PartyDAO: How does the most valuable community DAO make products?

22-11-23 15:13
Read this article in 35 Minutes
总结 AI summary
View the summary 收起
Original title: "PartyDAO: A person's carnival is better than a person's entanglement"
Original source: Reprinted by WhoKnows DAO
Original author: Siyan Hammer


On June 10th, PartyDAO announced that it had received US$16.4 million in financing led by A16Z.With a valuation of US$200 million, it has become the most The highest valued community-driven DAO.


The story of PartyDAO started with a brainstorm on Friday night, and its advanced path is an interesting exploration. What can a team with no founders, no financing, and no full-time employees do?


As the encryption market strives to transform from boiling in test tubes to mass carnival, how can we lower the threshold for public participation and let the concept repeatedly emphasized by Web3 be formed? Landable application?


Everyone says that DAO is a small group gathered by consensus. Where is the application boundary of DAO? With the influx of large VCs, can DAOs still maintain the community spirit?  


From Twitter 


 In the Web3 world, never There is no shortage of "lonely time" online connection, cherish the story of this fate. After all, a day in the circle is a year in the world. On the evening of April 16, 2021, local time, Dave White, a research partner at Paradigm, sent a tweet in his spare time to let everyone think about it.   



One and a half hours later, Mirror founder Denis Nazarov replied with an interesting idea in the prescribed format: a group of people get together to form a temporary DAO, and then raise funds to participate in NFT auction. If you win, everyone will share the NFT, and if you lose, the money will be returned the same way.   



After this idea was put forward, Denis himself didn't take it seriously, but unexpectedly, three days later, when Polychain Capital was Anish Agnihotri of the performance trading system made a contract and product prototype based on Denise's idea-this product was later called PartyBid v0.1.  




In this contract In the development process, there is another important figure - Anna Carroll. This girl is a contract engineer in Berlin. Seeing that Anish mentioned that someone needs to help audit the contract under the tweet of the contract, she directly read it on her mobile phone.


Anna also went on to become PartyBid's Lead Solidity Engineer. In just three days, this Friday night whimsy has crossed oceans and become a collaboration between strangers across continents.  



A week and a half later, Anish announced that he created a temporary DAO with the contract he wrote to participate in the Colin and Samir NFT auction. Best of all, they won! 


In just two weeks, PartyBid went from a Friday night brainstorm to a passing MVP (Minimum Viable Product, that is, the minimum feasible product) The real product tested.


Of course, MVP is a very traditional term, and Denis proposed a new concept in his Mirror—Minimum Viable Meme Status. This shows the power of sharing one's ideas online - when enough people spread the word, some people will start to build.


At this point, simply relying on Twitter social networking is obviously not enough. If you want the product to go further, human and financial resources are indispensable. Everyoneis distributed in various places, and they still have their own jobs at that time. It is definitely inappropriate to use the traditional company system. Why don't you try DAO? Denis Nazarov saw his Friday night idea become a reality, and he was naturally happy to add fuel to the fire.


So he opened the voting mode for PartyDAO as the head of the fan club on his Mirror, and sincerely invited relatives and friends from all walks of life to support him Crowdfunding efforts for the cultivation of products. After all, Denis is also a prominent figure in the industry. Once the crowdfunding was launched, the bigwigs showed up. The names of Seed Club, Li Jin, etc. all appeared in the crowdfunding list.   



But who is John Palmer, his name appears first, as if he was unknown before? In fact, he was the first product manager of the entire team, and he was also an entrepreneur who had invested in Polychain and Y Combinator. After that, he also served as the project leader and has been leading the development of the PartyBid project. Of the 13 community proposals that PartyDAO has released, 10 are from him. Of course, this is another story.   


There is an idea first, and then there is Member  


When crowdfunding, each contributor will get a certain amount according to the exchange rate of 1 ETH = 1000 $PARTY Amount of tokens. After the crowdfunding ended, PartyDAO officially started operations.


Only those who hold more than 10 $PARTY can join the PartyDAO Discord. On the second day after the crowdfunding ended, Denise came up with Proposal 1 - establishing a multi-sig group to jointly manage funds.


Many people have repeatedly emphasized that DAO represents a more equal and flexible form of organization, as PartyDAO wrote on Twitter: PartyDAO doesn't have any founders. The DAO preceded all contributors.


The underlying logic of equality and flexibility comes from the way it is different from traditional entrepreneurial teams. A traditional entrepreneurial team first finds a team of partners with comparable backgrounds and complementary capabilities before starting a business. DAO first has an idea and then attracts people, which lays the foundation for the so-called "community drive".


In PartyDAO, although there are some teams that are responsible for specific things, at large nodes, such as contract confirmation, web design, etc., the wishes and ideas of community members will be fully solicited.


A simple example, the original design draft of PartyBid was placed in a public Figma document, after the design team members did preliminary sorting and thinking, PartyDAO held an online design meeting. Members who participated in the meeting contributed their views, better supplemented and included edge user cases, and improved the design of the information layer. The benefits of this are obvious.


One of the most common arguments about DAOs is the relative inefficiency of decentralized teams compared to traditional corporations. Especially for PartyDAO, everyone usually has full-time jobs and is distributed in different places, so they can only rely on online communication.


John Palmer, the team leader, also feels this point:“I think the biggest challenge and lesson in coordinating such a team is that things can Going a bit slower than planned. If you're going to work this way, you need to understand that people are busy, and you need to take into account that things might be a week or two behind what you planned, sometimes just because people They are all very busy. If I join another DAO to launch a product later, I will consider doing other work such as marketing in parallel at the very beginning, rather than leaving everyone trapped in a nervous system. In the work of the timeline. After all, at the beginning, everyone joined in because they thought it was very interesting, but when more and more intense tasks were added, this actually violated the initial production motivation and fun.”


Although there are many limitations, one of the benefits of DAO is the flexible incentive mechanism. PartyDAO has also adopted a variety of more flexible ways to mobilize everyone's enthusiasm:


- In Proposal No. 2, John proposed that complete decentralization is not very It is a good way to quickly carry out product development and iteration. Therefore, PartyDAO also has relevant authorities to follow up the progress of specific tasks. The nomination and confirmation of relevant figures were confirmed in subsequent proposals.


- PartyDAO contributors work on a sprint-by-sprint basis, with each sprint lasting about 2-3 months. Compared with the traditional long-term work contract, this gives both parties more flexibility to choose the adjustment mechanism of workload and remuneration. For example, in Proposal No. 9, the work tasks for the two months after the proposal is passed are divided and confirmed, and the budget for payment of remuneration is confirmed according to the workload and market conditions. Remuneration will be paid every two weeks, and the specific amount will be determined according to the actual amount of work completed in the two weeks.


- Be more specific about how $PARTY is allocated. As mentioned in Proposal No. 10, the token pools obtained by contributors participating in V1 and V1.2 product development will be separated from future contributors to avoid conflicts and collisions in the distribution mechanism. The final number of tokens that can be allocated to the team that launched the V1 product is determined by each team's contribution to each individual. It will be confirmed first at the small team level, and then finally approved by the multi-signature group.


- In Proposal 10, PartyDAO announced the adoption of a new token mechanism in $PARTY. It is determined that $PARTY cannot be obtained through mining, so as to better prevent inflation, speculation, and protect contributors who obtain tokens.


Of course, it may be felt that the composition of pure part-time members will still become an obstacle to further development in terms of efficiency. About ten days after the launch of PartyBid V1, 9 Proposal No. 1 was born.


Since the proposal, the team will use more stable USDC instead of ETH to pay remuneration, and said that the main purpose of this proposal is to enable the team as soon as possible Members can build PartyBid full-time.


At the beginning of the year, John also announced on Twitter that he had started a full-time job at PartyDAO, and the latest recruitment information of the team is also full-time.


The essence is a social product  


PartyBid's product logic is very simple:< /h4>


- Choose to join or create a Party


- Pledge a certain amount of ETH to participate in the party initiated Crowdfunding


- If the NFT is a cash-buy mode, when the crowdfunding amount reaches the spot NFT purchase price, you can place an order on the exchange supported by PartyBid; if it is an auction mode, after the crowdfunding amount reaches the highest auction, anyone who participates in the contribution can choose to "raise the placard" to make an offer. If someone else quotes a higher price later, during the bidding period, Party can choose to continue crowdfunding and bid again


- If the bidding/purchase fails, the crowd The amount raised will be returned, PartyBid will not charge any fees


- If the bid/purchase is successful, the unused ETH will be returned, and everyone involved in the crowdsale will Obtain token confirmation ownership ratio. Participants will also obtain corresponding voting rights according to their own investment ratios to determine the next reserve price of NFT


Although the product logic is simple, the bottom layer of PartyBid The logic doesn't stop there. The primary reason is that it captures a market that has both existing needs and room for development. It is not a new thing for everyone to raise funds to participate in the encryption market.


PleasrDAO is one example - this mysterious group that has gathered many OGs in the encryption circle has participated in a lot of charity work by raising funds and auctioning NFT, and in 2021 In December, it received investment from A16Z.


However, the shortcomings of PleasrDAO are also obvious-It does not productize the process of fundraising and auction, and still relies on the traditional social reputation and social social network to carry out the whole act.


For ordinary people, the price of a blue-chip NFT is not low. Groups of friends can participate together, but it is difficult to confirm the ownership ratio and follow-up operations after the auction is completed. All of these are pain points that prevent NFT from getting out of the encryption circle, also allow the wealth created by NFT to further gather in the hands of people who already have a lot of wealth.


In the party at the end of the crowdfunding, we did see high-priced NFTs such as Goblin, Azuki, and Doodles, but the magical Yes, high-priced NFTs are not the majority of parties created.


I tried to use Dune to grab relevant data, although due to the complicated and confusing data tables related to PartyDAO, I could not get a confirmed number. However, calculations using different tables show that the price of at least half of the NFTs that Party intends to buy is below 0.5 ETH.


Admittedly, this is related to the current situation of too much bubble in the NFT market, too many speculative projects and too strong FOMO sentiment, but it also proves to a large extent that PartyBid The usage scenario is definitely not at the level of "purchasing NFTs that individuals could not afford before through crowdfunding".


To put it bluntly, although PartyBid seems to be an NFT fund-raising purchase tool, its essence is to emphasize social attributes-convert single-player mode into multiplayer game mode. According to Danny Aranda, who is in charge of the market, PartyBid can be expanded into a DAO or aggregation tool, "You don't have a DAO yet, but you have a very specific idea in your mind, and you can use this tool to implement it."


Or "You just want to do something with your friends, but want a more economical and safe way" . So it sounds like PartyBid is targeting the entire “sharing economy” market? But the "sharing economy" seems to be narrower. To a larger extent, what PartyBid is trying to answer is the change in the way people collaborate and socialize in the Web3 era.


Buying an NFT in a joint venture is not the end, but in the process of inviting your friends to participate in fundraising or other cooperation, you create an interesting social together Atmosphere, that's what it's about.


Product power is still an essential weapon in the Web3 era  


Although the Web3 era has undergone earth-shaking changes in human relations and organizational structure compared with the Web2 era, the logic that needs to be followed in product development remains unchanged.


As a social product, the number of users is always an important indicator. How to retain the number of users? The answer is simple - the product is easy to use. At this point, the benefits of being community-driven become apparent. As mentioned earlier, in the online design conference, the various ideas of the participants can make the product effectively cover many factors that may be overlooked, which is fully reflected in the product details of PartyBid.


Many concepts of Web3 have not yet been fully popularized. If the product is to break through the circle of non-encrypted user groups as much as possible, requires in terms of user experience Enough noobs. PartyDAO's product design also strives to lower the threshold of participation in many details.


A simple example is that in PartyBid's wallet connection pop-up window, there is no default user who already has a wallet, and no default user even knows what a wallet is. Instead, a simple science popularization was conducted next to the common Connect a Wallet, and the user was redirected to the wallet registration page.   



For those who participate in crowdfunding NFT for the first time, the first question after winning the auction is what should I do. When you click on the winning Party page, right above the NFT picture is the nanny-level teaching video of  What happens next? .   



As another example, when creating Party, PartyBid also fully considered the different needs of users. Some people care about a specific NFT, while others only care about a specific series Therefore, when creating a Party, the creator can freely choose whether to buy only a specific NFT, or any NFT in this series.  



In addition to being easy to use and fun, PartyBid also allows users to name the party or even the ownership token. Considering that some creators want to donate part of the ownership to charity or Other organizations such as DAO also launched the function of Party Split in September last year. Of course, if you want to share some crypto intersections with your Party peers, you can also require donors to hold a certain kind of ERC- 20 tokens.  




In general, PartyBid strives not to treat users as geniuses in product design, and lays the foundation for the product to break the circle as much as possible on the basis of improving the NFT purchase experience.


However, PartyBid still has a lot of things that I personally don’t like . For example, when searching and browsing Party, the only filter criteria that can be used are Party status and NFT trading platform, and I cannot filter for NFT price, purchase qualification, etc.


For another example, when participating in an NFT auction, you cannot set your willingness Participating in the highest auction price, which may cause the final transaction price to exceed my psychological expectations. And there are some bugs in the product itself, for example, I saw a Party whose auction has ended in the active party.


How is PartyBid doing?  


According to PartyBid's official website data,Up to now, 27027 users have contributed 8157.41 ETH to 3753 parties.


The official has not given specific daily activity data, but according to Dune's data, although the NFT market is affected by the overall downturn of the encryption industry, but The number of new parties per day on PartyBid ushered in an increase after entering July.


Considering that the data of the previous few months is indeed somewhat unsatisfactory, this wave of growth should also be caused by PartyDAO’s financing news to a certain extent The positive impact made PartyDAO and its products break the circle. After entering June, the number of new parties and the sales of NFT in the market basically showed similar fluctuations.





There are similar changes in daily contributing users and daily contribution amount. Black May once brought the number of daily contributors down from 2000+ to below 100.


After the financing news was issued, the number of daily contributors began to pick up, but as the market cooled down, it began to fall to the bottom in mid-to-late June. The number of daily contributors is even less than 30.


In July, when the price of ether recovered, the number of daily active users and the NFT trading market basically fluctuated in line. In the two weeks since mid-July, the number of daily contributors has basically stabilized in the range of 300-600, and the contribution amount ranges from 5 ETH to 60 ETH.


Considering that the total number of daily active people is still small and the contribution amount is greatly affected by giant whales, this kind of fluctuation is not difficult to understand. Generally speaking, the waveform fit between the platform and the market also represents the acceptance of the product itself by the existing market to a certain extent. But as mentioned above, the encryption market seems to be lively, but it is still a niche market so far. PartyBid is far from becoming a product out of the circle.   


Is the development of DAO still a carnival for giants?   


About future development, it may be a question that many DAOs are thinking about. Although relying on community fundraising and online income, PartyDAO has survived for a long time and successfully launched the first version of the product.


However, due to the needs of product iteration speed and DAO operation duration, PartyDAO passed Proposition 13 in March this year and decided to accept the proposal represented by A16Z Funds of investment institutions. In this round of financing, PartyDAO divided 8.2% of the currency rights at the price of 2 USDC per $PARTY.


With large investors, you will have higher expectations and requirements for output and team. And with the popularity of PartyBid, a group of competitors is bound to emerge.


How to maintain efficiency on the basis of making full use of the community-driven advantages, and how to protect the community spirit under the pressure of rapid iteration, as a project responsible Human John may have a new subject.


In June of this year, PartyDAO sent an interesting tweet: "We are applying to Y Combinator, but only if they allow If all 150 of our members go to Mountain View.”


What’s more interesting is that one of PartyDAO’s earliest crowdfunding fathers had a Members of the Seed Club, known as Y Combinator in the Web3 era, responded below: "We welcome all of you to join our Discord."  




Let's return to the original story of PartyDAO. Although it is said that the final landing of the product has a strong meaning of grassroots grouping, it has to be admitted that the premise that such an idea can be quickly implemented and supported by many bigwigs in the crowdfunding stage is also because the source of the idea is the circle. Inner OG.


After PartyDAO’s financing news was released, there were some discussions in the group that A16Z voted for the OGs in the team. The core of many grassroots carnivals in the encryption era is still driven by giant whales, which has to be said to be a limitation.


No matter for Seed Club or PartyDAO, They are all trying to conduct an encryption experiment. In the process of the development of this new thing, it is also destined to cross and collide with many existing systems. At least at the moment, the answer to the coexistence of the old and the new is not a life-and-death confrontation, but self-improvement by learning from each other's strengths and the expansion of mutual learning.  


Original source
举报 Correction/Report
Choose Library
Add Library
Cancel
Finish
Add Library
Visible to myself only
Public
Save
Correction/Report
Submit