Note: draft for discussion
1. TL;DR
Cabin has an exceptional vision and hundreds of amazing people have contributed their time, money, and expertise to experiment with ideas related to its vision.
I have spent the last two months engaging with every active member of Cabin willing and interested (18 individuals) about their questions about Cabin, their vision for it, and their ideas for its business models. My questions have been summarized at Cabin's $2.7 million problem - Questions about Cabin.
I’ve spoken to every single person I could about the problems facing Cabin, possible solutions, and opportunities, and this is the best project I could design to achieve Cabin’s vision given the input provided thus far.
I don’t see why the DAO wouldn’t want to commit 50% of its remaining funds (~$1.25m) to make bets in 2025 with 50% reserved for scaling the most successful. What are we waiting for?
In the spirit of Cabin’s vision, “Do the Thing” and “Do-ocracy”, I have worked collaboratively with active membership to prepare a holistic 6-month plan to get Cabin to profitability, requesting an investment of 396,000 USDC. This plan will leave approximately $2.3 million in Cabin’s treasury for further initiatives. I suggest Cabin aims to deploy $850k of this in additional projects in 2025.
With this 396,000 USDC investment, I am confident that we can bring Cabin to profitability within 6 months and establish the structures, policies, procedures, membership approvals and systems to service its members and prepare to scale.
Our goal will be to secure $1 million in sales by project closing on July 31st, 2025.
This initiative establishes:
- A Cabin Council of 7, with @eileen as its Chair, to oversee Cabin’s various activities and guide this project (42,000 USDC);
- A Cabin Steward, me, acting as an “Interim-CEO” on behalf of the membership and reporting to the Cabin Council (90,000 USDC);
- A Cabin Secretariat and Steward Support Team of 3 full-time staff devoted to Cabin’s governance and serving the needs of Cabin’s members (45,000 USDC);
- A Market Research, Sales and Business Development Team of 4 full-time staff devoted to Cabin’s profitability (105,000 USDC);
- A pool of 50,000 USDC to be rapidly deployed to the five ideas with the highest likelihood of cashflow positivity submitted by January 15, 2025;
- Budget for Operations, Technology and Development (18,000 USDC);
- Budget for sales, marketing, advertising, data acquisition, events, conferences, subscriptions, travel and other discretionary expenses dedicated to making Cabin profitable that will be reported on weekly to the Cabin Council (46,000 USDC); and,
- A Cabin House for five of us to work on Cabin’s vision (free!).
This initiative will engage the Cabin community and its stakeholders in a comprehensive process of sensemaking, social listening, and business planning to execute a strategic, financially sustainable path forward—and make Cabin profitable.
I’ll pledge to #buildinpublic in Discord every day and maintain complete transparency and openness. My goal is to deliver impactful results aligned with Cabin’s vision, benefiting its stewards and their communities.
396,000 USDC
30,000 ₡ABIN
2. Background
I have spent the last two months engaging with every active member of Cabin willing and interested (18 individuals) about their questions about Cabin, their vision for it, and their ideas for its business models.
I’ve spoken to every single person I could about the problems facing Cabin, possible solutions, and opportunities, and this is the best project I could design to achieve Cabin’s vision given the input provided thus far.
Since a long discussion with @jon that began on October 24th, 2024, I’ve been working on how Cabin can partner with local governments to achieve its mission and reach profitability.
Inspired by @camlindsay 's concept of a “Neighborhood OS” I’ve been developing this idea and working on many additional ways Cabin’s membership could serve municipal governments. I’ve built this plan in consultation with Cabin’s membership, municipal staff in Elora, Ontario, and community development professionals.
I also have the benefit of growing up in a home filled with municipal governance - my dad was the CAO of the Toronto Harbor Commission and then the City Manager and CAO of Orillia, Ontario (Orillia ontario - Google Search). His partner is also in municipal economic development. This gives me a unique insight into the buying potential of the municipal market, their needs, and how to approach them.
My work in ecovillage management, disaster response and community development for the UN and INGOs in various developing countries gives me additional context into the global opportunities for Cabin.
I’ve tested the ideas in this plan with more than two dozen professionals in the sector and I’m confident in their stickiness. I’ve tested my ideas with every member of Cabin willing to contribute and I am confident in Cabin’s community to succeed in these ventures.
3. The Plan
I propose to act as Cabin’s Steward (for lack of a better term for an “Interim CEO”) for seven months to get it to profitability, establishing a Cabin Secretariat of three full-time staff to support and manage the Cabin community under the guidance and direction of a seven-person part-time Cabin Council, elected by the membership. In addition, I propose to establish a four-person Market Research Team to explore and develop business opportunities, and a fund for rapidly deploying capital to our membership’s best ideas for cashflow positivity.
The Cabin Council
This plan establishes a Cabin Council of 7 Cabin contributors and token holders, with Eileen as its Chair, to oversee Cabin’s various activities, guide this project, and provide leadership and direction on behalf of Cabin’s membership. This Council will supervise this project and its staff, hold weekly meetings, and hold the team accountable for delivering results.
We would trust Eileen to guide the development of the Council concept consciously and work towards establishing permanent governance structures for the DAO while shepherding the development of the policies, procedures, and proposals Cabin needs to make. Over the coming weeks she would solicit interest from members interested in the Council and bring forward the appropriate proposals and elections to execute this process properly.
The Cabin Secretariat
The Cabin Secretariat will begin by sensemaking, listening and planning to determine the community’s ideas for itself, identify its best possible ideas for financial sustainability, and determine the highest impact uses of the $2.7 million Cabin currently has available to achieve its vision.
The Cabin Secretariat will systematically interview every interested Cabin contributor, steward, investor, NAP participant, token holder and stakeholder to gather their input, ideas and suggestions for the Cabin community. We’ll use the tools and processes recommended by the community such as https://pol.is and will collect transparent data on our findings. We’ll document the process and utilize AI to summarize these discussions and provide weekly data-driven reporting on our progress to the community. Their mandate is to understand and support Cabin’s stewards, as well as explore the various ways Cabin’s members could help Cabin make money and vice-versa.
I believe we have a fundamental mandate to support the livelihoods of our stewards and help them make money, so we should be working on figuring out how to sell their skills to municipal audiences, offer trainings in their community, and run profitable community initiatives like clubs. We should also figure out how to lend our network’s credibility and talent to our stewards as they develop their projects, helping them with project design, fundraising and business development.
I also believe we should establish some sort of social media sharing network where we work together collaboratively to enhance the voices of our peers by re-sharing and widely re-distributing each other’s content.
The Market Research, Sales and Business Development Team
The Market Research Team will systemically reach out to the staff and mayors of hundreds of municipalities to explore their needs and design solutions for them, evolving into a Sales and Business Development Team over the course of 6-months as Cabin’s offers are clarified. Their mandate is to make Cabin money.
Our Market Research Team will initially focus on exploring how we can serve municipalities through products and services such as the Neighborhood Accelerator Program, grant delivery, program management, event management, disaster preparedness, disaster response, club management and more.
This team will establish a CRM system like Hubspot, acquire data on municipal prospects from a market information provider like ZoomInfo, and utilize various sales automation and AI tools to create an automated pipeline of prospect outreach to engage with. As we understand our market better, our research team will transition into Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) building a pipeline of leads for the Head of Sales and Business Development to close.
The Neighborhood OS Concept
I believe that we have a winning concept with a Neighborhood OS that would allow a Mayor, Community Manager, NGO Manager, or any citizen to manage and implement programs in their community.
Inspired by Cam’s original idea, I have spent quite a bit of time developing the concept for a Neighborhood OS. I have posted a draft concept note at My draft ideas for a Neighborhood OS.
It is my personal belief that we can put together some sort of a package where a Mayor could deploy $1 million in community funding through 50 stewards that participate in our NAP and utilize our Neighborhood OS to host events, run clubs, manage volunteers, offer training, establish network marketplaces, organize crowdfunding, prepare for disasters, respond to disasters, engage in community planning and dialogues, and other awesome stuff, creating an active digital ecosystem that enhances the IRL neighborhood experience. This could be packaged as a $250,000 service.
This is, however, just my best bet given all the information available to me. We will of course let the Market Research Team prove there is a PMF for the above concept before requesting substantial development funding, ensuring we co-create the Neighborhood OS alongside our clients according to the needs that they are willing to pay for.
As an MVP we could begin simply with deployments of Lemonade (https://lemonade.social/), Notion, and similar tools without having to invest in upfront development costs.
Why municipalities?
Municipal governments are elected and funded by their community to provide services to their community. By focusing on people with salaries, budgets and teams, we can have a larger impact than by focusing on identifying individual volunteers interested in improving their community.
Consider simply the impact of coaching someone who works 40 hours/week on their project vs. 4 hours/week.
Sales workflows also become straightforward. We can simply procure data on our ideal customer profile from sources like ZoomInfo and set up a strong workflow with automation and human talent. (can you help with this? DM me!)
We also have a very clear target profile to advertise to via direct marketing - whether with advertising, email campaigns, calling campaigns, snail mail, or any other technique we might try.
This also gives us a clear content creation strategy for our newsletter and our social media - the best practices, tools, technologies, trainings and events for community management, community development, community engagement, community building, etc., sourced from anywhere in the world.
There are many other programs we can offer municipalities to support their community management and community engagement efforts, such as the services a Professional Membership Association might provide and expanded programming like the NAP. Cabin has hundreds of members with skills and talents that we can deploy.
Other solid ideas ready to be tested with municipalities include:
- Expand the NAP idea of community/neighborhood accelerators with additional programs of different design such as 10-week emergency preparedness accelerator, volunteer recruitment accelerator, community management and engagement accelerator, club management accelerator, regenerative community food production accelerator, etc.;
- Professional Membership Association for Community Managers with a ~$2,400/year membership fee and correspondingly high-quality services;
- Emergency preparedness and resiliency programs;
- Co-development of third spaces;
- Grant management;
- Volunteer management;
- Volunteer and club coordination toolkits with guides, weekly meetings, and a suite of recommended and supported apps;
- Technical capacity building, courses and training programs on utilizing AI, PM tools, KM tools, CRMs, workflow automation and other advanced technologies in municipal governance either online or in-person;
- Permaculture design courses;
- Ecovillage planning courses;
- Community fund management;
- New resident integration and onboarding;
- Community event planning;
- 1-on-1 coaching and mentorship for Community Managers;
- Community mapping initiatives on OpenStreetMap for critical lifeline infrastructure, resiliency, and to ensure all businesses are correctly visible online;
- Cabin stewards could moderate virtual community platforms for their IRL communities;
- Conducting community surveys and data collection;
- Impartial hosting of community dialogues;
- Conflict resolution;
- Speaker series programs;
- Community mapping of the 4Ws of community: Who (org and individual level), What, Where, and When and the creation of community wikis; and,
- more to come!
We’ll also explore partnerships with granting and funding agencies that are in alignment with Cabin’s values and mission.
Pilot Investment Deployment Pool
In addition, I propose immediately setting aside a pool of $50,000 to be somehow be distributed to the best 5 proposals for cash-flow positive businesses that support Cabin’s mission by January 15th, 2025. It is imperative we quickly deploy capital to support Cabin’s members and mission and rejuvenate interest in the project:
- Dan’s MTNHAUS project posted recently represents a perfect example of the ideas we’d like to solicit: https://snapshot.box/#/s:cabindao.eth/proposal/0x0d4be7de9d703668f420b291ce857a74e4bc66b7debabae19e68e955c841138b
Cabin House
I’ll rent a Cabin House and give free rent to four members of the team to stay with me IRL and we’ll document our work daily on Cabin’s social media. I’ll do this out of my own compensation in order to foster collaboration, cooperation, co-living, and embody Cabin’s values while we #buildinpublic on Discord and social media.
Plan Impact
Collectively this plan will dedicate 20 people to Cabin’s mission, working over 1,500 hours per month on behalf of its members and will stimulate the immediate creation of five business lines as alternative revenue streams.
Our goal will be to book $1 million in sales by July 31, 2025. This could be as simple as selling four $250,000 packages of services to municipalities.
4. Team
- Sponsor:
- Steward: @nickinparadise
- Members: @eileen
Deeply moved by Cabin’s vision and purpose, I’ve been slowly engaging the community, observing, interacting, learning and ideating for the past few months, and having 1-on-1s with almost every active member of Cabin’s Discord. I’ve got a passion for Cabin’s mission, great ideas for the organization, and the skills and experience to deliver results.
I’ve been working on the ideas in this document since October 24th when I first e-met Jon and have since successfully tested my ideas with a variety of municipal staff and stakeholders over the last few weeks, so I am confident these ideas will succeed.
My degree is in business and entrepreneurship and I’m a proven social entrepreneur who has been involved in 9 startups, 3 M&As, and 1 IPO.
I’ve been a digital nomad for 17 years, before it was even called that. I lived in my first Cabin-esque permaculture-designed ecovillage, Maia Earth Village in Palawan, Philippines (http://www.heartofsoil.com/) starting 12 years ago, and have visited more than one hundred permaculture-designed projects over the last decade.
As a disaster responder, I’m experienced with being a newcomer to uncomfortable and challenging situations with the responsibility of bringing diverse coalitions together to collectively develop and then implement solutions.
I’m convinced Cabin has amazing potential and want to invest my time in its success.
More on me at https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickinparadise
@eileen is a long-time Cabin member since the in-person Neighborhood Zero who appears to have the community’s universal trust. More about Eileen @ https://www.linkedin.com/in/eileen-vert-jubilee-2790ab150/
5. Goals
Objective: make sense of Cabin’s opportunities and the best ways to serve Cabin’s membership such as by giving them livelihood opportunities
- Key Results:
- 100% of Cabin’s contributors, investors, NAP participants, token holders and other stakeholders are invited to 1-on-1 interviews to gather their input, ideas and suggestions for the Cabin community and how to make it profitable
- 300+ interviews conducted with systemic data collection
- Weekly reports on progress to the community
- Final report after 3-months
Objective: understand how Cabin can profitably meet the needs of municipal staff, elected officials and community leaders interested in improving their communities and neighborhoods
- Key Results:
- Market research calls conducted with at least 500 municipal staff and politicians
- Multiple profitable business plans proposed to the DAO
- $1 million of services sold by June 30th, 2025
Objective: deploy $50k across 5 stewards as seed capital
- Key Results:
- Provide 5 contributors capital from a pool of $50k to start cashflow-positive businesses that benefit Cabin stewards and themselves by January 15, 2025
Objective: establish a Cabin Council
- Key Results:
- Elect a 7-person Cabin Council led by Eileen to guide this project and hold it accountable
- Propose appropriate governance and accountability policies and procedures to ensure good governance
Objective: re-engage Cabin’s membership
- Key Results:
- Weekly progress reports to the community
- Weekly community calls
- Establishment of project teams, committees and councils to work on projects for Cabin
- Solicit interest in Campfire Season 4 and similar content from the community
- Identify ways of supporting the livelihoods of our stewards and help them make money such as by selling their skills to municipal audiences, offering trainings in their community, and running other profitable community initiatives developed by Cabin
- Identify ways to lend our network’s credibility and talent to our stewards as they develop their projects to help them with project design, fundraising and business development
- Establish a social media sharing network program to promote our community’s projects
Objective: operate a Cabin House
- Key Results:
- Five Cabin collaborators brought together to work on Cabin’s vision
- New content generated weekly
- Cabin’s IRL vibes celebrated on social media
6. Proposed Budget and ROI
6-month project with 1-month of ramp time for @nickinparadise to hire:
- @nickinparadise as project leader and “Cabin Steward” @ $15k/mn
- Head of Market Research and Business Development @ $10k/mn
- Cabin Secretariat of 3 full-time staff @ $2.5k/mn = $7.5k/mn
- Market Research Team of 3 full-time staff @ $2.5k/mn = $7.5k/mn
- Cabin Council of 7 volunteers committing 10 hours/week @ $1k/mn = $7k/mn
- Technology, development and operating expenses @ $3k/mn
Total: $50k/month
- $300k for 7-months operations as per above;
- $50k for a Pilot Investment Deployment Pool to develop cashflow-positive businesses for Cabin; and,
- $46k for sales, marketing, advertising, data acquisition, events, conferences, subscriptions, travel and other discretionary expenses dedicated to making Cabin profitable that will be reported weekly to the Cabin Council.
396,000 USDC
30,000 ₡ABIN to be distributed in a 1:10 ratio to USDC amounts above
GOAL: $1,000,000 in products or services sold by July 31, 2025
This plan will leave approximately $2.3 million in Cabin’s treasury for further initiatives.
I passively suggest Cabin aims to deploy $850k in additional projects in 2025.
7. Timeline and Deliverables
Most deliverables and associated OKRs are presented above, in addition to those we will deliver:
- Weekly reports from the Cabin Secretariat and Market Research Teams including financial reports;
- Regular events and training;
- Improved engagement from existing members;
- Growth in new membership;
- An amazing experience for Cabin’s neighborhood stewards;
- A revitalized ₡ABIN token and Cabin community; and,
- A grand time along the way.
This 6-month plan would begin approximately January 6th, 2025 with a 1-month ramp-up to hire the team, wrapping up by July 31st, 2025.
I’m a disaster responder. I bring people together and get things done. Lets go.
