On Building A Tokenized Community (DAO) Platform
My name is Ben Huh and I am the CEO and founder of Origami.
Origami helps large, ambitious communities create DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) which are community-owned and run companies that are built on the blockchain.
We're sought out because of the collection of resources we provide to our DAOs, including:
- The Origami Framework: The industry-leading methodology that allows DAOs to raise money and protect their members.
- The Origami DAO operating system: software that brings together all the tools a DAO needs, in an easy-to-use place.
- Advice from an experienced team: On organizing DAOs for success including customer support from our professionals.
We're the team that helped build Orange DAO, one of the largest communities of experienced startup entrepreneurs, which recently announced $80 million in funding.
What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?
My claim to fame is that I was the CEO of an internet meme company called The Cheezburger Network. We ran sites like I Can Have Cheezburger?, FAIL Blog, Know Your Meme, and dozens of others that pioneered internet culture and viral content as we know it.
Cheezburger was one of the top 200 destinations on the web. It taught me a lot about how communities grow, how crowdsourcing works, and the laws of large and small numbers. It also showed me how Web2.0 failed to generate value for its users.
Fast forward to early 2021, I had been dabbling in crypto, but when my friends asked me to help set up an investment club to buy NFTs, I was immediately intrigued by the potential of coordinating a large group of people around the world to make decisions towards a common goal.
But like any early-stage tool, there were lots of limitations and issues in creating and operating DAOs. So I wanted to help solve them. I accepted an Entrepreneur-in-Residence role with a venture capital firm in NY called Betaworks to develop a much more scalable and easy-to-use framework for DAOs. That ultimately became Origami.
The first community to use Origami’s DAO framework was Orange DAO, a community of more than a thousand YC alumni, and other venture-backed founders. In less than a year, Orange DAO has accumulated over $80M in assets under management. It’s an exceptional success story even in the high-growth world of DAOs.
And now, Origami is helping build dozens of other large communities including some household names that we’d love to share in a few months. Sorry to tease you, but we have obligations!
Take us through the process of designing your initial service
The founding team was all Y Combinator-backed entrepreneurs who helped build Orange DAO. Our early funding came from venture DAOs we helped build. They understood the challenges in the industry and saw how we address them using software, frameworks, and advice.
The DAO ecosystem is in the nascent stages of development. Most products are incomplete and there’s not a lot of consensus around what is the best way to do something. Those rules are being written now, so every bit of early experience and experimentation counts for a lot.
As one of the founders of Orange DAO and active in its governance, I have seen first-hand the impacts of small and large decisions on the culture and impact of DAOs. Our approach to product development is very pragmatic: Ask what our customers find most valuable (in both clearing hurdles or pursuing opportunities). Then address it using the data from our DAOs and others.
The highest ROI activity in early-stage companies is talking to potential customers. Build a small product that solves a painful problem for them. And repeat.
And while the crypto component is new, the fundamentals of good software, user experience, customer onboarding, and security haven’t changed. I rely on a veteran team of YC alumni who are my co-founders at Origami who have built large, remote organizations, complex enterprise software, and operationally complex companies.
We ship meaningful, bite-sized upgrades to our code, documents, and processes on a rapid cadence. That allows us to test new ideas and kill them quickly to keep ourselves focused on our customers’ success.
Describe the process of launching the business.
Customer validation is the most important ingredient in achieving product-market fit. So we started by becoming our customers at Orange DAO — even before Origami was incorporated. Our entrepreneurial DNA is firmly rooted in the idea that customers are the ultimate arbiters of our success.
There are many ways to validate and test ideas before spending money to build them. So we started by using the ideas ourselves, inviting others to the DAO, and seeing what real problems and communication challenges came up.
This gave us the primary insight that DAOs need to scale, due to high demand, but there were very few ways to communicate ideas and needs to the DAO’s members, which leads to churn and apathy. The secondary insight was that due to the lack of legal clarity and experience, many DAOs were in a holding pattern in community mode.
Our success with Orange brought us our early clients. The Kauffman Fellows, for example, are a network of investors who went through the Kauffman Foundation's 2-year training program. When they decided to launch a DAO, they wanted a reliable team to structure it properly. They saw how well Orange was set up and asked to meet the people behind it. That's how we earned their business. When they saw how we operated, they invested in us.
Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?
Our best promotion is the success of the DAOs we work on. We’re a full-stack, integration solution for DAOs. We’re not a “dao-in-a-box” because our solution is tailored to each community. That level of integration allows the DAOs we work on to do extraordinarily well and raise their profiles, which sends other DAO builders to us.
By their very nature, DAOs are big groups of people. While a traditional startup can be run by just a handful of people, a DAO can start with hundreds, if not thousands, of members on day one. When Origami takes care of them, all those people become our best source of marketing.
It’s not much of a secret, but that’s our secret sauce. Our DAOs love the technical and operational experience we bring to the table so they can focus on building on their unique advantages.
How are you doing today and what does the future look like?
We’re exceeding our wildest expectations right now and it feels like drinking from the firehose. Our future is to scale up our capacity to serve 10 times the number of current customers.
Every order of magnitude increase in customers, employees, revenue, etc. requires the rethinking of all the underlying systems. I’ve been through that journey a few times at my previous companies, so I am trying to stay ahead of the needs.
Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
The fundamentals of building a business get tossed aside during the hype cycles. This effect is particularly pronounced in crypto because of the massive amounts of money involved, so the hype cycle is bigger. But the fundamentals need to be done well, and in the long run, we all benefit in the ecosystem from this.
At Origami, we’re heavily investing in the fundamentals of creating and running a DAO, including the legal structure, the Charter, and the operating system.
What platform/tools do you use for your business?
We use the same tools our customers use, and then some. Discord, Snapshot.org, Telegram, etc. are the basics. We want to make sure we experience the same things that our customers do.
In addition, we’re trying out new tools all the time as well, so we can have an opinion before our customers ask us about it.
What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?
My favorite business book is a bit of an oddball: Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. Munger is the other half of Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway holding company.
This book is a collection of speeches Munger has given throughout his career and provides detailed insight into the logic and habits of one of the most successful entrepreneurs in modern business.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?
Practice active listening and be careful about where you spend your time, then money. The highest ROI activity in early-stage companies is talking to potential customers. Build a small product that solves a painful problem for them. And repeat. Build on these small successes until they become easy.
There are no shortcuts to understanding your customers.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
Yes! Our job board is here. We’re hiring engineers at the moment, but the list can update at any time.
Where can we go to learn more?
- Sign up for email updates at joinorigami.com
- Subscribe to our podcast for DAO insiders and founders.
- And follow us on Twitter.
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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