# Our Story ## Definition: Creative Economy A place where digital communities can monetize their goods and services between and within social networks. Digital communities can be a brand's followers, a businesses' customers or a non-profits local hub. ## Builder Pains :compression: I've been a builder for a long time. I mean *a long time*. [Here's a 2020 article from Bezinga](https://www.benzinga.com/pressreleases/20/10/ab17924257/how-this-23-year-old-is-modernizing-the-construction-industry-with-a-new-ai-based-contractor-mana) that talks about my experiences; from starting my first business at 12 to launching a digital payments application in my early 20s. Growing up in a blue collar immigrant family, I saw how **hard** people had to work to create to run their businesses. Most small business owners' (SBO) time is consumed with managing their business and producing a good / service. Whether it was a craft, skill, trade, or service; *barely* leaving any time to build a sustainable brand or marketing funnel to ensure their business is sustainable. The same was true for decentralized communities. In 2021, I began working for a DAO (short for decentralized autonomous organization) that designed and launched Web3 products. Most of the projects all had one thing in common: the lack of simplified tooling to manage and grow their communities. ## The Lightbulb Goes Off :bulb: ### What is a DAO and why community-ownership matters If you're not familiar with the term; a DAO is basically a company or foundation that uses blockchain to enable community ownership. Members can own equity in a project, get rewards for a contribution, own their data or vote on governance of the organization. These organizations have paved the way for novel ***inter*** and ***intra*** community interaction. By giving community members more ownership over their digital spaces, members are incentivized to participate in community and use the product / service. In these communities, the power is given back to the people:fist: ## 3 Common Problems In December, I was engaged with over 30 founders; all who wanted to use a DAO to launch a product or service online. These founders reminded me of the the passionate and hard working *SBOs* that I grew up around. Every founder had three common problems: ### :question:Web3 products are overly complicated Web3 was overly complicated - between managing wallets, keys and tech-bro lingo, most people have a hard time wrapping their head around Web3 and its tools. Blockchain products are built for blockchain ecosystems; there's almost and "anti-centralized" view of Web2, though all communities are on the spectrum of centralization. ### :sunflower:Easy to create, harder to grow community Creating a digital community is easy; think of how easy it is to create a group on Facebook or Reddit. The hard part is growing that community. Managing marketing, communication, incentives, important updates and more is a headache and time consuming process. When launching a brand, product or service, most SBOs spend their time: * Creating the product or delivering the service (65%) * Managing customer service channels (5%) * Creating marketing collateral (30%) Most of these founder's didn't have the time to do the other key functions of running a successful business such as: * Updating channels with important company updates * Keeping potential investors up to date * Maintaining socials * Keeping a well organized, clean CRM * This is something I found at startups that are Series A-C funding as well! ### :fuelpump: Most tokens lack utility If you have some technical chops, deploying a smart contract isn't climbing a mountain. However, creating tokens and contracts that have utility **is.** Tokens are used as a mechanism to incentive behaviors within a community. Being able to create the IT systems that dynamically distribute tokens and incentivize behavior within the community is extremely difficult and requires modular flexibility. We built the tooling that enables super-creators:superhero: to build and grow awesome communities.