We chatted with Mark Tan, one of the team leads of Odyssey DAO, a 12k+ strong community, in an odyssey to onboard 1M more people into web3 through quality content and education.
How did you get started at OdysseyDAO?
I was already friends with Peter Yang, one of the founders of OdysseyDAO. He invited me to help with the crowdfund. He was opening team leads for four different work streams.
We agreed that community was the best fit, given my experience leading communities. So I started my tenure in January to March and renewed until July.
What’s the breakdown of OdysseyDAO in terms of members?
There are:
5 core team members, meaning someone who is appointed a role and allocated compensation
20-30 core contributors who are part-time and volunteer-based but have remained consistently active in the group. They’re also compensated at the end of the quarter.
6k members on Discord
12k people overall, combining our newsletter & socials
What are OdysseyDAO’s main goals and initiatives today?
Our main goal: Find ways to sustain the DAO. Because of that, we’re prioritizing:
Creating an on-demand course
Launching our NFT collection, which gives benefits to holders
Partnerships where we create content in exchange for sponsorship
What’s the biggest difference in web2 vs web3 communities?
The main thing: Processes and decision-making are open from the start. In a company, you tend to do beta research with your customers and those steps aren’t always open.
What’s the hardest part of running a DAO?
There are two main challenges.
Communication. It’s challenging to make sure project priorities and updates are reaching as many people as possible because the audience is very diverse and tools aren’t set up to handle this effectively.
Discord is a mess and people are working on different things so attention span isn’t there.
Commitment. Contributors aren’t as committed because people can ghost and no one’s going to chase them.
How did you improve on these challenges? Any strategies and lessons?
Communication:
Initiative over consensus
When there’s a project, I try to delegate as fast as I can as opposed to trying to get consensus because it slows us down.
Instead of asking “what do you think?” I now say, “here’s the plan; if we don’t have comments, it will go live next week.”
Ask for forgiveness not permission.
Regular recaps
It’s important to recap things periodically to bring people on the same page because streams of discussions happen all over the place.
We do this by writing a weekly recap of top things that happened and our priorities for the upcoming week.
Commitment:
Strategies here go back to community building as a whole. There are two types of motivations: Intrinsic & Extrinsic.
Intrinsic strategies are most powerful. There are three ways:
Remind them why they’re in the community. For Odyssey, it means learn, grow, and get mentorship from other people. So by reminding people why they’re there, you’re growing as a person too.
You weave this into your everyday. For example, I was talking to a bootcamp teacher and I told them “Hey, this is going to be messy but I promise it’s going to be fun and rewarding!” and I gave additional reasons. It’s not a charter you put out once in a while — you have to live it.
Pay it forward. Letting them know that this is something we pass on and pay forward to other people. If they pay it forward, they learn too because one of the best ways to grow is to teach others.
Alignment with the community as a whole. The person might be looking to switch to a web3 company or project so we align their goals with the value of contributing to Odyssey.
These intrinsic strategies also need to be combined with extrinsic ones:
Recognition. We give shoutouts, gratitude, and thank you’s regularly.
Bounties. We offer ways for people to contribute in a slightly more structured way, in exchange for ODY tokens and ETH for their contributions.
POAPs & Badges. We’re giving badges to contributors and participants for attending events or helping out.
What are some of your biggest mistakes and lessons from those mistakes?
Trying to do too many things. It’s very easy to get distracted with many things to do but hard to choose the right ones. For example, I tend to track things on a spreadsheet, which ends up being meticulous ops-heavy work. When I look back, maybe I shouldn’t have been doing that so diligently or outlining processes that no one reads.
Finding ways to scale faster from a working team perspective. For the longest time, I was doing work by myself. Two weeks ago, we did an ambassador program so I didn’t have to be the bottleneck and we could launch things out sooner. More people are stepping up because there’s something for them to represent and we kind of decentralized our responsibilities.
Reducing the number of documents and trying to be more concise. I now ask myself “Is this one-pager going to be helpful for other people or just for me?” I tend to document way more than others but not everyone works this way.