The Mulligan

Keeping up with LinksDAO 24/7 so you don't have to

Welcome to the Mulligan, the official publication of LinksDAO!

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Week 10

Hello!

Over the weekend, it came to my attention that all of the new golf clubs are out now. By that I mean on Sunday I went to Golf Digest’s website and saw that the magazine had put out the 2022 edition of its annual “Hot List” and I read the entire thing instead of writing the intro to this newsletter. 

And you know what?

I felt underwhelmed. Or maybe overwhelmed. Actually I was overwhelmed by the number of new golf clubs out there, yet underwhelmed by how little I felt a burning desire to actually buy any of them. 

Yes, TaylorMade has that fancy driver that’s entirely made out of carbon or whatever, and Miura has yet again won the Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence, its iron designs reaffirming that golf clubs can be so beautiful and well-crafted that they approach the status of “art object.” Still, I don’t know about you, but I don’t actually need any of that stuff. 

The thing about golf, I’ve come to realize, is that it’s a game whose biggest draw to me is providing a sense of fellowship. Clubs are tools that we use to play the game, but no club can replace the feeling of comradery that comes from sharing a beer with your buddies at the turn, or being paired with a rando at the first tee and then spending eighteen holes learning about their life, who they are, and what makes them unique. 

At LinksDAO, we love golf. But first and foremost, we're a community. 

- Drew M

Highlights

SXSW Registration a Roaring Success

The pace at which we’re moving here is nothing short of remarkable. It’s only been 52 days since mint and, as of 2/22, we’ve officially sold 90 percent of the 125 tickets to our first IRL event in Austin, TX… 72 hours after registration went live. 

This would not have been possible without the contributions of our eight working pods. They deserve the spotlight in this week’s edition. Shoutout to:

• The Events Pod for hatching the idea and tackling the logistics of the entire trip, from arrival to departure.

• The Dev and Operations Pods for spinning up a token-gated website in less than a week.

• The Moderation and Community Product Pods, as well as the entire Community Team, for making themselves available all weekend to answer any registration questions that members had.

• The Partnerships Pod for putting together attendee merch bags filled with exclusive LinksDAO gear.

We’re quietly stacking up quality tour wins while keeping our eye on our ultimate goal, winning majors and taking over the golf landscape. Be sure to stay tuned for announcements on a couple incredible events we have in the works. 

Genesis Edition Merch Vote Completed  

“Genesis Edition” has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? This past week, the Partnerships Pod held the DAO’s fifth Snapshot vote to determine what gear they should prioritize for the launch of our merch store. 

Eight distinct types of merch were proposed:

• Polos

• Sweaters/Crewnecks

• Quarter-zips

• Vests

• Hoodies

• Jackets

• Hats

• Headcovers

After more than 1,100 votes, polos and quarter-zips complete with the LinksDAO logo, sourced from Holderness and Bourne, took the top two spots! 

“But this isn’t a crypto thing! I didn’t buy an NFT just so I could get the same polos and quarter-zips as everybody else,” you may find yourself exclaiming. Fear not...

NFT holders will have early access to the pro shop upon launch as well as subsequent merch drops thereafter. The storefront will be token-gated to ensure members benefit from the proposed discounts. Additionally, Global and Leisure members will have access to an exclusive set of gear that the broader public will not. 

Full Snapshot vote details can be found here.

Community Spotlight

Member's Tournament 

Ultimately, we're a golf DAO. So what's on the itinerary for our inaugural event in Austin, TX? That's right, you guessed it... golf. Last Wednesday, shortly after the Mulligan was released, the Events Pod announced the names of the two courses LinksDAO members will be playing during our SXSW takeover. The first member's tournament will be hosted on Sunday!

• Saturday: Lions Municipal Golf Course

  • First public golf course in Austin

  • Hall of Famer Ben Crenshaw's home track

  • Home of the Firecracker amateur tournament since 1945, past winners include Ben Crenshaw and Tom Kite (captain of the 1997 U.S. Ryder Cup team)

• Sunday: Fazio Foothills Golf Course at Omni Barton Creek Resort

  • Signature Tom Fazio design with hazards purposefully favoring the right side of each hole

  • Texas roller-coaster type feel with elevated tee boxes and significant elevation change

  • GolfWeek's Best Courses by State (2021)

Community Team Interview

As promised, community team interviews will be featured each week in the Mulligan going forward. Next up on the tee, Ryan P of the Events Pod!

1. What’s your name, age range, location, and handicap?

My name is Ryan! I'm 32, currently located in Pinehurst, North Carolina and have a 0 handicap. 

2. What initially piqued your interest about LinksDAO?

Golf has always been “my thing”. I had been dabbling in crypto for a while and never saw anything in the NFT space that piqued my interest until I discovered LinksDAO. Now that I’m in, the lightbulb has gone off, and I’m more excited than ever about the promise of Web3.

3. Are you a contributor? If so, what projects are you involved with, and in what ways?

Yes, I'm definitely a contributor. I co-lead the Events Pod and am heavily involved in the planning of the first IRL event at SXSW. Also doing a bit in the way of partnership development.

4. What’s your favorite thing about the LinksDAO community?

I’ve seen a lot of different internet-based golf communities and apps in my life, and they all felt very “forced” and insincere. My favorite thing about LinksDAO is that we actually have a real and growing community of people that genuinely care about building something special together.

5. Tell us about your favorite golf memory or memories.

I was fortunate enough to play collegiate golf at Marquette University. Got a ton of stories from those days, some of which will may never get told. But, one of the best parts of those years were simply getting to travel the US and play a bunch of great golf courses.

6. What’s in your golf bag?

I have a mix of all sorts of different equipment in the bag. Favorite club is the putter (when it gets hot, watch out!). Favorite shot to hit is a low flighted wedge. 

P.S. Bez and Jim joined Golf Business Live with Jay Karen and Don Rea on Youtube. Highly recommend. 

Analytics

LinksDAO Scorecard

This past week LinksDAO officially turned two months old! I don’t know how you all celebrated, but since it’s still too cold to play where I live, I spent some time watching this incredible video on speedrunning Wii Sports Golf. Yes it’s a thing, and yes it’s even better than you think it is.

Anyway, since our community is now more than 60 days old, let’s take a look at how our Discord is doing with some fun stats:

• More than 33 percent of all accounts in the Discord are less than two months old — a strong indicator that LinksDAO is responsible for onboarding a lot of new frens into the space. Glad to have you!

• We sent more than 12,000 messages last week — that’s ~1700 a day, up 23 percent week over week — I guess we have a lot to say!

• The average “communicator” in the Discord sends over eight messages per week — markedly higher than the Discord benchmark stat for an average server. I wonder how many of those are “wen SXSW?”

• Out of the members who joined us at mint, fewer than 298 have left, putting us at an almost impossibly low churn rate.

• Our membership has continued to expand, and now encompasses 41 countries across the globe.

So what do those stats above really mean? Well, if you carefully take them all and put them in a supervised highly complex machine learning model with reinforced inputs, you only get one output: WAGTBAGC!

- Austin L

Twitter Muse