Background

This research aims to discover and understand how new users find DAOs, interact with them and make their first meaningful contributions. I want to understand more about people’s roles, their responsibilities, their pain points when finding a DAO, and the things that motivate them to join DAOs.

Problem

<aside> 💡 “Newbies face difficulties before accomplishing their first meaningful contribution to a DAO: finding DAOs to join, understanding what they represent, and how to make their first meaningful contribution.”

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Executive Summary

Proper education on what DAOs mean and the possibilities they hold lead to optimized experiences for new DAO contributors.

Many new users have little to no working knowledge of how DAOs operate before joining, hence there usually are no proper expectations put in place by new users before joining a DAO. Also, after locking in their assets, users are usually concerned with how well their liquidity does, and how much value they are getting in return.

<aside> 💡 “DAOs are similar to you investing in a physical company or being part of the decision-makers of an organization. Everyone is collectively making decisions together, so if you’re not active and do not create time to contribute to the success of the organization, why join? So, users have to plan towards joining, it has to be something they want to do.” - a research participant

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The challenges faced by new DAO users are not limited to the DAO ecosystem only, as users face similar challenges when interacting with more mainstream web3 ecosystems such as DEXES and NFT marketplaces. This is partly due to how relatively new web3 is, and also how little work most protocols have put into providing educative onboarding processes.

Research Methodology

I conducted remote user research interviews amongst 3 screened participants who have extensively good knowledge about how DAOs and their governance work. They were chosen so as to have them share first-hand experiences they had as new DAO contributors.

The goal was to:

• Understand new users’ thought processes when interacting DAOs as new users.
• Discover challenges users face in identifying and making their first meaningful DAO contributions.

Research Participants

The user interviews were conducted over two days. And here was the schedule:

Interview Questions

1. Are you currently a member of any DAO? If yes, which?
2. How seamless was the process of joining your first DAO?