Crypto Sapiens - Web3 Native Membership Management with Alex Poon co-founder of Charmverse
Primer: Notion and Trello are just Web2 tools. What are their Web3 equivalents? Meet Charmverse, a platform that scales collaboration and communities with Web3 capabilities embedded within it. Find out more from Alex Poon, co-founder of Charmverse, in this episode of Crypto Sapiens.
Background
Co-Founder of Charmverse, his third startup
Started off as a software developer
When he was 10 years old, he started selling gears from track cars to other kids
In 2010, he started his first company, a B2B AI/big data company that is targeted at publishers
After getting acquired, he started his second AI company helping people to schedule meetings over email
Started a redeemable NFT project in 2020
Spoke to various communities. Started building Charmverse to help organizations scale with smart contracts
Getting Into NFTs
Heard Chris Dixon talking in a podcast about Ethereum as a worldwide computer
Have always hated the Web2 ad-driven model as the incentives are misaligned
Got excited as blockchains, tokens, and NFTs could be used to solve some of these issues
Charmverse
Founding Charmverse
Was not set on building anything. Was spending time trying to learn from users and customers
Have spoken to ~50 DAOs before they started Charmverse
“We are in the business of the future of work and future coordination.”
- Alex Poon
Pain Points They Addressed
People complained that they are burnt out and can’t keep track of info in crypto
In coordination/cooperation, things should not fit into a Discord channel or in text
There needs to be a different interface optimized for work
What Is Charmverse
Some people think of them as an open-source Web3 Notion
Their goal is to enable collaboration while bringing in Web3 capabilities (logging in with your wallet, control access based on NFT/token holdings)
Tasks could be turned into bounties to engage the community
Have creative best practices to help the community get involved in proposal creation
Bringing in a membership directory
Feedback Received From The Communities
Have thousands of workspaces in their system
Focusing on the smaller DAOs right now
People have feedback that it’s a beautiful, easy-to-use workspace
Partnerships
Integrating with Gnosis Safe for payment from multisig wallets for bounties
Have a proposal builder that provides a guided experience to construct a DAO proposal
Votes can be done in-app and sent to Snapshot
His Philosophy On Apps
On Crypto Twitter, people disrespect the frontend — it is completely unimportant
To him, apps are meant to serve the users and UI/UX is important
Charmverse integrates and pulls together all these different protocols to serve their users properly
Protocol builders need to think about how their end users interact with their apps
The Value Of Trust
Their team is distributed
Having a distributed team does not change the nature of the work
Due to asynchronous communication, it is easy to assume that negative comments come from jerks
It’s important to build that trust
Most Influential Person
People from the Alliance DAO accelerator. They have been extremely generous in helping Web2 founders understand the nuances of Web3
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