Cabin Labs - Spring 2024 Retreat Recap

[jon]

Context

Cabin Labs is a pod within the DAO working on incubating bets and finding viable paths to becoming default alive (see Cabin Labs). In Spring 24, we are focused on building urban neighborhoods for friends & families (see Cabin Labs - Spring 2024). The Cabin Labs pod got together in LA for a seasonal IRL retreat; this post will share some of what we did, discussed, and took away.

Retreat Timeline

We packed 3 trips into 1 for this retreat.

First, @savkruger and I joined @Matai and a crew from Mars College (led by OG Cabin Build Week participant Nico) for a Protopian Retreat, hosted at the neighborhood Matai is building in Ojai, CA. It was awesome to see a place that has been growing as a cohousing community and neighborhood for 40 years (!), learn more about the incredible pop-up village known as Mars College from a bunch of Martians, and spend time around the campfire with friends old and new.

Next, @savkruger and I met up with @grin in Venice, CA for the Cabin Labs retreat. We coordinated the timing with Farcon, a conference for the Farcaster ecosystem founded by @grin & others last year in Boston and hosted by a new team this year in Venice. We spent some time checking out the latest in consumer crypto and seeing what Cabin could learn from the event. We also raided the costume closet from our awesome Burner host and SHOWED UP on the dance floor at Free Wifi:

Progress on goals

Neighborhood Cohorts

@savkruger has taken the lead on the Neighborhood Steward cohort-based program: Launching Cabin Neighborhood Accelerator, which started with 5 urban neighborhoods in Boulder, Oakland, Venice, Arlington, and Larkspur. After running a program with Cohort 0, we provided feedback to Savannah, who is now creating more structure and curriculum for the next cohorts.

The original plan was to run rural cohort for the next one, but we didn’t have strong traction or a clear enough value exchange for rural properties. Instead, Cabin Labs will continue to lean into urban neighborhoods and separate out neighborhoods for friends & neighborhoods for families for the next cohorts. Savannah is currently recruiting aligned participants for these next batches. Some incredible neighborhood builders like @KathiInPorto @Dahveed @prigoose have already started engaging and sharing their learnings before the cohort kicks off.

Steward Pipeline

We have reoriented the cabin.city landing page to focus on recruiting neighborhood stewards and getting them onto a 1:1 call with Savannah to join a cohort.

@grin is now rebuilding the onboarding flow and neighborhood pages to align with our this focus. People creating accounts enter a location and are placed into their local neighborhood. They will be able to see others in their area, upcoming events, their local steward, etc.

We launched The Network State Camp (https://tns.camp/) and started selling tickets. We expect this to be a strong source of leads for neighborhood stewards.

Pausing Citizenship, Crypto Features, and Outposts

In our Cabin Labs - Spring 2024 update, we shared plans to pause work on Citizenship, Crypto Features, and Outposts. It’s become clear from our work with 🏘️ Building Neighborhoods - Cabin that this is the right path.

Citizenship isn’t the right fit for the current iteration of what we’re building due to a lack of clear relevance to local neighborhood participants (see more discussion here: Cabin Citizenship 2.0). As Cabin Labs continues to refine our focus on urban neighborhoods, we are going to keep simplifying our current app and deprecating features that no longer fit, including the primary crypto-based onboarding flow, roles, neighborhood voting, etc. We are also updating all of our content (wiki, blog, obvious truths, etc) to better align with the current state.

Instead, we will focus on building tools for local urban neighborhoods (more on this below).

Decentralizing Pods

Cabin Labs is focused on incubating bets and spinning them out of Cabin Labs as independent pods. I’m excited to see @Matai, who led the charge on an incredible set of Supper Clubs over the past few months, spinning out his own proposal to continue building in this direction Support for Community Gatherings

He joins @jxn, who has been producing Cabin’s excellent podcast, Campfire, under his own contributor pod (and who also made a guest appearance at Farcon shortly after the Creative Kickback he hosted for his budding Venice, CA neighborhood). @grin also spun out his own pod in January, and continues to work closely with Cabin Labs.

@savkruger remains a part of Cabin Labs and I’m excited to share that she is stepping into a full-time role leading the Neighborhood Cohort program! As the program gets up and running, we can evaluate when it can be spun out into its own proposal.

Looking forward

Our contrarian take on DAOs

Many of our peers from the 2021 vintage of DAOs are dead and gone. Hardly anyone is talking about or building new DAOs right now. In the First Fellowship retrospective, we shared this perspective:

@jon

While everyone else seems to be running away from the failures of decentralized internet organizations over the past 2 years, we are taking the contrarian bet to continue leaning into a DAO-ish model. While there are serious headwinds to operating this way, we believe there are also some big advantages to a well run decentralized community: legitimacy, local action, long-term bias, and lower core operating costs. For a city building project, these advantages outweigh the costs.

Cabin is a DAO—we operate via autonomous pods with loose alignment and high transparency. We push value to peer-to-peer interactions at the edges of the community.

At this retreat, we reaffirmed our belief in this approach. We are a DAO, and DAOs are not good at the same things companies are good at. The standard startup playbook is written for companies—applying this playbook to Cabin doesn’t work well. We are not going to follow this playbook.

We aren’t building a company, we’re building a city. To build a city, we need things that DAOs can uniquely create: legitimacy, local action, long-term bias, and lower core operating costs. We’ve been abundantly clear since the beginning that we would continue to build in a way that is community centric and long-term, even if it’s not what everyone else is doing right now. We think this is a unique advantage we have that will compound over time.

What this means in practice:

1. Continuing to support a network of local neighborhoods as our core focus
2. Keeping our burn rate low and finding long-term paths to financial sustainability
3. Co-creating our brand & values and building in public
4. Practicing governance of contributor pods that are loosely aligned towards our shared vision
5. Cycling in new stewards, contributors, and leaders over time

As long as we continue to see highly engaged community members implementing the Cabin vision locally and staying connected to the network globally, we are on the right path.

Tools for neighborhoods

Cabin Labs will continue to focus on how we can best support neighborhood stewards in building the social infrastructure for strong urban neighborhoods.

We believe that the biggest opportunities are:

1. Connecting stewards for mutual support in the neighborhood building process
2. Helping people find neighborhoods to participate in locally
3. Helping neighborhoods share resources and practice local functional sovereignty
4. Finding models for local neighborhood financial sustainability that also support DAO financial sustainability

In particular, we are exploring some product bets to support this direction based on learnings from our current neighborhood stewards—including shared neighborhood treasuries, a neighborhood “fix it” bounty app, and urban third spaces for families.

The current crypto meta

Memecoins and L3s were the biggest discussion topic at Farcon and we considered what role Cabin might play in the current meta. No plans here for now because we don’t think this trend is clearly enough aligned with what we’re doing. If we can find a way to incorporate lessons from these projects in a way that makes sense for us, we’ll reconsider—but we aren’t going to chase trends for the sake of it.

Closing thoughts

Cabin is the first network city. We are building something deeply special and unique. I see it in the relationships between community members, the passion of neighborhood stewards, the participation on this forum, the earnest grappling with hard questions, the burning desire people have for what we’re creating. Building a city is a long, slow, hard process—but the value it creates is deep and meaningful.

If you are reading this, you are a part of that process, and I am grateful for you. I am especially grateful for two groups: the stewards building their local neighborhoods into strong communities & the contributors dedicating their heartbeats each day to this mission. Getting to spend time at the retreat in person with many of our neighborhood stewards and contributors was an incredible reminder of why we do what we do.

[savkruger]

Woowoop! Thanks for writing all this up! I’m excited about our direction and curious what others think of it.

[camlindsay]

Thanks for this update Jon! Love this new direction and am excited to participate ◡̈

[Ktando]

Thanks for putting this together. Some questions/thoughts below. Look forward to hearing from you and hopefully others in the community too.

Re: Farcon, curious what the team took away from spending time with Crypto builders, given that it isn’t our area of focus? Anything relevant to apply to Cabin’s current roadmap and more immediate term goals?

On Neighborhood Cohorts:

What does good progress look like over the next 30, 60, 90 days? What are the goals for Cabin Labs? How are you measuring if your efforts are working?

On Steward Pipeline:

Similar to above, what are the goals we are trying to hit over a specific time period to measure progress? How are we driving people to the new onboarding/account creation beyond the Network State Camp?

“As long as we continue to see highly engaged community members implementing the Cabin vision locally and staying connected to the network globally, we are on the right path.” Where can we see the health of this engagement? Is discord the right place? Number of people commenting on forum posts? People voting on proposals? Number of people becoming stewards?

What do you all believe is the right sequencing when thinking about building tools? Have we validated neighbor stewards as something that’s working that it makes sense to begin building product to support them, or are they low-lift hacks to continue validating ahead of building product? I don’t know enough here, but would love to better understand what we’ve learned that gives us confidence to begin building more software.

[jon]

great questions, thanks @Ktando.

@Ktando

Re: Farcon, curious what the team took away from spending time with Crypto builders, given that it isn’t our area of focus? Anything relevant to apply to Cabin’s current roadmap and more immediate term goals?

1. We are building a network city. It’s still a DAO, and it’s still on crypto rails. A (loose) analogy here is a front-end / back-end software stack: we are focused on building for non-crypto-native people at the local layer, but we are still on backend crypto rails at the network layer. For instance, we have the hypothesis that shared assets are a key unlock for community building (eg neighborhood treasuries), and it’s almost impossible to create shared assets on traditional financial rails (see SLASH BLOG). Unfortunately, few people in consumer crypto seems to be focused on making things usable in the real world by normal people (and the US government has made consumer on-ramping painful), but this in itself was a helpful takeaway from the conference.

2. We still have a tremendous amount of brand equity in consumer crypto. People love Cabin and Cabin is a potent meme. The broader network state meme continues to drive engagement for us, and we are able to convert some of that energy into local neighborhood building. It’s worth staying close enough to the consumer crypto scene to understand trends that might unlock new opportunities for us. I wrote a bit about memecoins in the retro — I don’t think it’s the right fit for Cabin right now, but that was a path we needed to explore in the idea maze.

@Ktando

What does good progress look like over the next 30, 60, 90 days? What are the goals for Cabin Labs? How are you measuring if your efforts are working?

We continue to be focused on our goals outlined here: Cabin Labs - Spring 2024

We completed the Neighborhood Stewards Cohort 0 pilot and @savkruger has been building the curriculum and pipeline of participants for Cohort 1, which will launch on June 3rd. We’ve received ~50 applications so far and our goal is to have ~12 neighborhood stewards in this next cohort. This will be the core group of neighborhood builders that we will learn alongside as we explore the tools & products that help us build a network for urban neighborhoods for living near friends & family.

After pivoting, we are essentially rebuilding from scratch. The first step is to make something that a small group of people find deeply valuable—that’s what we’re focused on. We’ll know we’re successful when we start seeing transformative engagement from the neighborhoods & stewards that are a part of the cohort program, which lasts for 12 weeks (approx. the next 90 days).

We will be tracking cohort participation & engagement, neighborhood growth (engaged members & events), and the growth loop that we can drive from cohort participant content → future cohort applications. By the end of the Summer 2024 Cohort (September 4th) we should have a strong sense of if it is working well or not.

@Ktando

How are we driving people to the new onboarding/account creation beyond the Network State Camp?

There are 3 groups of people we are focused on onboarding:

1. Neighborhood stewards. This is the most important group, and our focus is on creating a growth loop from each Cohort’s build-in-public content & successes that helps us get more applicants for future cohorts.
2. Neighborhood participants. the cohort program itself will be focused on helping stewards grow engagement in their local neighborhoods.
3. Cabin.City account creators. We are reorienting the app towards location-based connections to people / neighborhoods in your local area, starting with onboarding. We expect this to be a valuable tool for stewards over time to recruit people locally, but it’s not the primary driver at the moment.

@Ktando

Where can we see the health of this engagement? Is discord the right place? Number of people commenting on forum posts? People voting on proposals? Number of people becoming stewards?

The most important form of engagement will happen in local neighborhoods that are a part of the Neighborhood Accelerator. If it’s working, we should see recurring local events, build-in-public content, engaged stewards in the cohort, and a backlog of people applying to join future cohorts.

@Ktando

What do you all believe is the right sequencing when thinking about building tools? Have we validated neighbor stewards as something that’s working that it makes sense to begin building product to support them, or are they low-lift hacks to continue validating ahead of building product? I don’t know enough here, but would love to better understand what we’ve learned that gives us confidence to begin building more software.

A major goal of the Neighborhood Accelerator is to use tools that don’t require any custom software to start, learn what new tools neighborhood stewards need, and build for them over time. In the mean time, we are rebuilding portions of the existing network city app to: (1) capture location info for people signing up organically and route them towards local opportunities, (2) reframe Cabin’s network city towards urban neighborhoods, and (3) clean up product debt from past experiments.

[Ktando]

Thanks Jon- I think maybe I wasn’t clear enough when asking about health of engagement. I didn’t mean specifically on the local neighborhoods, which i agree, we will see once the accelerator is running, but specifically to “The broader network state meme continues to drive engagement for us.” Trying to better understand what kind of engagement, and where are we seeing it? Is it citizenship, more subscribers to the email list, etc?

Appreciate the responses.

[jon]

The network city meme is a big part of our top-of-funnel—it’s the core, exciting idea that people want to be a part of. It’s the bat signal that brings people in; it’s how we’ve attracted our best contributors and community members. It’s how we’ve grown our newsletter, twitter account, app signups, etc.

A few recent, specific examples: We run the /network-states channel on farcaster, which has quickly grown to 5.7k subscribers (Warpcast). The Network State Conference converted hundreds of Supper Club participants, which provided content that has converted more people, and helped lead us to the insights that have become the Neighborhood Accelerator. The writing we’ve done on network cities & states has resulted in dozens of podcast appearances, prominent conference speaking opportunities, and group chats that have led to partnership opportunities (eg recently Prospera, Artizen, Yayem, etc) for Cabin. The Network State Camp will be another opportunity to bring people interested in these ideas closer to Cabin.

We don’t subscribe to the same vision of network states expressed by Balaji in his book, and we’ve always called ourselves a network city vs. a network state. But there’s no doubt that we are considered a leader in the emerging ecosystem, and to the extent that this ecosystem continues to grow, we expect this will be a core driver of growth and attention for Cabin.

[Zakk]

Jon, thank you for sharing this reflection. The big thing that feels like it’s missing from this is a discussion of the DAO’s top-level goals and what metrics we’re tracking to ensure progress towards those. Was there any discussion of the DAO’s goals at the retreat? You mention that this will be a long, slow, hard process - can you share some insights on what concrete milestone the DAO is focused on accomplishing next?

[jon]

Hey @Zakk, this retreat was not primarily focused on goal setting, because we already have goals for the season (you can see them here: Cabin Labs - Spring 2024).

Our primary focus this season has been on activating 10+ neighborhood stewards through our Neighborhood Accelerator program and building a pipeline of 20+ potential stewards for future cohorts. We are currently exceeding these goals while keeping a high quality bar for the program.

We ran a pilot Cohort 0 in the first half of the season with 5 neighborhoods, and used the learnings from that cohort to build out a complete curriculum and program for Cohort 1 (Cabin Neighborhood Accelerator - Summer 2024), which is launching next week with 10 more confirmed neighborhoods. We have recruited 83 applications for the program so far, which has allowed us to keep it selective and focused on highly committed participants. An additional 15 of these applicants were a strong fit, but not ready to start the cohort next week, so we plan to circle back and include them in the Fall 2024 cohort.

From here, our next milestones will be kicking off the Neighborhood Accelerator Cohort 1 on June 3rd and running the program over the next 13 weeks, through September 4th. Over that time, we will be evaluating the engagement and retention of the cohort, growth of their neighborhoods, and feedback loop from neighborhood content to new applications for future cohorts. Additionally, we will be working with this cohort to understand potential growth paths, tools, and revenue opportunities associated with developing neighborhoods.