A little tale of our journey…

Once upon a time, not long ago, lived 2 spritely young lads by the names of Tom and Tristan (T&T from herein). They live together, though not in the same house, but in the same city. A wondrous, magical city called Bath in the South West of England. At one time strangers, they quickly built a strong bond over a common problem. The problem? Queuing.

Now, although many people in England are notorious for loving a good queue, T&T despised them (that’s putting it mildly). So, they set out to banish queues with an innovative mobile pre-order and payment app that allowed people to order ahead and beat those dastardly queues. 

There were certainly some ups and downs on the journey to undertake this monstrous mission. They managed to raise funds and build an army of others willing to end Britain’s love affair with queues. After a fair few years of battle, T&T found themselves in a position where they were satisfied with their attempts and had an opportunity to hand the reins to another willing crusader to take the mission to the next level.

This gave T&T an opportunity to go back to the drawing board and find the next problem to solve. After some sporadic sprints as coworking space owners, CRM consultants and investment consultants, T&T landed on solving a massive problem they saw in the startup world. They wanted to help startups grow and from thenceforth started Growth Division. 

Growth Division was built on the principle of using a distributed, freelance network of highly skilled, vetted growth experts who would form custom growth teams for startups to validate new channels for growth. For over 3 years T&T built a solid network of amazing Growth Strategists and freelance growth talent. They toiled away building processes that allow this distributed team to work effectively together. 

Now, having helped grow over 50 different startups T&T know a thing or two about managing expert teams and scaling startups. But it’s not quite happily ever after yet, as they have spotted a new quest they want to follow.

Ok, enough with the fairytale-style BS. 

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Our experience scaling a startup and then building Growth Division certainly explains how we got to the point where we started Growth DAO. Still, it doesn’t exactly explain why we believed in the DAO structure so much we decided to commit to building Growth DAO. So, I’ve summarised our key reasons why we believe in the DAO structure in the first place and why the structure specifically works for Growth DAO… 

DAOs are the future

DAOs are the best way to incentivise distributed teams

Distributed, remote teams are here to stay. Since the global pandemic (dare we mention it) there has been a massive move towards remote work and more and more people are taking the leap and becoming freelancers. But the traditional consulting contract model does not effectively incentivise freelancers for the long-term success of their clients.

We believe the DAO structure is the future way of organising people towards a single end goal. It keeps everyone involved fully motivated through shared ownership and incentivised through distributed voting rights. Also, DAOs are often organised through various online tools and platforms and therefore they have evolved to be dynamic and ready-to-go for the remote team world.

No more inefficient middle management

Traditional management models are often overladen with cumbersome middle management, people who overbuild processes because it’s their job to build processes. We (and the DAO structure) emphatically say “NO!” to middle management and unwieldy hierarchies. 

We’re building out a management structure in line with the Teal Structure, proposed by Fredrick La-Roux, which is about empowered self-management of the community with advice-based decision-making and peer-to-peer reviews.

Increase buy-in

The very structure of a DAO is built on the idea of disseminating decision-making. This democratisation increases member buy-in to the future of the organisation as people get to have their say. By utilising people’s specific expertise in the organisation better, more fair decisions can be made. Growth DAO will be using a weighted voting system based on tokens held, which derives from the number of earnings from Growth DAO itself as well as ongoing participation rates in the community.

Autonomy drives creative problem solving

Self-determination theory (developed by Edward Deci & Richard Ryans) broke new ground in understanding peoples’ intrinsic motivations, the theory is grounded in the idea that giving people autonomy and independence in their decision-making improves productivity and reduces wastage. People become better problem solvers as they are entrusted to make decisions within their field of expertise. 

Giving autonomy to members is something that underpins the entire DAO structure. Within Growth DAO we are relying on field-specific experts to contribute their knowledge to help inform better decision making.

The DAO structure works for Growth DAO

We know remote growth teams for startups work!

Over the last year, we have proven that distributed teams of experts are a highly effective way of running a growth team in the startup world. We have over 50 case studies to prove it. We now want to improve the scalability of what we’ve built at Growth Division and build it into a more scalable, autonomous DAO structure.

Better incentivisation and rewards for members

Although we have always paid our experts at Growth Division fair remuneration based on the value they add, we believe the DAO structure better aligns the incentives of experts as they get an upside in the GRWTH token. The more you earn with the DAO (through the stablecoin USDC) the more GRWTH tokens you earn, which over time will be increasing in value. This encourages experts to keep their clients for as long as possible and do an amazing job for all Growth DAO startup clients.

In-built referral growth mechanism

As an expert earns more and more GRWTH, and as the supply diminishes through the “burn” mechanism the value of the tokens will increase. This should encourage experts to want to funnel as many clients and opportunities through Growth DAO as possible. Furthermore, people who successfully refer clients to Growth DAO will be paid out in additional GRWTH as a “thank you” for the referral. This should be a nice viral loop system which drives exponential growth.

So, hopefully, that’s given you a glimpse into our story and how we got to the point where we are building Growth DAO and hopefully you now understand the logic behind the decision to create this DAO! For us it makes a lot of sense, if it makes sense to you too you should join us in Discord or Apply to Join the DAO as an active Growth+ member.