The Story of PartyDAO: How to turn a concept into a $200 million product within 1 year?
Original title: "The Story of PartyDAO – 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 in financing led by A16z, with a valuation of $200 million, which is the highest valuation of a community-driven DAO so far.
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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.
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"Wouldn't it be cool if a DAO could be deployed to automatically bid on any NFT auction, call it PartyBid"
Denis not only proposed the idea and named it, but also explained the basic business logic clearly in the same tweet, seriously using the capacity of a tweet 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. Anish was obviously humbled, and he fully developed the spirit of more work and less BB, and it took Denis' idea into a contract in one weekend.
As soon as Anish tweeted that he had done it, 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!
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PartyDAO was established
Before deciding to turn it into a more mature product, some financial support is still needed. After discussion, everyone decided to use DAO to do this. They launched a crowdfunding campaign on Mirror with a target of 25 Ether, and supporters will 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 in the work. It means that more than half of the contributors paid their own money and supported themselves.
“Isn’t it crazy to see what the Internet can take from an idea in two weeks. But we can go further.”
May 7th Proposition 1 - Create a multi-sig 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 - Approve 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 revise the budget to 13.65 ETH + 2500 $PARTY, each role corresponds to a specific person.
The PartyBid V1 product group is officially launched.
While initially only 7 people were actually involved in building PartyBid as a product, other community members gradually started building PartyDAO itself. Their goal is not just to launch a product, but to build PartyDAO itself into a long-term organization that can sustain itself.
At the beginning of August, PartyBid v1 was launched. At this time, the core contribution team has grown to 11 people. During the product construction process of V1, they also received help from more than ten other members from different projects and communities.
V1 is not the end, they followed up with a lot of iterations and optimizations. Correspondingly, the community has approved several budgets for product maintenance and subsequent iterations.
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Financing in a Bear Market
Let’s talk about the financing details. Many friends may be most concerned about this. At present, all public reports are quoted from the PartyDAO draft, which does not even mention the valuation.
PartyDAO raised 16.4 million USDC in this round, accounting for 8.2%, which is a valuation of 200 million US dollars. A16z led 10 million of them, and Standard Crypto invested 3.5 million dollars. These two companies accounted for the majority, and the rest included Compound VC, Dragonfly Capital and Uniswap Ventures.
In addition to these institutions, there are also strategic investors and community investors.
Among them, most of the strategic investors are top streamers in the Web3 circle, including Alex and Devin, the founders of Opensea, Jacob, the founder of Zora, Trevor and Alex, the founders of FWB, Dom, the founder of Loot, Aaron Wright, the founder of Flamingo, etc. The list is too dazzling to list them all. And the community investors all come from PartyDAO community members, most of the members mentioned above participated, and they contributed 1M$ of it.
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Building the future of group coordination
Cryptocurrencies are always swinging in strong boom and bust cycles, and while people are frantically pouring money into some pictures, PartyBid seems to be 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.
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