PartyDAO: They turned the concept into a $200 million product within 1 year

Chao

22-07-06 12:44

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Original title: " The PartyDAO Story – How a Group of Strangers Turned a Tweet Into a $200M Product DAO in 1 Year 》

Original author: cwweb3, DAO enthusiast

A few weeks ago, PartyDAO announced that they had received $16.4 million led by A16z Financing, with a valuation of 200 million US dollars, which is the highest valuation of a community-driven DAO so far.

PartyDAO is amazing. It originated from a tweet. There is no founder, no centralized team, and most members have their own essential work. Participating in spare time, it is in this situation that they handed over a good product, and relying on community financing of only 25 ETH, they developed into an impressive product DAO in less than a year.

Origin

April 16, 21, this is Friday night, Paradigm Dave White, a research partner at , was probably in a good mood, so he started flirting on Twitter-

It's Friday night, let's play something. Reply in the format "If [xxxx], wouldn't that be cool" and then we can brainstorm together to see what we can do.

He received a total of 18 replies in the requested format, including one from Mirror founder Denis Nazarov.

"If DAO could be deployed to automatically bid for any NFT Auction, isn't that cool, call it PartyBid"

Denis not only came up with the idea, named it, but also tweeted The basic business logic is explained clearly, and the capacity of a tweet is seriously used to the limit.

A big brother named Anish saw this tweet. His job is to build a high-performance trading system at Polychain Capital. In his spare time, he likes to tinker with Ethereum. He calls himself an amateur Solidity engineer. Clearly humbled, Anish took Denis' idea into a contract in one weekend in the spirit of more work and less BB.

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As soon as Anish tweeted that he had done this, a girl named Anna replied. She is a professional contract engineer. She said, hey, I checked your contract on my mobile phone, and it feels good. When I go back and look at it in detail, I can help you do a code check. This is how people gradually gather. This MVP with no front-end and no audit has been discovered by new friends in the next two weeks. Everyone is attracted by this product idea. They also used this contract to win two auctions together. , it is available!

At this point everyone feels that it is worth investing more resources to push the MVP into a more mature product. Among them is a buddy named John Palmer, who is a fan of generative art and had an unsuccessful entrepreneurial experience. He volunteered to say that I am good at being a PM, and I can take the lead in pushing this matter down. There is a PM, followed by contract, front-end, design, audit, and just like that, a team is formed.

PartyDAO was founded

Deciding to turn it into a more mature product, still need to have Some financial support. After discussion, everyone decided to use DAO to do this. They launched a crowdsale on Mirror with a target of 25 ether, and supporters would become members of the DAO.

The goal of 25 ETH is really not much, and the crowdfunding will end soon. A total of 52 people participated, and those who will participate in the work in the future also participated. It means that more than half of the contributors paid their own money and funded themselves.

“Isn’t it crazy to see what the internet can take from an idea in two weeks. But we can go further.”< /p>

May 7th Proposal No. 1 - Establish a multi-signature group to jointly manage funds

Proposal No. 2 on May 15th - approval of 6 contributor roles, a budget of 11 ETH+2500 $PARTY and a delivery time of four weeks (crowdfunding exchange rate 1ETH=1000$PARTY)

Proposal No. 3 on May 15th- Approval of John as the project Lead to be responsible for the overall coordination of the project

Proposal No. 4 on May 17th- Modify the contributor roles to 7, and modify the budget to 13.65 ETH + 2500 $PARTY. Each role corresponds to a specific person.

PartyBid V1 product group officially launched.

While initially only 7 people were actually involved in building PartyBid as a product, other community members were gradually starting to build PartyDAO itself. Their goal is not just to launch a product, but to build PartyDAO itself into a long-term organization that can sustain itself.

At the beginning of August, PartyBid v1 was launched. At this time, the core contribution team has grown to 11 people. During the V1 product construction process, they also got more than ten other people Help from various projects and community members.

V1 is not the end, they have carried out a lot of iterations and optimizations. Correspondingly, the community has approved several budgets for product maintenance and subsequent iterations.

In the course of nearly a year, the entire financial resources of the entire community are the initial crowdfunding of 25 ETH and some on-chain income from the agreement.

Financing in a bear market

Let’s talk about the details of financing, many friends may be most concerned It's still this. At present, all public reports are quoted from the PartyDAO press release, which does not even mention the valuation.

PartyDAO raised 16.4 million USDC in this round, accounting for 8.2%, which is a valuation of 200 million US dollars. A16z led 10 million of these rounds, while Standard Crypto put in $3.5 million. These two companies accounted for the majority, and the rest included Compound VC, Dragonfly Capital and Uniswap Ventures.

In addition to these institutions, there are also strategic investors and community investors.

Among them, most of the strategic investors are top streamers in the Web3 circle, including Opensea founders Alex and Devin, Zora founder Jacob, FWB founders Trevor and Alex, Dom the founder of Loot, Aaron Wright the founder of Flamingo, etc., the list is too dazzling to list them all. The community investors are all members of the PartyDAO community. Most of the above-mentioned members participated, and they contributed 1M$ of it.

Token will unlock 1/4 after one year, and the rest will be unlocked month by month in 36 months. This round of financing was actually completed in mid-March, but everyone chose to announce it in early June.

Building a future of group coordination

Cryptocurrencies are always on strong boom and bust cycles While people are frantically throwing money at some images, it seems that PartyBid is just part of the hype.

But this is not the case.

With the rise of Web3 and DAO, people no longer have to participate in some traditional institutions, but have the ability to choose their own focus according to their own values and interests. Even in the absence of enforced social ties, everything from early hunter-gatherer tribes to retail investors beating short-sellers on GME stock points to a desire to coordinate around common goals. The encryption field is gradually transitioning from investment speculation to the real application era, and the next step is naturally for people to unite and participate in this ecosystem. And PartyBid is a player who focuses on this track.

PartyDAO is just an experiment, and it may be a model for how a community can self-coordinate and fund, build and develop open infrastructure and next-generation applications. And the core of PartyDAO is to turn what a single person/organization can do in the past into a multiplayer game. They hope to build more powerful group coordination tools and make these tools available to the mainstream of society, not just a small number of crypto players.

PartyDAO still has a lot to write about. This article does not go deep into the product development process and the organization and operation process of DAO. I have established contact with several core contributors of PartyDAO. When I have collected enough information, I will write about how the highly decentralized community DAO works together to complete complex tasks such as products and financing. What are the interesting stories and what are the lesson and learn.