Cabin Labs - Spring 2024 Retreat Recap

[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.