Partnered With:

Explore the opportunities and challenges of the Service DAO

Read this article in 14 Minutes

The biggest customers serving DAOs are other DAOs and encryption protocols.

原文标题：《 Service DAOs - Landscape, Challenges, and Solutions 》

Originally written by Terry Chung

原文编译： DAOrayaki

While traditional companies turn to consulting firms for advice, protocols and DAOs often have completely different requirements, operating mechanisms, and cultures that make them best served by other cryptographic native contributors. Service DAOs is being refined to address this need.

Over the past month, we've interviewed the operators of Service DAOs. Hence the DAOrayaki community; This summary article has been compiled to explore the biggest challenges facing Service DAOs and solutions from the community.

Why Service DAOs?

Service DAOs has three key advantages over traditional consulting firms.

1. The Contributor acquires direct ownership

Service DAO contributors receive both a share of the value they create for each customer and a share of the organization as a whole -- its reputation or future revenue.

According to the founders of the Service DAO, ownership has fundamentally changed the way people treat organizations. It aligns incentives better and produces a more collaborative and open culture.

2. An open culture of contribution

Some service DAOs are structured so that anyone can join and contribute.

If you have skills and a high level of contribution to the DAO, there is little to stop you from having a work account in the DAO. For DAOs that filter applicants (through interviews, reviewing historical work), they place more value on a person's ability to add value to a DAO -- anonymous contributors, for example, were common among those we interviewed.

3. Better understand the problem they're trying to solve

The biggest customers serving DAOs are other DAOs and encryption protocols. These customers face special challenges in development, operations, management, compensation, pr, legal, and more that are best addressed by other DAOs.

For example, DAO TO DAO salespeople are more familiar with the challenges of lobbying Token holders through governance proposals, multiple signatures, and how these might affect the service cycle.

4. Reduce contributor revenue fluctuations

贡献者通过服务 DAO 社区和客户的项目获得 Token 报酬。由于客户项目 Token 的一部分累积到组织中的所有利益相关者，个人贡献者可以随着时间的推移平滑收益波动。

Challenges faced by serving daOs

We've broken down the most frequently asked questions in interviews into four intertwined categories.

personnel

1. Difficulty finding and retaining contributors

Skilled contributors jump from DAO to DAO and are difficult to retain for the long term.

The service DAO is going through a period where demand far outstrips capacity. As a result, many are struggling to find value alignment, cultural fit and people familiar enough with the task at hand to execute it without management oversight.

2. It is difficult to activate potential community talents

Even for DAOs with access to talent, getting talent in the network to actually contribute is difficult.

Operators cite shyness and confusion as the two main sources of the problem. Either the talent doesn't understand the DAO culture (where contributions make people contributors) and waits for guidance, or it's too uncertain about standardized processes, who to talk to about issues, whether they'll be paid, and how to actively participate in projects.

3. It is difficult to maintain consistency in culture and values and spread throughout the DAO

The most frequently mentioned difficulties revolve around cultural construction. Operators are trying to solve:

Ensure that contributors are aligned with value

Create culture-consistent internal processes, marketing and documentation

Operators emphasize that culture refers to the entire experience of being part of a DAO -- from the language used, platform, documentation, meeting format, and so on.

Every interaction a contributor has with the organization and its members will reflect the organization's philosophy and culture, which is by far the most cited factor determining retention, quality of contribution, ability to recruit, and overall better operations.

One DAO operator cited the example of Amazon Door Desk. In the early days of Amazon, in order to save costs, it proposed to set the door panels on the table feet, so that more people have desks. Also, "only spend money in ways that improve the customer experience". This spirit permeates the company and every interaction it has with its customers.

DAO operators are working hard to align with the mission and create DAO-wide cultures in hierarchical, asynchronous, and remote environments.

operating

1. Lack of standardized processes

Operators find it difficult to standardize processes and maintain documentation of these processes.

When determining processes, daOs have difficulty disseminating information to contributors so that they are used consistently in practice. Some operators see archival record and process bloat as a challenge for newbies who want to start contributing but have to navigate the document pages.

2. Legal uncertainty

Many DAOs struggle to merge (especially if they are not in the US), choose the best entity, issue tokens, help contributors pay taxes, and pay vendors/external entities that are not native to the crypto community.

Outside of the

Inconsistent customer experience

In addition to culture, the second most cited issue is the difference in customer experience. Projects take longer to complete because processes are not standardized and well communicated, or because of a lack of hierarchical quality assurance, although the experience for some customers is not as good.

2. Cooperation friction

In DAO TO DAO collaboration, operators also face some challenges when ending the collaboration, especially since DAOs can only pay for services after voting and multiple signatures.

Crowdsourcing solutions -- methods that work for at least one DAO

Once the contributors outlined the biggest problems they faced, we asked which solutions could alleviate those problems in their DAOs.

During the interview, we got the following 5 suggestions: legal, personnel + operation, technology stack and external

Legal aspects

Workers Co-op -- The downside is that it is hard to find lawyers who really understand cooperatives.

LCA -- Classes of investors with a two-tier system are allowed

LLC - makes sense for small development stores, but it's hard to have anonymous contributors

Series LLC - Easy to maintain, but the disadvantage is centralized

Talk to an attorney early, not when you need to.

Personnel + operations

1. Salary structure

Coordinape + Sourcecred is used to compensate for the split. Decentralized but cumbersome.

The sales people get 10%, the DAO Treasury gets 10%, and the rest is divided up by the contributions contributors play in each project.

Establish a "pay" culture early on. Sometimes external token holders don't like paying FOR DAO contributors, so build that culture early.

2. Recruitment and retention

Attract new people and train them by asking everyone in the community to mentor each other in the project.

Allow new employees to work only at a shallow level.

3. Build culture

Encourage more 1:1 interactions (such as using Donut on Slack). It's very important for people to get to know each other.

Repeat tasks and narratives as often as possible.

Limit your growth rate to spread culture before hiring. Ideally, DAOs always have more experienced people than newly generated DAOs.

Make memes, art, some kind of shared "sacred" document/art that contains all the collective principles (i.e., spoils) that the community can aggregate.

4. Simplify operations

Hire a project manager.

Allocate talent/funds for communication, coordination improvement, process improvement, enhancement of full-time membership experience, documentation, quality forum posts, sales process, etc.

Maintain structure, limited work quality/customer experience differences by adopting existing processes (design sprints) -- do things that have been tested and worked.

Technology stack

Custom https://smartinvoice.xyz/ CRM and invoice

Utopia / Gilded Finance

Discord, Gnosis, Lettucemeet, Airtable, Notion, Snapshot

Outside of the

There are several people who manage the bridge between the working group, personnel and the public.

Transparency is spectral and costly. - If you're working on an open source, community-driven project, be completely transparent. - If you're building a product, spend less time on transparency. - Balance transparency with operational focus based on what you're building.

Make memes for DAO. It also helps retention and recruitment.