Psychedelic: A Product Studio DAO Building on the Web3
Meet Psychedelic, a (soon to be) DAO consisting of web3 developers, entrepreneurs, & projects building on the Internet Computer (and other protocols it natively integrates with like Ethereum).
Today is the first step towards our end goal of turning our current product studio into a community owned and operated DAO. This first step is mainly just a branding move, meaning we will start using the Psychedelic name and growing awareness around it.
Because, while Fleek is a super dope brand, it’s mainly known as a hosting platform, and with everything else we’ve got going on (and planned), we are quickly outgrowing that framing of who we are/what we do.
So we felt best would be to keep the Fleek brand for our existing developer/hosting platform (and potentially other stuff in the future), but put that and everything else we are doing (especially the Open Internet Services that will be tokenized in the future) into/under a new brand that will eventually become the product studio DAO: Psychedelic.
Why Now? 🧠
We’ve got several new products and projects launching in the next few days and weeks that we felt made more sense to announce under the Psychedelic brand.
Plus we’ve been putting off the switch for months and the longer we wait the more annoying it will be to introduce/switch later on!
So even though the IC isn’t ready for a DAO like Psychedelic to exist (yet 😉), the Psychedelic brand is ready. So all things considered now felt right to start turning the tide in that direction.
So… What is Psychedelic? 👽
To understand Psychedelic, it might help to first understand what Fleek is like currently. We are a collective of 30 people (devs, designers, marketers, entrepreneurs, etc.) building cool products and Open Internet Services on the Internet Computer (and at the intersection of other protocols the IC will natively integrate with like Ethereum).
Ideas for new products and Open Internet Services are discussed pretty much daily, and as a group we just continuously decide and revisit what projects to work on based on a number of factors, like…
- Resources available
- How much time/resources it would take to build
- Market timing
- Future factors that might impact the viability of the product/service
- And just how passionate we are about the problem/opportunity!
But once we find a new idea that answers the above questions to our satisfaction, we typically go ahead and build it (or bring on additional resources to build it).
Not only is this model a lot of fun, but it leads to a higher probability of success for projects because of the shared learnings across all our projects/team (which is often where new product ideas come from), and the compounding synergies and knowledge share between projects/team members is extremely powerful.
Opening up this Model by Transitioning to a DAO 🚀
But as mentioned, right now this is all done as a closed community of the 30 people at Fleek. While we could keep hiring and try to scale things up as a traditional company, that seems like a significant (and inefficient) amount of work (especially from an operational perspective), and in the spirit of web3, it feels lame.
And as web3 has shown, great ideas can literally come from anybody and anywhere. Plus our goal all along for all our products was to exit to our community, so we figured, why not just go all in and do it not just for our products but for the underlying studio itself.
So basically we thought… What if we just kinda did what we do now, but as a DAO? 💭
Where pretty much anybody can join the DAO and contribute, anybody can submit a proposal for a new idea to work on, and anybody who is interested in an idea can decide to contribute some of their time to work on it and earn tokens in return.
That’s Dope. So What Now? 🤔
Right now not much. As we said this first step is really just a branding move. But what you will see immediately is us using the Psychedelic brand in more places.
For example you’ve probably seen that the repos for Plug, DAB, and our other projects have lived under the Psychedelic GitHub org since inception. But now we will also rename our Discord and create some other Psychedelic specific channels on other platforms such as:
- Our Website: https://psychedelic.ooo/
- Our GitHub: https://github.com/psychedelic
- Our Twitter: https://twitter.com/psychedelicDAO
- Our Discord: (Previously known as Fleek’s Discord).
- Medium: https://medium.com/psychedelic-dao
To start and to seed the DAO, Psychedelic will include the current and future projects we are incubating at Fleek, especially the Open Internet Services and other projects that will be tokenized in the future.
Basically Psychedelic DAO will receive a portion of the governance tokens of each project.
The Next Step? Welcoming External Projects 🤝
In addition to internally incubated projects, Psychedelic will also look to support external projects who are aligned with our mission.
We’ve already brought one external project from the IC ecosystem into Psychedelic (announcement coming next week), and will look to speak with more teams who are a good fit to join.
The idea is to not only provide resources to projects that join Psychedelic, but also in the future give Psychedelic (PSYCH) tokens to each project & participant that becomes a part of Psychedelic. That way, every PSYCH holder is incentivized to see every project and person in Psychedelic succeed.
One way to think about that is to imagine if every one of a16z’s portfolio companies was actually incentivized to collaborate and help the other companies in the portfolio succeed rather than the ‘every project for themselves’ model that currently exists.
We think this approach will recreate the magic we currently experience internally at Fleek between different projects, but as a decentralized DAO, and ultimately lead to more success, value creation, and enjoyment for all involved.
Wen DAO? Wen Token? Plz Mi Famiglia 🔮
TBD. The Dfinity Foundation says the SNS (service network system) framework will launch in January. And in conjunction with that we are also starting to do some of our own DAO research/prototyping just in case the SNS doesn’t end up meeting our exact needs.
That’s nobody’s fault, it’s just very hard to create a one-size-fits-all framework for DAO’s. We also feel it’s healthy for the ecosystem that multiple groups come up with multiple approaches and explore the design space of what DAO’s can be on the Internet Computer (kinda similar to what we’ve witnessed with NFT’s and tokens so far on the IC).
A DAO framework is something we need not just for Psychedelic, but for all projects that launch out of Psychedelic, and all Open Internet Services and other tokenized platforms/services/apps in general. So it’s def top of mind.
Our goal is to solve that in Q4 and hopefully launch the DAO for Psychedelic and our other Open Internet Services in Q1 2022.
How Can I Get Involved? 🤙
For Community Members 🗺️: Become a productive member of the Discord community. Start adding value to the Psychedelic community and/or to the projects within Psychedelic (ex. there is a lot of opportunity for early projects that integrate/utilize/build on top of our different products/Open Internet Services).
For Projects 🧰: Reach out. Let’s chat. We’ve got a lot going on and a lot of different projects. Maybe you can use one of our products for your own project (Plug, DAB, etc.). Maybe you’re interested in joining Psychedelic. Who knows.
Joining Psychedelic isn’t a rigid structure. It’s fluid. Each project that joins will be on a case by case basis and you can propose whatever you want for joining. And overtime since the proposals will be public you’ll be able to get a feel for different projects/proposals to better formulate your own.
But in the meantime let’s just jam and figure it out together.
For now, that’s all we wanted to share with everyone as we move forward into this new brand and get started with it. But, like we said, the time was right to make the move because a lot is coming, so stay tuned, join us on Discord, and don’t miss one bit of what’s coming next for Psychedelic and its projects.
- Our Website: https://psychedelic.ooo/
- Our GitHub: https://github.com/psychedelic
- Our Twitter: https://twitter.com/psychedelicDAO
- Our Discord: (Previously known as Fleek’s Discord).
- Medium: https://medium.com/psychedelic-dao
