🤔 How Do We Start a DAO for Our Hackathon Project? (And Why Should We?)

This one is for you with a quick rundown on how to take your project that started at a hackathon, DAO it up to keep it running, and maybe even raise some more money via CCO.

Feb 11, 2021

So you’re cranking on a hackathon project (maybe at ETH Denver 2021 😉) and there’s always that question hanging over the whole thing, “what happens after the hackathon?” Well, here at DAOhaus we started as a hackathon project, and here we are about to launch a massively revamped version 2 and $HAUS token.

We think the secret to our success was the early launch of HausDAO, the DAO we’ve used to coordinate our building (and fundraising) since that hackathon. We also think that a DAO can probably do the same for your project so we thought we’d put together a little guide to help you DAO it up!

What is a DAO and Why Should We Use one?

To start, we actually just dropped a post last week covering this one in details. That post starts with the basics of “what is a DAO?” and runs all the way through the whole DAO software stack. Start there if you really want the full rundown.

But a quick intro…

A DAO is a decentralized way to facilitate human cooperation. It does so by providing a platform for decision making. You set up the DAO software, get the early members onboarded and you can quickly start putting proposals up for a vote by the DAO members.

Better Than a Multi-Sig

But, maybe more importantly for a hackathon, a DAO might be a better place to hold funds than a normal old multi-sig. We’ve written at length about this one as well, but the short version is that DAOs (especially on DAOhaus with a minion) provide similar decentralized control of funds with greater flexibility. This flexibility is the key to keeping a hackathon project alive as it introduces novel ways to collaborate, coordinate, cooperate, and even raise more funds, instead of just holding money.

If this sounds cool keep reading. Below is a quick guide for how to use DAOhaus to get started with just a few clicks!

Step by Step: How to Start Your DAO

Step 1: Fire up DAOhaus

Visit https://app.daohaus.club

Connect an Ethereum wallet, we like Metamask. (you might need to set it up for a chain like xDAI to save some gas, but since you’re at a hackathon we’re not going to cover those things. The links above will help.)

Step 2: Pick a Template

Head to https://app.daohaus.club/summon. And select a template you like. We suggest Guild of Product for a hackathon-type project.

If you’re not sure what kind of template to use we’ve got a post for that too!

Step 3: Summon your DAO

Make sure your wallet is set to the network/chain where you want to launch your DAO and hit summon. Confirm the network transactions and that’s it!

Hint: if you want to add your whole hackathon team you can use the multi-summoner. You’ll need your teams wallet addresses, and you’ll need to decide how many shares will go to each address.

Step 4: Check out your new DAO

Below is a look at HausDAO, our DAO. You can use the 0x address at the top to send funds directly to the DAO. (Don’t use the one in this screenshot, unless you want to send money to us 😬.)

Step 5: Submit a Proposal

Okay, you might not need to do this one right away, but you’ll want to know what it looks like, so we wanted to feature it. Below is a look at the proposals page in RAid Guild. (They call them Quests.) Hit new proposal to submit a proposal!

Extra Steps:

Now that you’ve summoned your DAO you can do all kinds of cool stuff, but we’ll stop the guide here. Poke around a bit and you can find out how to:

Add custom tokens.
Customize your DAO’s visual theme.
Set up Discord notifications.

Then What?

You’ve got your DAO set up! So now what? Well, glorious human collaboration, of course!

The real answer is, it’s up to you. You could use the DAO as a fancy wallet, or you could start submitting proposals for every little decision if that’s what will help your project keep rolling. But, here’s a bit on how we did it:

Get a Grant

At DAOhaus we kept things moving by getting a small grant from Metacartel. You could also put up a grant on Gitcoin and invite people to contribute. (Do this at the right time and you can get matching funds, which is cool.)

Especially in the Web 3 eco system there are a lot of places to go to find a bit more funding to keep hacking away. Here are a few of our favs:

Metacartel
Meta Gamma Delta
Open Grants
Clr.fund
Ethereum Foundation
Uniswap Grants
Also check specific projects for community grants (e.g Maker, Aave, etc.)

Set up a “Community Contribution Opportunity”

We used the grant funding to further flesh out our hackathon project, and then we went big with what we called our “Community Contribution Opportunity.” During our CCO we invited members of the Web 3 community to contribute directly to HausDAO to fund our next phase of development. The direct dynamic of the CCO allowed us to raise a considerable amount more than our grants round, allowing us to grow the team, and work for 6 months to get to the launch we’re now preparing. Our next phase starts with the launch of the $HAUS token.

We’re also getting the tooling ready to let any DAO set up a CCO for their own projects, so stay tuned, and sign up below to get updates.

Finally, is you still need help setting up your DAO, you can always reach us in our Discord support channel. Use the links below to get us.

More DAOHaus 🏰

Haus Party