All want for Christmas is a good onboarding

DAOs will onboard the world, but no one really knows what they are doing yet.

Dec 22, 2021

Christmas morning you wake up, and what do you have under the tree or in your stocking? A QR code! And if you scan it will take you to the best onboarding process ever.

But this never happened. And now imagine that instead of finding that, you find a game wrapped in a gift box - the Jumanji game.

I have a theory that one of the worst onboardings in history is the game from the movie Jumanji. Literally, it was lethal onboarding. They didn't die by miracle on a lot of occasions.

https://media.giphy.com/media/DZdE6qEzCfRHW/giphy.gif

Another movie onboarding that I think is better is Skywalker as a Jedi, and Harry Potter as a Wizard, that is, if we remove the part about killing their relatives or living in a closet, before introducing them to their amazing world.

So if you don't want to be stuck for years in an almost eternal onboarding like poor Alan Parrish, read on.

The never-ending story of how to do a great onboarding

Okay, I confess that I partly lied because it is an eternal process.

Endless, because as ‘users’ (yes, us) are always changing and evolving, these experiences have to be done by hand. DAOs are alive. And you have to keep them active because as with humans, movement is life.

In the Pozzle Planet universe for example, we have experienced entering the wormhole of trying to create the perfect onboarding over and over again. And you know what? We will continue to experience it, it's a loop that you can't escape from. And that's actually a good thing because it means that you keep improving, that your community is active, alive, and that you can still do better. What would a DAO be if it was something static?

Joey DeBruin @Joey_DeBruin

The Substacks and Patreons of the world were the first boats to float across Web2 network moats - they showed that optimizing for creator experience is now the winning strategy. But there's an important difference between being open and being interoperable.

Some rules of thumb that we have learned after such a long process:

Keep it simple: This is a phrase I hear all the time but I don't know why people usually (myself included) do everything possible to complicate their lives. We love to complicate, it's tremendous.
Don't lose focus on your mission: You are a guide, you are fast, you are reliable, and all you want is for as many people as possible to complete this process in the shortest time possible, that's it.
We are all human: You can change it, you can make it fun, you can try new ideas, even at the end of the process you can ask your audience to give you feedback on the onboarding.

If you thought this was a cool move, you can level up and collaborate with this platform called DAO Onboarding Research that is taking care of improving this part of the process by collecting feedback from all users that have been involved.

At Pozzle Planet our onboarding goal is that you want to know more about the community while you enjoy space travel in the Pozzleverse. But to make that happen we also want to know more from you, and from any member who wants to go out and explore the unknown planets.

The freedom of innovation

If there are no written rules on how to do something you are never wrong, you are just discovering the ways to do it and the ways not to do it.

The creative freedom enjoyed by those who dare to create new things is imagination heaven. There is no limit, and trying to control the DAO is literally like trying to put gates on the field or dikes on the sea.

DAOs will onboard the world. They truly are the key to mass adoption(...) but most of all we need to be objective. Guess what? No one really knows what they are doing yet.
-Scott Mandel

Patrick Mayr @pat_mayr

Web 2: Founders build products that attract community Web 3: Founders attract community that build products

This means that people who really want to do things and change the world don't have to sit on a bench waiting for inspiration to strike. They just have to get on with it. Starting by joining communities, connecting, learning, and finding their own way together.