Moloch DAO application
Tavern Keeper
Description
Everyone has been in a video game where they got lost and didn’t know what to do next. What happens? A lot of people just give up. The same thing is happneing in our DAOs and online communities.
Now, imagine joining an online community was like starting a new game. When you start, your world is small, you are guided by a friendly NPC and as you progress you discover new quests, places and allies in your world. The experience of discovery and progression keeps you motivated. And when you meet another player and view their profile, you can understand their status and contributions to the community. Even though you don’t know the poeple around you and the landscape is unfamiliar, you have a clear path forward and are motivated to perservere and make impactful contributions in this new world.
Tavern Keeper makes joining your Discord community a guided adventure. New members will know exactly what they need to do next. They can set out on the adventure tailored for your community, progress, earn achievements, know exactly how to contribute, and stay engaged.
Tavern Keeper achieves this with customizable Discord bot interactions, community NFT profiles within the community and specialization based attributes and achievements. Tavern Keeper aims to improve community on-boarding, retention, engagement, and alignment.
We started Tavern Keeper as an ETHDenver 2022 hackathon submission, and have since continued to build our vision to empower the next wave of communities to succeed. We are asking for a grant in order to make that a reality.
Vision
We envision a world where joining a DAO or community is intuitive and fun. A world where community managers become game builders for their communities. Community members play the game and are awarded for their achievements.
Their achievements convey status within the community and everyone knows exactly where they stand at that moment.
The profiles are season based. So, as the communities goals change from season to season, new goals are communicated through new achievements and attributes.
Our vision doesn’t stop at DAO’s. We think any Moloch fighting organization or community could benefit from clarity of mission, incentive structures, and individually owned reputation.
Problem
Right now, communities have a tough time onboarding new members, and keeping engagement up with existing members. Getting started with a new DAO, for example, is usually a process of joining a Discord server, reading a welcome post, and then, if you’re lucky, a smattering of links, notion pages, and a tidal wave of new channels to wade through. This critical period is where a lot of potentially valuable members get lost, or give up. Destined to forever be a “lurker”, at best, or at worst, disengage entirely. I’m sure this is a familiar tale for people involved in DAO’s. I know I’ve been there myself a few times.
In addition, after that initial first-contact with the DAO, members often fail to find places to meaningfully contribute. Often due to a lack of guidance, members who made it this far easily fade into the background. Without something to hold their interest and keep them invested, it’s easy to move on to a different community. And without any way to incentivise participation, communities can’t meaningfully reward beneficial activities.
Solution
Tavern Keeper aims to equip community managers with more powerful tools to create engaging experiences on their platforms. Specifically, Tavern Keeper is a customizable, interaction and listener based Discord bot where community managers can build unique bot interactions and multi-path-ed on-boarding flows. Profile NFT’s with counters, skills, and achievements allow members to display their contributions. Community managers set the NFT attributes each season to coordinate their communities effort towards their goals. In addition, Custom artwork in the interactions and NFTs allows the community to reflect it’s distinct and binding culture.
We envision these tools to be used to incentivise activies that the community values; such as voting on a DAO proposal, volunteering your time for a good cause, or even just attending a welcome call!
Product Features
For our first demo to the RaidGuild community, who we hope to be our first user , we are building the following features (tentatively planned for 4/15/22):
- An interactive dialoge with new users to cover the information currently given during cohort sessions
- Mint a new NFT “profile” for users who complete the first “quest” above, based on their selected role within the guild
- Quiz interactions to ensure the user has a base level of knowledge before proceeding
- Award on-chain “achievements” based on quests the user completes, such as joining a cohort, demo’ing a project at demo day, submitting a hackathon project, or participating in a “raid” (client projects at the guild)
- Token gating Discord roles based on achievements collected during quests
- Customizable interactions, based on a configuration file for community managers
In the future, features that we are excited to build are:
- interactive quest builder UI, instead of configuration files
- Improve NFT’s to include seasonality, with new NFT’s minted for different seasons.
- quest templates to kickstart a community
Validation
Our team started building Tavern Keeper as a virtual hackathon entry to ETHDenver 2022 and as part of the season 4 RaidGuild cohort. We were selected as an Honorable Mention by the celebrity judges, just outside the top 5. The judges also selected us as a winner for the DAO Tooling track. In addition, we also won the Harmony DAO Tooling bounty first prize.
Outside of ETHDenver, our project has garnered excitement within our RaidGuild cohort that we formed from. Our community manager, Taekikz, has been excited to use the project to ease his workload. We worked with him to form our first set of features tailored to the issues he faces as the lead for the guild’s cohort process.
Progress
We have completed our ETHDenver submission. In the next few weeks, we will have completed our RaidGuild demo. We expect to then work on refining the experience for community managers, and start building deeper relations with several pilot communities.
Differentiation (from other projects)
Similar projects include BanklessDAO’s “first quest” bot, which served as some inspiration for Tavern Keeper. This project is a single interaction, designed for a single community. We think our project can provide the same functionality, with far more customizability, features, and a much broader vision.
Otterspace (not yet released) has proposed a similar type of product with a potentially robust feature set and front-end.
Our strategy is to go to market and provide value quickly. We believe our best chance to succeed is to start gaining feedback from users as soon as possible so we can iterate on our product and provide value quickly.
We think the best place to do that is providing value to community managers and new users by meeting new users at the pain point on Discord. We already have a head-start within RaidGuild, and hope to leverage our own communities for feedback and support.
We have watched our own community within the guild, and on our project team, get excited at creating the “lore” for our journey, crafting artwork and designs for the the first demos. We believe that we can bring this same magic to other communities, and change the current landscape.
Team
- Jon - Developer
- o080o - Developer
- Govinda - Design + Product
Grant Request
We are requesting $50k as a grant from the DAO.
What the Funds Are For
This money will be used to pay expenses in setting up a formal entity, hiring developers as needed, offer bounties if needed, and sustain the team for the next few months. Our next goal is to build a front-end for community managers to create new quests, and creating easy templates for common community issues like an FAQ page, a discord primer for new users, or an organized set of external document links. This money will be used to build out this next level of functionality and start integrating with real DAOs to start making a difference.
Our team is in the very early phases of creating what we believe will be an amazing product! With a little push, we think we can really change the landscape, and supercharge this amazing ecosystem!
Specific deliverables will include:
- Updated and improved smart contracts
- Implement Decentralized NFT Metadata back end
- A quest building front-end for community managers
- A small library of quest templates to start with
- working with between 1-3 communities to deliver an awesome experience
Help Requested
Outside of funding, we believe that MolochDAO could be a great first client of our product! We would be pleased to work with ReallyBoringGuild and the rest of the DAO to find opportunities to create more engagement within MolochDAO on the proposal process! Whether it’s offloading common questions that new grant-proposers have, gamifying and interacting with existing members on the proposal process, or putting user proposals into discord, we believe that Tavern Keeper can help!
Additional Resources, Links, Portfolio
- ETHDenver winning project
- Demo video
- RaidGuild demo: TBD
- Slides from ETHDenver
