This is the second of a series of 12 discrete stories about how a variety of web3 projects (ranging from crowd-funding platforms and NFTs to DeFi and gaming) have approached decentralized community building. You can read an aggregated overview of insights across all of these projects here.

Juicebox: Community Synopsis

decentralization spectrum:

Fully Decentralized ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ ⬤ Fully Centralized

how it started: Sharks, Nouns, and the U.S. Constitution

In the fall of 2021, peri and jango quietly launched a new, crypto-native crowd-funding platform called Juicebox. This programmable treasury enables funders to receive custom tokens for their contributions, earning them fractionalized ownership in whatever project they invest in.

As jango and peri share in their respective founding stories (jango’s here, peri’s here), this project was inspired by jango’s experience working alongside iOS developers in Slack as part of a web2 project.

In his words: “We didn’t want to think about price, business models, advertising etc. We just wanted to build, and we didn’t like thinking of this structure with users on one side to pay fees, and builders on the other to create and get paid, since we felt like the folks using the app were a part of the building process as well.”

Once they realized the best approach was to abandon the web2 paradigms, they began diving deep into web3 structures, which is how Juicebox emerged. Naturally, the success of a crowd-funding platform is largely dependent upon users participating in the ecosystem, and two big projects seeded the initial traction phase: SharkDAO, a DAO to buy Nouns through collective purchasing power, and Constitution DAO, a “flash flood” campaign to bid on the U.S. Constitution at a Sotheby’s auction.

In both of these communities – which spun up suddenly and without warning – the Juicebox team leaned into the power of the “yes, and” (popularized by improv comedy groups) and offered up their platform as the mechanism by which each community could achieve their goals. Within only 7 days, Constitution DAO alone had brought in roughly $47M (in Ethereum) through the platform and dominated the tech news cycle in publications like Verge and even a front-page story in The Wall Street Journal. In the end, from an estimated 17,000+ people, with 5% of them brand new to crypto. Suddenly the power of decentralized ownership and funding clicked. That was only the beginning.

how it’s going:

The spotlight that Juicebox received through these two big initial projects accelerated their continual growth, in both product and developer adoption. As of July 2022, more than 700 projects have been powered by Juicebox from a combined total of 37,000+ unique users, with projects like AssangeDAO and MoonDAO featured on their homepage. The team has continued to adapt and iterate, both on the user experience and what it means to contribute as a developer to their ecosystem – an impressive balance to get right.

Today, Juicebox is among the cleanest examples of transparent, public documentation and onboarding materials, both for users (through their Notion site) and developers (where it takes mere minutes to locate their website source code, GitHub issues, and their product roadmap). Interestingly, despite the openness of the ecosystem and the size of the community (which numbers some 12,000+ members in Discord), the relative number of core contributors remains small – about 17 people, according to this Dune Analytics dashboard.

As is noted in their protocol docs, “The Juicebox protocol is a programmable treasury. The protocol is light enough for a group of friends, yet powerful enough for a global network of anons sharing thousands of ETH, ERC-20s, or other assets.”

JuiceboxDAO today maintains an “open contribution policy” that encourages proposals and includes different “Focus Areas” or collectives that each manage different components of the project, such as Peel, their front-end developers, to WAGMI Studios, who manages their visual identity. New contributors start by completing tasks, then working their way up through proposals with the possibility of a recurring payment for their ongoing work.

why it worked:

Whereas in web2, API documentation served as a large contributing factor to developer adoption, in web3, Juicebox’s team seems to have learned very early that the more they can expose to the community, the more builders they will attract. And after all, “devs like to dev with other devs.” This focus on transparency, also noted in their governance philosophy, is one of their superpowers.

The second major contributing factor is this project’s ability to tap into that special part of the human psyche that just wants to be a part of a greater collective, particularly in something that’s impossible to do alone. If you’ve ever rooted for an underdog at a sporting event, or empathize with the Hero’s Journey of many literary characters, you know how electrifying it can feel to jump on the bandwagon for something “just crazy enough to work.” Constitution DAO channeled the adrenaline rush you might get from a “Hail Mary” final play of a football game or a “full court Buzzer Beater” in basketball that somehow leads to an unexpected victory.

One of Constitution DAO’s core contributors shared with me that it was the most fun he’d ever had in just one week.

“It was incredibly stressful, I was getting 3-4 hours of sleep a night,” penryn said, commenting on the experience leading up to the bid at Sotheby’s. “But it’s such a beautiful example of everyone incredibly invested in this RIDICULOUS goal we set for ourselves. We made the front page of the WSJ in print — that’s something not a lot of people can say.”

how decisions get made:

• Core team: According to jango, there’s not much of a core team. As proposals have been approved by JBX holders, responsibilities have been delegated to individuals for day-to-day decision-making and action taking. JBX voters reflect on these past decisions and their results when evaluation future proposals
• Juicebox DAO members: JBX token holders are eligible to vote in their governance process, which runs on a 14-day cycle (this includes a temperature check, snapshot vote, multisig execution, and delay period)
• Juicebox DAO contributors: Complete tasks, submit proposals, be considered for one-off or recurring payment for work

top 3 web3 vibes:

• Quick agility to jump right into other community-led projects and build early traction
• Transparent & thoughtful “building out loud” process, in terms of documentation and recruiting
• Empowering people to just have fun

advice to founders & builders in web3:

It’s often helpful to know what ideas have influenced creators or builders. Below is jango’s list of books that have had a catalyzing impact on him – he wanted to share in case they may be a source of wisdom for others, too:

• Janus: A Summing Up, Arthur Koestler
• Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl
• Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton
• Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail, William Ophuls
• DAO of Capital, Mark Spitznagel.
• Americana, Bhu Srinivasan.

Special thanks to @jango and @penryn for their help on this narrative. You can also view the complete repository of articles and references across all projects as part of this study.