It seems there is a general lack of alignment in terms of what we’re doing.
The website says we’re building a hub for people interested in decentralized organizations & applications in the Ethereum ecosystem, but a lot of what we do is kind of unrelated.
I don’t want to go into details but it really seems we do a lot of random things across raids & guilds, often doing things that are only vaguely related to DAOs & dApps.
We’re creating a lot of value for our own people by allowing everyone to do whatever they want & get rewarded - but we’re not creating a lot of value for the wider ecosystem, making it hard to attract valuable players & patrons.
This is resulting in:
- Not so many people joining or understanding what MetaGame is about
- Hard to raise funds for the continuation of MetaGame
- inb4 “we don’t need to raise”.
- Yeah, yes we do unfortunately. We are minting something like $150k/month & there is no way in hell we can be earning anywhere close to this without any actually finished products.
We have neither created an Onboarding Machine nor a Decentralized Factory.
As it stands, people in the wider ecosystem have either never heard of MetaGame, don’t understand it or don’t see any value in it.
What we started with
Vision:
- Build a decentralized society focused on wellbeing & regeneration; helping people become the best versions of themselves & make an impact, as laid out in the MetaManifesto
Short term goals:
- Create an onboarding machine into the DAO space for anyone interested in DAOs
- Create a decentralized factory (collection of DAOs, DAO tooling & knowledge) for anyone interested in starting or already running a DAO
Long term goal:
- Cultivate a network of people & projects working on building a better future
- Help people find their own metagame (the most optimal way to play life)
Now what?
It seems we rushed ahead to the step where everyone is just encouraged to do whatever, skipping the crucial Phase I of establishing a hub for DAOists & dAppers - a decentralized factory & onboarding machine for the Ethereum DAO ecosystem.
If we want to keep on with maximum autonomy & people just doing whatever they feel like doing, that’s fine. If we want to expand focus from DAOs & Ethereum onto any chain & anything that’s related to people becoming better versions of themselves, cool - that was the long term idea anyway.
But whatever we choose, I think we should make this decision consciously rather than just slowly drift towards it, not even realizing a decision is being made.
I think it comes down to these two options
- a) If we want to raise funds, we’ll need to laser focus everything we do on the Ethereum DAO ecosystem & create value for people outside of our community.
- b) If we want everyone to stay 100% autonomous & keep 100% creative freedom in terms of people being encouraged to do whatever they feel like doing, we’ll need to make peace with the fact that Seed price will probably continue trending towards 0.
If we choose a), we should proceed by asking ourselves “how does this serve the goals” whenever we want to do something & be ready to answer this question for others.
We need to try harder to find alignment between what we want to be doing & what MetaGame as a whole needs to succeed.
Post-“Aligning MetaGame” voice session synthesis
The general feedback seems to have been something like “why not both?”
We should be putting in more effort into things like MyMeta & getting it adopted, but there should still remain a strong emphasis on the community itself. And if MetaGame is about helping people find their metagame, it should be as wide as people’s diverse interests are.
The problem is, if we make it so wide from the get-go, we won’t really help people find their metagame because we’ll be scratching the surface with multitudes of different domains rather than helping people go deep on a specific one - besides, if we make it about “any knowledge or skill whatsoever”, there are better places to learn about them on the internet…
Actual Proposal
My goal with this whole post was never to “focus all effort on MyMeta & drop other projects” or anything like that. What it really comes down to is focusing the things that we’re doing onto achieving certain goals / serving certain persona. Right now they’re kind of buck shots from a distance, let’s get a sniper?
Make MetaGame more explicitly about:
- Building dApps & DAOs based in the EVM-compatible ecosystem
- The projects we’re onboarding don’t necessarily need to be building something FOR the EVM ecosystem, but they should be DAOs imo, at least in the wider sense of the word.
- Helping people find their metagame, but mainly through “grabbing this web3 opportunity”
This would mean further defining the user persona & aligning everything we do to serve this persona. This would then be the persona until the next stage of the project, when we are ready to start onboarding complete newbies.
This persona, vaguely:
- Knows a thing or two about the space but wants to learn more & get involved in DAOs
- Wants to level up & become the best version of themselves
- Wants to connect with others & live well
- Wants to make a positive impact
And by “everything we do”, I mean everything we do.
Whatever workshop we’re organizing, whatever project we’re inviting, whatever we’re tweeting, whatever quest or raid we’re starting - asking ourselves: does this benefit the persona?
The kind of things I think benefit the persona:
- Anything related to EVM-compatible DAOs, NFTs, dApps & DeFi
- Anything related to wellbeing. Yoga, virtuous cycles, meditation etc.
- Anything fun that makes the community members connect
- Its ok for fun & social stuff to be non-web3 or wellbeing-focused, but I think all knowledge sharing stuff should be
I think we can easily find enough things to do under these constraints.
- “Helping people connect, level up & become the best version of themselves” is extremely wide & can include literally any skill & knowledge that exists - too wide imo.
- Limiting “helping people connect, level up & become the best version of themselves” to
- “through anything related to EVM-compatible Web3 stuff & wellbeing” - I think is still wide enough to make the community not feel too constrained but still constrained enough to make a focused impact rather than falling apart, stretching into 10000 directions.
There is actually some real science in the design space actually needing to be constrained
for real creative thinking to happen more easily
Why not make it about other technologies?
Because this is where we have knowledge & network in. Not to say we shouldn’t expand later but we gotta start somewhere & make a focused effort on that area to make a real impact.