Experimenting With DAOs and NFTs with Diana Chen

Okay, awesome. Um, hi everybody. We're going to get started a little bit early. Thank you all so much for coming here. I know this is a very early talk, so thanks for getting up early and showing up here.

Um, I'm going to be speaking about experimenting with Dows and NFTTS. So, first of all, a little bit about who I am and why I'm qualified to speak on this. Um, I am, my name is Diana. I'm the founder of Rehash, which is the very first communityowned podcast. And what that means is that our community members are the ones that help make key decisions about the podcast, such as which guests we invite onto the podcast.

Uh, before I started Rehash, I had recorded about 200 podcast episodes on web three topics. at two different companies, at Rabbit Hole and at Unstoppable Domains. Um, and I started Rehash back in April of 2022. So, it's almost been a full year already. Um, and it's it started as an experiment itself and we haven't stopped experimenting since.

So, I I'm really excited to talk to you guys all about that part. Um, I also spent six months experimenting with decentralizing a content and media function within the scope of a company when I was at Rabbit Hole and uh had a lot of learnings there that I've applied to rehash which we'll get into a little bit later. And with NFTTS, I that is something that kind of immediately grabbed my attention um as soon as I entered the space back in late 2020 before the big NFT craze. Uh, and the first NFT experiment I participated in was something called Paperclip back in the summer of 2021, which um, if any of you were into reading blogs back in the early 2000s, there was a blogger back then who ran a red paperclip experiment where he had a red paperclip and he traded it up and up and up until he eventually got a house for free from a red paperclip. So we we basically tried to replicate that experiment on chain with NFTTS.

Um so really for the last two or more years I've been experimenting a lot with NFTTS and with Dows and I'm really excited to talk to you guys about this topic. Um, hopefully you're here because you're interested in experimenting with Dows and NFTTS, but really this talk is for anybody who is maybe a DAO contributor, um, a core contributor at a DAO or even a fringe member, somebody who's a community leader in a DAO or in a company, somebody who's a creator. I think a lot of the learnings that I've gained from the last couple of years really apply to creators who want to better connect with and engage with their fans. Um, and anybody who's just a curious mind and wants to learn more about how to push the boundaries of what we can do in web 3. Uh, and most of all, somebody who's not afraid to fail.

And, um, looking out here, I'm not seeing anybody that looks like Albert Einstein. Uh, which I guess makes sense because if you were Albert Einstein, well, this gentleman here slightly resembles Albert Einstein. Thank you for being here. Uh, if you have more wisdom to share, please feel free to come up and and take my place. So to start off, why experiment in web 3?

Um for starters, the the first thing is that experimentation at its core is really all about va uh learning and value creation. By learning more about your audience and your community, you're better equipped to know how to provide value for them. Um, another thing is that experimenting can help you avoid what I call analysis paralysis. And maybe some of you heard of this before, but it's this idea that sometimes when you overthink a certain thing or overanalyze something uh to infinity that you never actually go and get the thing done and execute on it because you keep waiting to have that perfect strategy. And this is actually one of the questions I've gotten the most about rehash is how did we start rehash?

Did we have a perfect strategy before executing or did we kind of just go for it? And the answer is absolutely that we just went for it. Uh when we started rehash back in April, we had nothing more than a vague idea of what a podcast Dow could look like and a set of core values. And that was enough for us to launch our crowdfund and to successfully uh achieve 3x what we set out as our goal for the crowd fund. The next thing is um that experimenting helps you move quickly.

So once you get things going, if you can experiment, if you can learn uh course correct, if you can learn from your mistakes and course correct quickly, that'll help you to move faster. And um some of you may know this famous quote by Jeff Bezos that he shared in a letter to his shareholders back in 2016 where he said, "If you're good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be more expensive for sure." So experimenting is a really good way to get you to move quickly, learn fast, and ultimately uh save your company, your organization money in the long run. And then finally, I think that right now uh in a bare market is the perfect time to experiment because right now there's less money floating around, which means it's lower stakes for failing. So, if anything, right now is the best time to experiment.

um figure out what works and what doesn't work so that when the next bull market comes around, you'll be perfectly positioned to just go out and do the thing that's going to bring you the most success. Two quick caveats before I move forward. When I use DAO in the context of this talk, I am more so referring to a decentralized community, uh not necessarily a a fully decentralized autonomous organization. So, just a quick caveat there. And then the other thing is that as I'm speaking about this, I'm speaking from my own experience building rehash and from other Dows that I've seen with whatever you're building.

Each person in the audience here is probably building something different, is involved in a different community with different culture, different goals. Make sure you're thinking about what your goals are specifically before applying any of these principles. So experimenting with Dows, why would you want to decentralize your community? The first is to increase happiness and loyalty. The more ownership you hand over to your community, the more engaged they'll feel with your brand and with each other.

Um, and the happier they are, the the more connected they feel with your brand and with each other, the more loyal they'll be to your brand. and the the happier they'll be being in your community. The second thing is that when you decentralize your community or your organization, you can streamline a lot of the admin and operational tasks within your organization. So when you replace a lot of the manual admin tasks that any organization would have to do um and replace that with technology, you can actually move a lot faster. you can get a lot more done with your resources.

So, for example, with Rehash, we uh have an onchain governance voting period every season where we ask our community members to nominate their favorite guests that they want to hear on the podcast and vote on them. And we use joked out for this. It's all on chain on polygon, very low cost. And this completely eliminates any need for uh any of us on the core team to you know manually go through and see count how many votes each person got. Um and there's so many other examples of how onchain governance can help streamline ops for your organization.

And then finally another great reason to decentralize your community is to make it easier for co-arketing and co-branding opportunities. Um, I think one thing blockchain really enables for communities is this ability to uh to token gate a certain event for example or to token gate a merch sale or something like that. uh which is so much more efficient when you can just say, "Hey, let's take my community token and your community token, token gate it with something like Guild, for example, and then allow people to go in and buy merch or sign up for your event when they hold one or more of the tokens that are uh whitelisted in this guild gate. So, um these are a few reasons, just a few reasons why you might want to decentralize your community. So an example of this with uh the rehash as a podcast for example in the first box on the left you can see if you have a fully decentralized model that means the DAO is voting on you know maybe who the host is what the format of the podcast is who the guests are what your monetization models are what your treasury allocation is all of these things.

Whereas on the far right side you have a fully centralized system where uh a single entity is determining these things. And when probably 99% of the podcasts you listen to right now follow that fully centralized model on the far right where you can experiment is in the middle. So I don't think that a fully decentralized system is the goal for everybody here. It might be for some, but I think for most your goal is going to exist somewhere on that spectrum between fully decentralized and fully centralized. And that's where you'll want to experiment in the middle.

And so, for example, for rehash, uh, we are experimenting primarily with the guests part, letting our community members decide which guests are invited onto the podcast. Um, but you might also want to experiment with other things, other aspects of of your content, your media, your organization, your your company. So, when you think about decentralizing your community, a few tips I think that apply to most people. The first that I would highly recommend is to create very clearly defined values. I mentioned this earlier when we started rehash.

We had a set of very clearly defined values and we said, you know, we're not quite sure where we're going to go with this, but these are the things that really matter to us. So, if you align with us, if you vibe with our values, come join us and we can build it together. The second is to start small and grow later. And I think this is a a much less controversial tip now that we're in a bare market, but I think back in the bull market, everybody just wanted to grow really fast. Um, and that's not always a good thing because as I'm sure many of you have seen the drop your ENS tweets and things like that where you just get thousands and thousands of bots coming in and trying to get any airdrop or any freebie they can.

Um, what you end up with there long term is you end up with a a lot of followers, a big community of people who don't actually understand what you're doing, what you're building, and aren't loyal to you. And at at the second you do the tiniest thing wrong, they'll turn their backs on you. And that's not I I think what anybody wants. So, uh be patient, start small, grow later. And then the last thing is that you want to nurture each role.

So, um let me get a little bit more in depth with each of these things. The first thing going back to values real quick is that when you set your values, another quick tip is don't just say this is my value, but also explain why this is your value. and by holding this value what that actually means to your organization. So for example, one of our core values is uh basically a diversity value. And so by holding this diversity value, what does that mean?

It means that we're going to make a conscious effort to invite diverse guests onto the podcast. And the fact of the matter is we're on season four of the podcast right now. In each season of the podcast, we've had over 50% uh female guests, which as you guys, you know, I'm sure walking around here looking around, you can see that there definitely are not close to 50% female in the web 3 space. So, uh I I I really proud that we've held true to that value. Um, again, starting small can be tempting to grow fast, but if you start small and be patient with building your community, you will reap rewards long term.

And then finally, nurture each role. So, I think a lot of the times in this space, I hear people saying, you know, how can we get people more active and engaged in our DAO? How can we get people to become core contributors? And there's this pressure to make everybody a core contributor. And I actually think that uh that that shouldn't be our goal to make everybody a core contributor.

I think everybody in our community and everybody in our audience serves a very specific purpose. You can kind of see I've laid this out as 1 2 3 and four. And you can kind of envision this on a spectrum where on the one end you have your core contributors who are fully committed to what you're doing, what you're building. They're all in. They're maybe spending all of their time working on your project.

And then on the opposite end of the spectrum, you have kind of your lurkers. You know, the people that maybe pop into your Discord once in a while, say GM, or maybe like listen to like one podcast episode every couple of months. These people are just as important as your core contributors. And you want to nurture those relationships, too. So I think the key thing to understand here is that you want to be able to identify where each person in your community sits on the spectrum and to be able to nurture that relationship accordingly.

So if you identify somebody who keeps shilling your project on Twitter without you even asking or maybe you don't even know who they are, you want to grab on to that and keep nurturing that relationship so that they can keep doing that for you. If you have somebody that just pops in once in a while, still take the time to reply to them, to say hi to them, keep them involved in your community and maybe over time they can become a more involved contributor uh and eventually become a core contributor. But just know that that is not always the goal. You don't want thousands and thousands of core contributors. That's not what's going to drive your organization forward.

So, moving on to NFTTS. Um, NFTTS are they kind of had their time back in 2021 and people don't talk about them so much anymore, but this is something that we've been experimenting with at Rehash with podcast NFTTS and I think there is a lot that can be done in this realm. Uh but as of now I think it's still very unclear why people collect content NFTts and by content NFTs I mean you know music NFTTS uh written article NFTTS podcast NFTts so I actually ran a poll on Twitter asking why people uh anybody who's paid money to mint a piece of content why they did that and I think the primary reasons are a to support a friend um to for the utility attached So like say it gives you governance rights in the community for the highquality content. So it's like the same reason why people collect really expensive pieces of art because it's high quality content. Um and then for the perceived status and by far from the Twitter poll but also from just talking to people the primary reason right now why people buy NFTTS is to support a friend.

Um and this could be for a few reasons. maybe like the the quality of content isn't quite there yet. Uh but when we think about, you know, in the context of supporting a friend is the primary reason why people buy content, that is even another reason to really nurture your relationships in your community. Build those one-on-one relationships so that you can get people to understand what you're doing and back, you know, whatever it is you're creating or building without perhaps being a friend or knowing you to that level. So three quick tips for experimenting with NFTTS.

The first is to define your goals. So I think you know a lot of times like people immediately jump to well how should I price my NFTts? How many how should I structure my NFTs? Should I structure them as you know multiple additions or as one of ones? And I think before you get into that you should define what your goal is.

So, for example, with Rehash, our goal right now is to get people in the habit of collecting podcast NFTts. I think podcast NFTs still aren't is not like a very popular thing that a lot of people have heard of or understand. So, we just want to get people in the habit of it. And so, we're optimizing for um getting as many people collecting as possible. So, we've structured our NFTs such that each NFT is only 0.

005 005 ETH and we have 20 editions of each episode that are available to collect. And so this way with kind of a smaller number of additions available at a very low cost, we're hoping that this will um help drive user behavior to collect these podcast NFTts. If your goal, you know, maybe during a bull market is to generate as much revenue as possible, then that might not be how you want to structure it. Uh, so define what your goals are, understand what your goals are, and then that will help you determine how to structure your NFTts and how to price them. You also want to be able to identify your collector.

And luckily, there are tools nowadays such as Bellow, which I'm a big fan of, um, that can help you better understand who your collectors are. So, a tool like Bellow, for example, will actually show you who all of your current collectors are and other projects they've collected, the average amount of money they've paid per NFT, um, and different other points of data about your current collectors so that you can better understand how to price out your NFTts. And then finally, don't be afraid to fail. Learn from your experiences and course correct quickly. Um, and that's pretty much it with NFTs.

So, finally, like last quick thing, this is just a funny meme. Um, NFTTS, Dows, this whole web 3 space in general, we're all still very early in the space and a lot of this is very new. There is no rulebook for how to do things. Most people don't really know what they're doing. We're all out here experimenting to a certain degree.

So, just, you know, don't be afraid to go out and try new things and fail. you will fail, but that's really the only way to learn is by failing. Uh, so thank you for coming. I know I'm a little bit over time. Hopefully you learned something new in this talk.

Um, feel free to connect with me on Twitter at DDWchen or on Telegram as well. I've got a uh run to a podcast after this, but please send me a message on Telegram if you want to chat more. Um, I've also got some Rehash stickers in my bag that I'm happy to pass around if anybody would like one. And if you're an NFT holder in the audience, which I see some of you, and you haven't gotten your rehash beanie yet, please come find me to get your rehash beanie. [Music]