists. Our mission was to entertain and inspire people around the world through purpose-led storytelling. Together we:

• Created a compelling universe of characters
• Grew large, global audiences
• Cultivated passionate fandom
• Built both businesses around our content and joy for fans

We produced a groundbreaking narrative with beautiful visuals that reached millions, telling Miquela’s story the same way we all share our own — through Instagram posts, Facebook diaries, TikToks, songs and vlogs. Using these familiar formats, and sharing Miquela’s story in the context of our audience’s friends and family, allowed her fans to suspend disbelief and fall in love with her world and her journey.

Over the years, the platforms changed. They once acted as open spaces for creators to tell their stories and connect with their communities — but, they developed into technologies built to extract as much value as possible from the people that created it for them. We had to get off the hamster wheel. We had to reflect on who we were and what we truly wanted, rather than push toward the platforms’ definition of success.

In September 2020, we started to see the power of decentralization. We realized decentralization could help us not only to solve the problems we were facing at that moment — it could actually help us achieve our original mission. Our team went deep, spending hours discussing the outcomes of DeFi summer, studying the creation and airdrop of $Audius and similar tokens, and observing how Friends with Benefits — which would eventually go from meatspace to a DAO — was taking shape. We decided to run a test, auctioning an original art piece by Miquela as an NFT on SuperRare. It sold for an incredible 159E (all of which went to charity).

Building blocks were taking shape around us:

• Tokens were emerging as a pathway towards both individual and collective ownership, creating financial upside for community-led projects, products, and communities.
• Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) started popping up, creating examples of how open communities (of mostly strangers), with no central authority, driven by a token, were self-organizing around shared interests, successfully pooling resources and building together.
• NFTs were revealing a way for creative and cultural content to be both universally accessible and individually-ownable. Someone could collect parts of Miquela’s story without restricting access to it for her larger audience. On top of that, the value generated by NFTs was distributed directly to the people who created it.

If the internet unlocked global human coordination thanks to instantaneous, asynchronous communication and cloud-based collaboration tools like Zoom, email and Slack, what other business principles could be improved with blockchain technology?

The dominant, top-down, one-to-many corporate structure is reflective of the power imbalances we face on centralized platforms. It became clear that a mission-driven, passionate community of contributors could replace the role of the all-powerful CEO — and Web3 would enable people to govern their own path forward. In a post last week, our founder Trevor reflects that, in contrast, general purpose blockchains initiated opportunities “to coordinate people around ideas or causes that were important, and to incentivize people to create more value for others instead of needlessly extracting for themselves.”

We began mapping a plan to decentralize Brud, opening our org and operations to fans, storytellers, artists and creators, and turning those who support Miquela and Brud into real owners that participate and share in the value they create.

As Brud, our mission was to entertain and inspire people around the world through storytelling with purpose. As Dapper Collectives, our mission evolved to supporting storytelling that inspires and entertains people around the world through the development of tooling, communities, builders and systems that will make DAOs mainstream.

MISSION MAINSTREAM

Dapper Collectives is the team within Dapper Labs that’s bringing DAOs into the mainstream. We are a vision-driven partner, launching a suite of core DAO tooling that supports the growth and development of DAOs and open source DAO tooling on Flow.

We are building a world where empowerment, connection and ownership for creators and their communities are a given and the cultural value they generate flows freely and fairly back to them. This means mainstream, accessible and open tooling created for:

• Scale — Reaching beyond the millions of niche crypto natives to impact the billions of people globally who tell their stories online today.
• Popularity — Designing our tools, user experiences and community contribution opportunities to be (hella) fun and engaging.
• Flexibility — Creating modular and composable solution “legos” with optional levels of decentralization for creators and communities to create the DAO that will work specifically for them as they evolve.
• Invisibility — Building tooling, systems, and thinking so useful, powerful, synergized and normalized in our everyday lives that they become second nature and we no longer see their novelty.

FOR CREATORS, BY CREATORS

Our product approach is part vision, part practice. As we build our tool suite, we’ve been educating our team members about the powers of Web3 in preparation to launch the Brud DAO. We’ve reflected on the fact that every “ah ha” moment we’ve shared came from us presenting a mental model or real-life framework to explain these complicated and emergent mechanics.

We’ve asked ourselves: rather than introducing entirely new ways of working, thinking and transacting, could we use popular product interaction and engagement design to help calm nerves and kickstart inspiration and creativity among our own team of creators? These four guiding principles now supercharge and motivate us:

• Accessibility — Changing everyday life will require being useful to everyday people in everyday ways. No previous knowledge required.
• Inclusivity — Lowering the barrier to entry for adoption of DAO systems. If the most new-to-crypto person understands, then everyone else will too.
• Joy — Making our tooling truly fun, engaging and delightful to use. Small interactions go a long way in stewarding users through an experience learning. We’re looking to bring that “You’ve got mail!” dopamine rush to Web3.
• Change — Creating tools and systems so flexible and scalable that they will live, grow and evolve long after we’re gone.

ACCESSIBLE, POWERFUL TOOLS FOR COLLECTIVE CREATION

Working alongside and in partnership with the growing Flow developer community, we are expanding the tooling stack that will empower communities, creators and their audiences to easily launch and grow their DAO on Flow. Empowered by a mission, meme, shared interests, skill sets, or needs, contributors of all kinds will be able to use our open source legos to coordinate, participate, connect and be rewarded in new ways.

👯 Making Decisions, Together —
CAST expands on existing DAO voting models to introduce creative and governance decisions in a collective, transparent way.

In Practice:

• There is no “one,” in charge. That means, token holders as “owners” vote to voice their desires for the organization and align on the strategy and outcomes most important to the DAO’s success, such as creative, financial, community and roadmap decisions.

In the works:

• First: Closed Alpha release to support the decentralization of Flow.
• Then: Going permissionless: Come one, come all!
• Hybrid decentralization that enables creator DAOs to build specialized offerings and proposal-types for contributors and fan communities.
• This allows communities to participate in the formats and decision-making processes that work best for them.

Customizable pages that motivate increased participation by giving more hubspace than vote-and-get-out.

💸 Pool funds, together —
VESSEL supports multi-signature, treasury management, for groups of people to manage shared funds and collectibles and visualize DAO transaction histories.

In Practice:

• For value to flow back to the people that create it, we need a place for that value to live. Think of VESSEL like a shared bank account of DAO funds and collectibles with a designated group of community members managing transactions, paying contributors or investing in an high-value NFT for the community.

Booked for our Beta:

• Familiar banking app design.
• Access on your desktop and in your pocket, on the go.
• Defining access and control of shared funds, both coins and collectibles.
• Intuitive payments, transactions and management. Heavy should not be the head that signs up to wear the DAO treasury crown.

🎨 Create, together —
ODE is a robust, curatable creator-first marketplace with layouts that support linear storytelling and customizable experiences..

In Practice: Creators are storytellers. With ODE, they own curating their work, creating context and meaning for their pieces and in turn increasing value for the NFT, collector, audience and beyond. Today, so much of what we put out in the world is smashed between other images, songs, tweets, photos in feeds. All connection with us as the source is lost. ODE restores control to the creator and everyone is rewarded as a result.

Coming Soon:

• The benefit of showing up late to the party is that we can include what others have left out. Building on Flow’s robust marketplace framework, ODE will expand on the purchase-first experience by uniquely rethinking how we experience NFTs today.
• No more shady algorithms! Stories unfold how creators intended and how fans expect.

🛠 Build worlds, together
BLOOM allows you to easily access the full Flow DAO stack and launch your DAO in minutes.

In Practice: In minutes, stitch together Dapper Collectives’ core products and other tools on Flow to help creators, fans and builders easily launch with an out-of-the-box framework and grow decentralized organizations on Flow.

DAO makers, creators, contributors, joiners, tool builders:

• Home, hub and watering hole for all things DAO on Flow with forums for discussion for builders, creators and tooling and DAO directories.
• Onboard DAOs big and small to new forms of self-management and community — fueled by shared interests and powered by a token.
• Education and onramps for learning about Web3 community building, DAO operating systems, core tooling, playbooks and case studies around building on Flow and beyond.
• Find your people: Discover what DAOs and DAO tooling are being built on Flow and connect, build and create together.

HERE FOR A GOOD TIME AND A LONG TIME

We see Flow as the blockchain where culture happens — and we are here to grow the ecosystem by collaborating and supporting its development at every level. To truly create the rich soil that will allow for 10,000 projects to bloom, Flow evolving from being home to the world’s most trusted communities to supporting the most exciting Web3 projects is imperative.

STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS:
At Dapper Collectives, we are creators ourselves, so we uniquely understand the needs of those moving culture forward. From established fandoms (dreaming of WWE DAO 😈 ) to Web2 companies looking to innovate, from artists to teams — we’re ready to help them to create, together. We are dedicated to the longevity and acceleration of the Flow ecosystem, and know that fostering and attracting huge fandoms, collectors, and mainstream audiences to Flow will signal and incentivize more creators, dreamers and developers to build and be successful.

BUILD IN PUBLIC:
Our team started building on Flow < 6 months ago and we are still learning! With inclusivity at the core of our mission, we plan to be open about what and how we’re building. We know that the more we can share, connect and team up with ecosystem builders driven by our same mission, the more value and the better, faster and stronger we’ll all build. That means sharing successes and failures with all of you as well as reaching out for your thoughts and inputs on works in progress. This is a must. In the words of Janet, “It’s all for you.”

BOUNTY PROGRAM:
We’re all going to (literally) make it together. Long term and continuous value creation will be community-driven. Dapper Collectives bounties incentivize builders to help build the open source tools we know will be fundamental to DAO’s success. Let’s work together to push forward the opportunity and success of creators, fans and communities on Flow. We are looking for all kinds of builders, from all kinds of backgrounds, skill sets and interests.

Check out our current bounties here. Let’s go!

OPEN SOURCE:
We’re building for longevity, progressively. As Flow co-founder and Product Lead Layne Lafrance shared with Packy McCormick in Flow: The Normie Blockchain: “We want this to be a generational product, designed for ten years of dapps to seed ten more years of dapps.” Flow is a powerful layer-1 designed for open worlds. It’s progressively decentralizing and so are our products. We will first focus on delivering our core roadmap towards product market fit and then begin inviting the community to collaborate and contribute to our codebase. In the meantime, we…

• Bless and encourage you to take our code and fork it as you wish and need.
• Invite you to give us thoughts, feedback, kudos, ideas, along the way.

WE ARE SUCCESSFUL WHEN…

The stakes for us are high. We’re not only dogfooding our own products, decentralizing our beloved Brud org — we’re trying to untangle and rethink the operating systems and platforms that make connection harder and harder to find. Truly, we’re solving for the devil we know.

We aren’t in the pursuit of perfection. We are in pursuit of a spark and some winds of change that can feed a small flame and start a fire. We’ll know we’re successful when Dapper Collectives are the old dogs, and new generations of builders have taken our initial frameworks — by then in their 500th fork — and continued to explore how basic principles of ownership, empowerment, community and connection drive real, world-changing creativity. We’ll know we’ve done what we set out to do when the story of creators being taken advantage of by evil corporations is so distant that it feels as unbelievable, and as poignant, as a freckle-faced robot living in LA. ~

🫂 Still wanting more info? http://dappercollectives.fyi/
🫂 Stay updated with who, what, why, how we’re building: @_collectives_
🫂 Watch me slowly get better at tweeting: @nicoledeayora
🫂 And a special thanks for *the cutest* illustrations by @__tomcarroll