Summoner 101: Expectations of launching your own Moloch DAO

What is it like to launch a Moloch DAO fork?

This post was brought to you by $MAGIC

In the spirit of experimentation, Totle recently purchased my time tokens known as $MAGIC and decided to redeem them. David, the CEO of Totle, essentially gave me a fairly wide prompt and suggested that I write about DAOs on the Totle blog. Agreeing to that, I decided to spend Totle’s redeemed time writing about the realities of what it is like to start DAOs and what it usually requires from a tactical standpoint.

• What should I expect as a DAO summoner?
• What does the journey of launching a DAO look like?
• What are the tools I can use? Where can I join other DAOs?

In this post, we’ll explore some of these questions.

In this post, we will NOT explore the philosophical musings of what should and shouldn’t be a DAO, or discuss the unique advantages of a DAO are. My personal view is that we don’t know those answers unless we experiment and that there’s little point in theorizing about it.

Instead, this post aims to push readers to take up arms, launch their own DAO experiment and get a better understanding of what is involved.

What should you expect when launching a DAO?

DAOs are all about building and coordinating online groups of people. If you don’t enjoy collaborating with strangers on the internet, you’ll likely find other activities more rewarding. You will require compromise, intellectual honesty and more importantly: Patience

Coordinating people on the internet is a tough and chaotic process. When done well, and key missions are accomplished — it can be glorious and incredibly rewarding. You will not regret it.

• If you are community orientated and enjoy collaborating with random internet strangers, you might just find doing a DAO really fun.
• 🎧 Recommend podcast episode: Orochi DAO with Makoto Inoue

Other main tasks of a DAO summoner

Selling/convincing — You’ll be doing a ton of fundraising and convincing others to contribute to the project. Not everyone’s cup of tea but it may just be important enough for you to bear the pain of eventual success.

Operations — You’ll need to make sure all the trains run on schedule, this means getting shit done. Scheduling DAO meetings, preparing meeting agendas, writing meeting notes and implementing processes.

Delegation — Past a certain point, most of your work is really just delegating work within the DAO. This means understanding how to scope and define items of work, understanding how to assign it, how to vet contributors and managing outcomes.

What is really useful but not absolutely necessary to launch a DAO?

• Experience fundraising
• Experience in leadership roles
• Experience in community building
• A good network/reputation in the relevant community

What would a DAO launch journey look like?

There are many ways to skin a cat. I prefer the simple and straight forward.

📚 Brainstorming

1. You might have an idea for a DAO.
2. Write all your ideas, thoughts, concerns and questions around the DAO in a document as a brainstorming exercise. Feel free to include a small number of others in this process. Spend no longer than a week on this.
3. Write a one-pager for your DAO idea. Discuss and select the best ideas to then draft into a document exploring the mission and vision of the DAO, how you would imagine the governance decisions it would make, the assets it would manage and also an initial mission/raid for the DAO to achieve as its first milestone along with the required resources to do so.

Keep this to one-page or you will fail. No one will bother reading your 4 pager brain dump. Keep it simple stupid. Needs to be explained in one sentence.

🏹 Validation

1. Share the one-pager for your DAO idea to 5–10 individuals to get feedback. Again spend less than a week to do this.
2. Summarise all feedback into a document for review.
3. If people generally tell you it is a good idea, reach back out to them to get them to pledge resources to you. Doing this should give you an idea of what people think; improve, change and iterate as needed.
4. Create a telegram chat group and ask all supporters of the project if they want to join it. This will now be your community chat where you will keep everyone updated, share ideas for feedback and also engage with people who are interested in getting involved.

☀️ Public release

1. Turn your one-pager into a blog post and share publically.
2. Send everyone who is interested in the project to your community telegram chat. This is your home base, welcome people in, answer questions and build a community!
3. Raise funds, find resources and required contributors for the DAO to achieve its first scoped out milestone. Don’t waste any more time beyond necessary to get the project going.

Your first DAO meeting

Once you have the right resources and right people involved, set a meeting via video call to discuss the DAO’s first action items.

• Before the meeting, attendees should be briefed around what to expect in the meeting and initial items for discussion.
• By the end of the meeting, try to end up with a set of immediate action item steps that will directly drive the DAO towards achieving its first scoped out milestone and goal.

Tools to use to launch a DAO:

• 🏡 DAOHaus: Launch and coordinate Moloch DAO forks for free.
• 📞 Zoom for video calls and synchronous meetings.
• 💬 Telegram chat for communications. This will be all you need in the beginning, for now, you won’t need things like discord for a while.

DAOs join first before starting your own

If you are still unsure if you should start a DAO, the best way to find out is by just DAOing it. The next best thing is to join an existing DAO.

• 😇 MetaCartel DAO — DApp focused DAO driven community
• 👹 Moloch DAO — Ethereum Grants Fund DAO
• 🐍 Orochi DAO — Events coordination DAO
• ⚔️ RaidGuild — Community run dev shop DAO
• 🏡 DAOHaus — Browse other community DAOs for inspiration

If you have any other Qs or want feedback on an idea for a DAO, feel free to HMU in my DMs on twitter: @pet3rpan