The GenesisDAO funds the first step of a Crypto-CRM Industry

tl;dr: New technological innovations drive new marketing needs and new marketing solutions. The advent and growth of DAOs will lead to the creation of a “crypto-Salesforce” and the decentralized-CRM industry.

Salesforce was founded in 1999.

Today, it is the largest Customer Relationship Management (CRM) providers in the world, with 2018 revenues over $10 billion.

One of their earliest, (and most successful) campaigns was “No Software.”

It was an aggressive, full frontal assault on the existing business software market. The campaign was based on leveraging the new capabilities made possible by the advent of the commercial Internet.

Today, their innovation is commonplace and a given. Back then, it was radical.

The innovation was “Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).”

Now, we just call it “the cloud.”

Innovative Tech Alone Isn’t Enough
Great technological innovation alone is not enough to make a success.

The second component is great marketing, which starts with the all-important question:

Is there anyone out there who actually needs what we are building?

There are all types of questions that flow from there, of course (e.g. market size, willingness to pay, etc.), but one of them is:

Can we offer something that is somehow better and different than the existing alternatives?

Salesforce recognized that the advent of the commercial Internet meant an explosion of digital touchpoints for companies to manage. This would lead to new challenges and opportunities in executing marketing, sales, and customer service strategies.

With SaaS, Salesforce could deploy new software capabilities faster, allowing companies to execute marketing faster and engage with customers and prospects faster.

The disruptive impact that the Internet had on marketers and marketing was the requirement to execute and respond faster (‘real-time’ was the jargon then). Salesforce wisely seized the lead in positioning themselves as the enabler of marketing and sales for companies that wanted to thrive in this new, faster environment.

In short, they knew there was existing demand and that it would grow dramatically.

They also knew they had a business model innovation (i.e. SaaS) that could deliver superior economics and time-to-market benefits over the existing solutions that were “on-premise.”

New Crypto Environments Give Rise to New Needs
Once again, we are seeing the emergence of new market needs based on the arrival of new technologies.

The new technology this time is blockchain.

The new needs come from the existence and evolution of DAOs— Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.

DAOs are governed by non-hierarchical, decentralized communities that codify their decisions in smart contracts, secured by blockchains.

The end result is a “back-office” that holds the promise of operational efficiency that is orders of magnitude cheaper than existing alternatives.

Here’s an example.

1. Let’s say you are a programmer, designer, or marketing consultant. You think you can help a DAO achieve some objective (better code, better website, improved awareness).
2. You submit a proposal to the DAO.
3. There may be a small fee to prevent spammers.
   Then, there is the opportunity for debate by members of the community about the merits of the proposal, before it is put up for a vote.
4. If it is rejected, the proposal dies. However, if it is accepted (depending on the rules of the DAO-51%, 2/3rds, whatever), you are on the hook to deliver.
5. Let’s say you are the designer and you have committed to creating a new logo.
6. You execute your process (as defined in the proposal)
7. Once you complete the logo, submit it to the DAO for final approval/acceptance. When the deliverable is accepted (again, it could be 51% of the vote or whatever), your payment is released from a smart contract.

No accounts payable. No invoicing. No accounts receivable. No bank transfers. No forms to fill out.

It sounds futuristic, doesn’t it?

Except that is is already here.

I submitted a proposal to the GenesisDAO of DAOstack and it was approved. You can see it for yourself.

The proposal is to create what some have called “The Roadmap to Crypto-Salesforce.”**

Essentially, we are looking to create the blockchain/smart-contract based foundation for a Decentralized Marketing Organization.

What is a Decentralized Marketing Organization?
About a year ago, I wrote The Decentralized Marketing Organization: How Crypto-Marketers Can Increase Token Value by Empowering Community Members as the theoretical framework.

The basic idea is that, in a decentralized network of crypto-token holders, every single person is, in essence, a marketer. They have a natural incentive to grow the value of the network (and hence their token’s value).

As any good marketer would do, these DAO token holders must identify appropriate individuals who would benefit from the existence of the network, make them aware of the innovation, educate them, and assist them in participating.

It’s customer acquisition, except in a DAO it’s community-member recruitment.

There’s a lot more to it, as you can see in this post about how I was incentivized to market LBRY, there are many, many ways in which members can recruit other members.

The good news is that, thanks to Ethereum and DAOstack, a DMO is technically possible.

It wasn’t just a few years ago.

There’s your technological innovation.

Challenges of a Decentralized Marketing Organization
The challenges of creating a DMO are significant.

For example, how do you, as a DAO member…

• find the best opportunities among thousands or hundreds of thousands of proposals?
• assess how much value they will provide to the DAO?
• measure the impact of those proposals?
• ensure that the learnings from the successful, and failed, initiatives are disseminated across the network?

It is NOT an easy task…by any stretch. This list of questions just scratches the surface.

Benefits of a Decentralized Marketing Organization
The benefits of a DMO, however, could be enormous.

One of them is massive cost-savings when compared to existing systems for executing marketing activities. DAOs have the potential to execute far more activities at far lower costs with far more people. This is one of the Impacts of Digital-Native Value Organizations.

Another potentially disruptive impact could be a faster innovation and improvement cycle. In a world where the marketing landscape changes every 11.6 seconds (if not faster)

This is true across the DAO, but I’ll focus on the marketing function of the DAO (driving awareness, perception, and engagement).

Call it Dandelion Marketing or “Little Bets” on steroids, if you want.

So, there’s an answer to the question of: Can we offer something that is somehow better and different than the existing alternatives?

It’s Yes.

At the core, a DMO and CRM may look the same. It is scalable software designed to help an organization obtain its desired marketing results.

But, beyond that, they are very different.

Unlike CRM which is focused on “Customer Relationship Management,” a DMO focuses on the community. CRM looks to maximize Lifetime Value of a customer. A DMO seeks to maximize the network value of a community.

Bottom line…there is no technology on the market today that helps a DAO effectively drive marketing outcomes at scale.

New Needs, New Solutions
However, we have the bigger question of: Is there anyone out there who actually needs that we are building?

Does anyone actually NEED a DMO?

The answer here seems to be Yes as well.

Why do I say that?

Well, for one, the members of the GenesisDAO voted in favor of the proposal. At a minimum, they think it is necessary. Yay!

Now, let’s look around the crypto-sphere.

• Dash (#13 on CoinMarketCap) has $600k in its DAO treasury.
• Decred (#30 on CoinMarketCap) has $15 million in its treasury.
• Gnosis (#199 on CMC) partnered with DAOstack to create dxDAO
• Polkadot has set up PolkaDAO using DAOstack.
• And there are others.

To be sure, much of these funds will go to things other than marketing (which is fine).

However, as the tech matures and the networks are able to create more and more value, these orgs will need a way to get the word out to those people who will benefit most.

This is the marketing function.

Together, with the members of the GenesisDAO, we are embarking on the first step to see if we can create a DMO.

If we can (and it’s a 72 point font if), the benefits will accrue not only to the GenesisDAO, but every single DAO that uses DAOstack.

It’ll be like a series of WordPress plug-ins, but for DAO marketing.

Goal of the DMO Project, Step 1
The goal of the GenesisDAO Decentralized Marketing Organization (DMO) is to enable a global network of individuals to spread the word, communicate the benefits, and generate the activity necessary to cost-effectively grow a DAO.

In order for it to work at scale, the DMO will have to track the effectiveness of different marketing activities and broadly share the knowledge and learnings from each activity. In so doing, it will create a recursive loop of improved marketing performance.

DMOs will be able to use token economics to drive behaviors at the micro level. (See How Crypto-Fueled Micro-Incentives Will Change How Work Gets Done)

They will also be able to gamify swarm intelligence. With that, a decentralized organization can effectively incentivize and disseminate knowledge sharing in ways that a centralized org never could. (For more, see Anticipating the Impact of Crypto on Organizations)

The list of needs that a DMO is going to have is already long.

Some of them include:

• Value calculator…so a DAO can do ROI calculations on marketing initiatives against key metrics such as token price or transaction volume.
• On top of that, a Proposal Reporting function and Knowledge Repository
• Decentralized market research function…think about integrating with Veil, Guesser, or Augur to get “skin in the game” answers to questions of strategic importance to the DAO.
• Milestone-based payment function for marketing contractors
• Proposal templates with updated best practices, keywords, and templates to help others understand the proposals.
• Suggested Proposals module that enables people to suggest things that need to be done, get them voted on, and have contractors come in and agree to execute
• Connected to that a “Recommended teammates” algorithm that helps proposers put together the best group for executing a campaign based on past performance, reputation, and interests.
• “Social Scalability Index” that serves as the equivalent to a Brand Health dashboard, but which pulls in native crypto data from the blockchain.
• Comms support module to get comms assistance from official DAOstack channels.
• Marketing token creation engine…something that allows/enables the assignment of marketing-oriented parameters to a token in order to drive marketing outcomes (e.g. loyalty points)

I could go on.

I do recognize that this is a big list and much of this will happen years from now. That’s fine.

The point is that a DMO, “crypto-CRM,” has an entirely new set of needs that didn’t exist before.

Salesforce (no CRM provider actually) is architected for this. They are going after an existing market that, according to some, is going to be $80 billion in a few years. They aren’t paying attention to DAOs. Most likely, someone else will build the DMO software suite.

Because the market is emerging and growing.

3 years ago, there were no DAOs.

Today, some people think 2019 is the Year of the DAO.

Even if it isn’t this year, it will be one year soon.

Next Steps for the GenesisDAO DMO
This journey is long and perilous. There is a lot we don’t yet know about DMOs and what they will require.

The question we are trying to answer in Phase 1 is:

“What are the steps required to create a robust Decentralized Marketing Organization ready to support GenDAO so that it can effectively identify and fund the best marketing initiatives to support long-term growth?”

What lies beyond that is TBD. The whole DMO idea may be hare-brained/crazy to begin with.

Of course, many people thought the same about the idea of delivering business applications over the web as a service.

If you’d like to be a part of this, you can join the GenesisDAO here.

If you want to set up your own DAO, visit the DAOstack website.

**(Caveat: I know that’s a huge statement and in no way am I making the claim that this WILL be ‘crypto-Salesforce’ or that I am the person who might be part of the team that pulls it off.)