At this early stage of the development of PubDAO, we are building the base layer of our service model, a model which could be called Content as a Service, or CaaS.

The term CaaS has been used before to refer to content creators delivering content straight to consumers, but in our case we create content for clients who in turn deliver it to consumers.

Our service model consists of a demand side and a supply side: clients who post tasks to the PubDAO Dework base, and content creators who apply to claim them. When a client approves the application of a given creator, after reviewing the creator’s portfolio, the creator then begins working on the bounty. Eventually the creator submits the specified content to the client, who ultimately has to sign off. At this point, the client triggers the payment to the wallet of the creator, according to the amount specified in the task, and the creator can keep a tokenized version of the task as an on-chain attestation to their work.

These content creation tasks follow a template format informed by community deliberation. When a client posts a content creation task, the task needs to specify certain information which creators deserve to know before applying, such as the payment amount, the estimated time commitment, and a description of the content in question. This template is liable to undergo changes as this service model scales and encounters obstacles, and should ideally balance the interests of the clients and the creators. Once such a balance is struck, and a general rhythm found, this base layer can become a self-service layer, and PubDAO can focus on building out a premium layer.

Basic and Premium Service Models

If there are clear guidelines for how a client can be vetted, onboarded and oriented into PubDAO, they should be able to go about sourcing content in a self-service manner, without guidance from PubDAO managers. These managers, who essentially work with clients to source high quality content from the pool of PubDAO creators, can then begin to reserve this service for premium clients, who could pay a premium service fee that the self-service clients would not have to pay.

Depending on further legal and logistical considerations, this premium service fee could be split between the manager and the PubDAO treasury, thus constituting income for the former and revenue for the latter.

Whether or not this premium service layer will have managers dedicated to clients, or merely grant clients access to PubDAO’s pool of managers, is to be decided. In the former scenario, a manager can build up a rapport with a given client, and develop an intuition for the sort of content that client needs. In this case, the client could pay a monthly service fee which is routinely split between the dedicated manager and the PubDAO treasury, in the manner of a commission.

Whereas in the latter scenario, the client could have access to a variety of managers, each with different areas of expertise. Here, the service fee may be on a task-by-task basis, with different managers taking a cut, in the manner of a finder’s fee.

In addition to increased access to PubDAO managers, premium clients should also be able to enjoy a suite of other benefits, to justify the service fee. What these additional benefits are, and how they can be embedded within a sustainable business model, is to be determined.

Talent Liquidity as a Service

The content bounty status quo that PubDAO is responding to largely consists of companies using their own web3-integrated trello boards to attract and manage content creators. Such a diffuse landscape of siloed content creation opportunities can be difficult not only for creators to navigate, but for clients to regularly source content from. One option is to onboard in-house content creators, but this implies a steady enough need for content.

In the arrangement PubDAO is exploring, clients can plug into a community of content creators, and benefit from the competition entailed by posting a bounty visible to the whole of said community. In this respect, PubDAO is something of an inverted flea market: instead of sellers setting up camp amidst a swarm of buyers, buyers set up amidst sellers.

One of the difficulties we may encounter in this model, however good a problem it may be, is an overabundance of low-quality writer applications for content tasks. Of course, the client is still ultimately able to approve both the application of a given creator to start a task, and the work submitted by that creator, but having to sift through dozens of applications at the onset may be a friction point.

Hiring a PubDAO manager to help separate the signal from the noise would here indeed be considered a premium service, but ideally such premium services won’t have to consist of solutions to problems we ourselves create.