A conversation with @blakeminhokim from Myosin.
We're always trying to learn about all the interesting things happening in web3. To satiate our curiosity, we host a weekly-ish Twitter Spaces series called Coffee Conversations. What follows is a summary of the thirteenth episode.
For the thirteenth episode of Coffee Conversations, we hosted Blake, co-founder of Myosin, to talk about the journey of scaling a services DAO from scratch to 150 onchain members and multiple paying clients in less than a year.
Highlights and Summary
Blake studied psychology and Business Management at Columbia University before working as a strategy consultant and a business designer.
He is no stranger to early-stage projects and validated several ideas as a venture designer. Seeing tech as a vehicle for societal change, Blake understood the potential of blockchain applications and believes that DAOs are the best way to get people onboard.
So, when Simon (Myosin's co-founder) reached out to Blake in Feb. 2022, Blake immediately agreed. In the 15 months since then, Myosin has developed a roster of paying clients that comprise businesses of all sizes.
In a nutshell, Myosin helps these businesses take advantage of this opportunity and works with them to propose a web3 strategy that will help them achieve their business goals.
The way Myosin operates -- like a digital agency -- is nothing new. However, their unique take on the typical agency structure has attracted talented contributors to the DAO.
They use their token ($MYO) to denote membership and also use this to compensate contributors. All contributors start by working on internal projects, after which they get to work on paid projects. The income so generated is divided among the deal sourcer (10%), the DAO treasury (15%), and the project team (75%). This is a departure from the traditional agency model where the partners/people on top take almost all the money the average person does not get to capture the fruits of their labor.
Also, Instead of thinking about member participation in seasons, their project-based structure keeps contributors deeply engaged for whatever time they stay involved with the project.
Given Myosin's success in a relatively short period of time, one may not appreciate the effort they put into reaching here. Besides gamifying the whole contribution process, they left no stone unturned in attracting and pursuing only the most talented marketers, content creators, designers, developers, and community managers worldwide.
Blake talked about posting job descriptions on web3 job aggregators as a hack to recruit quality DAO members. He also told us about the DAO's membership committee that reviews all applications and is an outspoken proponent of progressive decentralization.
Blake feels that trying to decentralize too early is a treacherous path that blunts the competitive advantage of small teams, which is the speed of execution. Another pitfall where communities get trapped is trying to grow too fast.
Projects with an open, permissionless Discord server often end up with empty channels, valueless tokens, and abandoned bounty boards. The approach to growth must always be intentional.
Also, onboarding the wrong people is a given in the journey, and instead of worrying about not doing this, one should focus on removing them as soon as they realize that they aren't a good fit for the community. The beginning entails a lot of hand cranking, and there's no way around it.
Myosin's first projects came through personal connections. One of their earliest clients was Consensys. Currently, they are working with Solana on the launch of their mobile phone and are working with Shiseido to experiment with web3 functionality in their internal-facing projects.
Their latest endeavor is Myosin Catalyst, where they plan to run workshops for CMOs and marketing folks to educate them on the potential to web3 and possibly onboard them as clients.
Myosin has a really active community. If you are an operator interested in narrative-building and onboarding people onto web3, consider joining the DAO.
A testimony to their community, one Myosin member built out a Milo -- their very own Discord bot to keep track of gm streaks when the bot they were using started to falter. Today, they charge communities to use this bot, and it is yet another successful project in Myosin's portfolio.
In this conversation, Blake walked us through the steps and learnings behind Myosin's position today as one of the few revenue-generating DAOs (let alone profitable revenue-generating DAOs). Community leaders trying to take their community to the next level should give this another read and apply to join the DAO here.