Stop Using Spreadsheets to Run a DAO: My Personal Journey Into DAO Ops Chaos

When I Expected DAO Magic

When I first joined a DAO, I thought I was stepping into the future. Decentralization, community-driven innovation, and contributors rewarded in real-time—it all sounded magical. I imagined smooth workflows, automated payouts, and smart contracts handling everything behind the scenes.

Instead, I found myself drowning in spreadsheets.

The DAO I worked with had bounty trackers spread across Google Sheets, Discord threads buzzing 24/7, and Notion boards that broke every other week. Contributors would complete tasks, but payments often got stuck in limbo because someone forgot to update a cell or approve a payout. At one point, our bounty sheet had more than 40 rows marked “Done,”—but only 10 of those contributors had actually been paid. The rest were left waiting, sometimes for weeks.

That’s when it hit me: smart contracts don’t magically solve DAO operations. Coordination does. And the way we were coordinating was broken.

Why It Felt Like Bureaucracy

If you’ve been in a DAO for even a few weeks, you’ve probably experienced this pain yourself. On paper, decentralized governance was supposed to reduce overhead. In reality, most DAOs are stuck in Web2 admin hell—but with more moving parts.

Here’s what I saw firsthand:

• Manual bounty verification: A contributor submits their work, and then a member of the core team manually reviews, checks off, and updates a spreadsheet.
• Manual payouts: Even when the work is approved, another core member has to trigger the actual transfer from the DAO treasury. That often meant logging into a multisig wallet and coordinating signatures.
• Lost updates: When your “source of truth” is a Google Sheet and a Discord thread, things get missed. Contributors complain about not being paid for weeks because someone forgot to update the “Done” column.
• Fragile coordination: Notion pages, Discord bots, spreadsheets, Telegram pings—each workflow lived in a different tool. None of them talked to each other.

What was supposed to be decentralized, trustless, and transparent turned into a patchwork of fragile systems and constant human oversight. Instead of freeing us from bureaucracy, DAOs had just re-invented it—with extra steps.

And I was right in the middle of it, updating spreadsheets at 2 AM and chasing bounty managers to approve payments.

Realizing Something Had To Change

One day, I stared at our bounty tracker and saw 40+ completed tasks waiting for payout. Contributors had done the work. The DAO had the funds. But nothing moved because everything relied on someone manually pushing a button.

That’s when I realized we didn’t just have a tooling issue—we had a coordination issue. And if we wanted our DAO to grow beyond a handful of contributors, we needed a system that could run itself without humans babysitting every step.

That’s when I discovered a different approach to DAO operations—through workflow automation that didn’t require building a backend or hiring operations managers.

Escaping The Spreadsheet Ops Nightmare

Even though I only initially used Kwala to simplify our DAOS operations, I was tired of constantly manipulating spreadsheets or whisky texts and opaque notepads. Kwala made me set up here in a straightforward way the rules governing our DAO.

This workflow responded to triggers both on chain and off–such as GitHub commits, DAO votes, wallet signatures, or KYC checks between trusted partners of the community. After setting up the rules, the system took them over and carried them out automatically. This made for an instant weight off my shoulders.

Think about it like this:

1. A contributor pushes code to GitHub.
2. The system checks if the pull request was merged into the main branch.
3. It verifies the contributor’s reputation score or compliance status.
4. If everything checks out, the DAO treasury pays them instantly

No bounty manager. No spreadsheet. No Discord reminders. Just rules that run forever once you define them.

The best analogy I can give? It felt like Zapier for DAOs—but cryptographically enforced on-chain.

The Story That Changed Everything

Before we switched, one of our contributors worked for three weeks straight before seeing a single token in their wallet. Not because we didn’t want to pay them, but because their row in the spreadsheet wasn’t updated to “Done.”

By the time someone noticed, it was too late; it was embarrassing. The contributor felt frustrated, and our DAO lost credibility. A few others even hesitated to take on new tasks, fearing the same payout delays.
When we moved to workflow automation, that entire problem disappeared.

We defined a workflow builder rule:

1. The contributor submits a PR.
2. System auto-detects the merge.
3. It validates contributor conditions.
4. Treasury executes instant payout.

The contributor never had to chase us again. Payments became part of the workflow itself.
For the first time, I felt like our DAO wasn’t just surviving—it was actually scaling.

Workflows That Actually Excited Me

Once we got the hang of workflow builder, we started experimenting with all kinds of contributor logic. Some of my favorites were:

• Participation incentives: “If a contributor votes in more than 80% of proposals over three months, unlock a bonus.”
• Role-based access: Automatically assigning Discord or editorial rights once contributors have completed specific workflows. No more manual role juggling.
• Multi-sig approvals: We baked logic that paused payouts until two out of three DAO leads signed off. Clean, simple, and no endless Telegram threads.

The best part? All of this lived in the workflow builder files. No backend servers. No DevOps. Just declarative rules we could verify and trust.

Why I Trusted This Approach

That was my biggest question. I didn’t want to trade one fragile system for another.

Here’s why I felt comfortable moving forward:

• Workflows are signed by us, so we know exactly what logic we’re enforcing.
• They’re stored immutably on-chain, so no one can secretly change them later.
• Execution happens through permissioned and verifier nodes—and if a node deviates from the rules, it gets slashed.

That meant we weren’t trusting a single ops manager anymore. We were trusting the system itself. And as our DAO grew from a handful of contributors to well over a hundred, it all scaled without breaking.

Finally Feeling Like Real Infrastructure

Looking back, I realize what the true shift was.

Before, DAOs felt like an idea—a messy experiment in coordination weighed down by manual processes. After we automated our workflows, DAOs started feeling like infrastructure.

We could scale from 2 to 200 contributors without rethinking our entire ops process. Instead of chasing spreadsheets, we focused on incentive design, governance strategy, and actual community building.

That’s the leap—from “DAOs as a dream” to “DAOs as infrastructure that runs itself.”

What I Took Away Personally

When I first joined a DAO, I assumed inefficiency was just part of the game. Spreadsheets, delayed payouts, and endless Discord pings felt normal.

But once we automated our operations, the entire story changed.
Contributors trusted the system again. We stopped losing hours to admin tasks and started shipping results.

And here’s my biggest takeaway: a DAO shouldn’t run on spreadsheets. It should run on rules. Because once your rules actually execute themselves, you finally get to see what decentralized coordination was meant to look like.

In our case, Kwala helped us build Web3 better—by turning messy processes into verifiable workflows that actually run themselves.