gm creators!
Hope everyone had a great weekend and touched some grass.
Today is day 4️⃣ of my 30 day writing challenge.
In case you missed it, here was yesterday's post: "Picture yourself coding in Beijing". I covered the "Internet 3.0" whitepaper released by China last weekend.
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A sense of belonging
If you have been part of a Spanish study group or bought an NFT from a 10k pfp collection or go to a temple every Sunday or have volunteered at a food bank consistently, you have been part of a community. We all have been part of communities and always will be part of them as well. They come in all shapes and sizes and are what make us a cooperative population. As Brene Brown puts it, "a deep sense of love and belonging is an irresistible need of all people. We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong. When those needs are not met, we don't function as we were meant to."
The communities we join and associate with say a lot about what we value, what we're passionate about, and how we perceive the world around us. I asked ChatGPT about the different kinds of communities and this is what it said:
Geographical, Interest-Based, Cultural, Professional, Online, & Intentional.
Sounds about right. Communities are how people identify each other, connect with like-minded people, and build a future they want to see.
Finding "CMF"
The problem is that most communities die. Why? Because they don't find community market fit (CMF). It's hard for people to effectively coordinate and get things done. History has pretty much been a progression of how humans get better at working with each other.
Having a mission and/or vision is great. But without execution, any good mission doesn't really mean much. If Vitalik and early Ethereum builders just posted a whitepaper but didn't start writing the code, then there's a good chance this newsletter wouldn't exist today. Execution on a mission is essential for a community to survive and grow - not just in size, but in meaning as well.
In web3, we see this issue a ton. NFT hypebeasts will launch a project, try to make things work for a few weeks in a discord, and then the community eventually dies due to lack of utility. Same goes for the recent memecoin hype cycle we saw. In the first few weeks of the $PEPE launch, there was an ecstatic community ready to see their token go to the moon. But as expected, the trading volume lost momentum and the price quickly went downhill.
Maybe there's a chance that a few core pepe believers form a group chat and start building some random tool that takes off and brings the token price back to life, but we'll have to wait and see.
uTiLiTy
So how can communities in the web3 space start being serious about building towards their mission?
My guess is Prop House.
Prop House is public infrastructure funded by Nouns DAO. It is an experimental approach for communities to deploy capital. Through funding rounds, communities auction off fixed amounts of capital to builders with the best ideas.
Basically, communities can set up community houses to host funding rounds. There are two types of funding mechanisms:
Open rounds: people can propose any idea they have for the community
Mandated rounds: people propose ideas around a certain topic or goal
Rounds typically last for 10-14 days. This gives proposers about a week to pitch ideas and the rest of the community a few days to vote for their favorite ideas. Let's dive into a few examples.
Nouns
NounsDAO, the project this tool was initially built for, has funded 609 ETH to builders for all sorts of projects. They've received 1749 proposals from 41 different rounds of funding. It's incredible to see the variety of proposals from all kinds of people across the globe.
PurpleDAO (Farcaster)
I thought it was super cool that PurpleDAO was retroactively funding community members who have been contributing actively. Incredible to see folks vouching for each other and giving shoutouts to builders who deserved the rewards.
$TURBO
This goes into what I was discussing in the section above. For those of you that don't know, $TURBO is a meme coin that was launched about a month ago. It's the first "AI memecoin" - the roadmap and execution was commanded entirely by ChatGPT. You can read the initial thread by Rhet Mankind here.
What's interesting about this community on Prop House is that it's promoting the most enthusiastic of $TURBO holders to come together and try to create utility and they're using the turbo coin as a reward. Potentially, if enough hackers and creators get together, something really cool could come out of a memecoin that was made just for shits and giggles. Impressive to see podcast ideas, character ideas, and game development come out of these proposals.
Tasking Economy & Accountability
For me personally, going through the Prop House communities in detail reminded me of the tasking economy. Where people don't need to stick to one role but rather think of their work as a queue of tasks from a variety of companies, projects, and DAOs.
For example, if you're passionate about video development, you can go through different community houses and propose an idea for a hype marketing video. Conceptually, it's just bringing the gig economy (Fiver, TaskRabbit, etc.) on-chain. It would be so cool to set up a pseudonymous identity, get a fresh eth address, pitch an idea, execute, and get paid. I'm excited to see that trend grow and what comes out of it. Prop house helps lean into Balaji's pseudonymous economy idea as well - the ability to separate your living and earning identities.
I'm curious to see how accountability works out for proposals that are funded. Many templates already have clear requirements on when certain payments will be sent. It would be cool to see some sort of stock model that vests quarterly play out as well.
Right now, Prop House is just focused for DAOs and web3 communities, but it's clear that there's something really valuable cooking. Simply put, Prop House is showing us a fun and efficient way for communities to come together and build really cool things. It takes away the politics, corrupt leadership issues, and procedural overkill we see today in most organizations. Realistically, most things we are bottlenecked on today in our communities shouldn't really exist. The ability to have an open marketplace for ideas and people to vote on capital deployment should be as simple as Prop House makes it to be.
That's all for today's post, hope you enjoyed it :)
If you have any other topics you'd like me to deep dive, just hit reply and shoot any ideas away.
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