Cabin Labs - First Year Retrospective

The three core pillars of Cabin Labs’ mandate are to:

  1. Run Experiments
  2. Refine Vision & Strategy
  3. Keep the Lights On

Here’s the progress we’ve made against each pillar in the last year:

1. Run Experiments

Here is a comprehensive look at the 11 experimental bets we took in the last year:

I’m very proud of the progress we made against the set of experiments we committed to running, and the overall progress we made towards finding a winning approach to double down on with the accelerator program. Check out the post for detailed updates on the experiments we ran and results we got from all of these bets:

First wave (Fall 2023 → Winter 2024)

:globe_with_meridians: Software for Network States
:technologist: Deep Work Club
:sunny: Solarpunk Sandbox
:plate_with_cutlery: Supper Clubs

Second wave (Winter → Spring 2024)

:saluting_face: 500 Citizens
:world_map: Family Neighborhood Map
:sun_with_face: Eclipse @ N0
:billed_cap: Merch Store

Third wave (Summer → Fall 2024)

:chart_with_upwards_trend: Neighborhood Accelerator
:camping: Network Society Camp
:world_map: L2 neighborhoods

I’m also excited that we’ve been able to spin out 2 independent contributor pods from Cabin Labs so far, and have a live proposal for spinning out a third one:

2. Refine Vision & Strategy

We’ve taken some major steps towards refining vision and strategy in the last year. In late 2023, we had pivoted away from rural coliving for nomads, but didn’t know where we should go next. Since then, we have updated our vision, Obvious Truths, strategy, roadmap, and goals to reflect what we’ve learned from the experiments we’ve run in the past year:

  1. Re-write of the Vision Doc: Cabin | Cabin's Network City
  2. Re-write of our Obvious Truths: Obvious Truths
  3. Rebrand of Cabin.City: https://cabin.city/
  4. Launch and growth of this forum: https://forum.cabin.city/
  5. Roadmap & Strategic Updates:

3. Keep the Lights On

Keeping the Lights On includes dealing with all of the boring administrative work of operating Cabin. Here’s what was in the original proposal mandate:

  • Maintain infrastructure
    • Pay the bills & keep services running (app, CRM, email, blog, forum, etc)
    • Complete necessary database migration to keep app running (by Feb 2024)
    • Take care of DAO’s legal and tax needs (legal structures, tax filings, etc)
  • Manage digital footprint
    • Manage community gathering spaces (discord and discourse)
    • Manage social media (twitter & instagram)
    • Manage content (newsletter, blog, website)
  • Develop partnerships
    • Serve as the point person for inbound partnership requests
    • Source opportunities for new partnerships
  • Support proposals
    • Provide feedback on all proposals submitted in Proposals
    • Coordinate execution of multi-sig for all approved proposals
    • Provide support and feedback for all approved proposals
    • Help hold approved proposals accountable to outcomes

We’ve completed all of these tasks, and in all, they have taken up probably 20% of my time over the last year. I wish the boring administrative work took less of my time, but I fear it is an inevitable time suck, no matter how efficient I try to make it.

Additionally, as we see more independent proposals spinning out, more of my time goes towards mentoring and supporting contributors, recruiting new contributors, organizing and running contributor retreats, and reporting contributor work back out to the broader community (eg this type of post). I’d estimate that these activities now take up at least 1/3rd of my total bandwidth. While this is a large time commitment, I think it is one of the highest leverage buckets for me to invest in.

Conclusions

Overall, I think Cabin Labs has fulfilled its original promises to the DAO in the first year, and is starting to fully see the fruits of our labors.

In the past year we have gained a core growth and support mechanism for our network of neighborhoods with the accelerator program, an amazing group of contributors operating in semi-autonomous pods, a clear sense of direction for Cabin Labs and associated pods, learnings from our previous experiments and a new set of hypotheses to test, and a stronger and more engaged community and DAO than we had a year ago.

We of course have plenty of work left to do. We are playing an Infinite Game, and we’re in the early innings of building our network city. In the next year, I hope we can grow our network of neighborhoods to more than 100, refine our business model and generate revenue, and continue to be a clear frontrunner and leader of the network society ecosystem.

I’d love to hear any thoughts and feedback about how we can better serve the DAO in the next year.