Letter to Founders
12 Aug 2026
What if you could raise money in a way that helped you find your initial users?
That’s what we’re building MetaDAO to be. Think ProductHunt meets crowdfunding meets the stock market. 21 companies have raised $45M+ from 138k+ people here.
MetaDAO offers three main advantages over venture capital:
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Get distribution, fast: creating surface area for a community of owners to form around your company is an underrated growth hack.
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A clear path to liquidity: if you raise venture, your ability to get liquidity is non-deterministic and depends on factors outside your control. On MetaDAO, you automatically gain the ability to sell a portion of your stake as the business becomes more valuable.
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Raise faster: MetaDAO moves at internet speed: if you can convince a group of people online to be bullish your company, you can complete your round in as little as 4 days.
This doesn’t come without trade-offs. The two main ones are:
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Anyone can invest, including rude people.
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To protect against rugs, the money raised is held in a treasury that can be clawed back under certain circumstances.
But for early-stage consumer founders who want to win, I can’t think of a better option.
Charlie Dalton
Co-founder, MetaDAO
We generally look for early-stage consumer companies with highly competent founders.
Competence is subjective, but we evaluate things like:
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Has this person done anything hard to completion? Examples could include building & selling a business, creating a highly-used open source package, or running a successful Minecraft server.
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Do they deeply understand the market that they’re building in?
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Are they prepared to build in public - utilizing MetaDAO to its fullest extent?
Terms are set on a per-company basis.
MetaDAO is built for founders who want to truly align their users, so we have a higher ownership target than a typical pre-seed / seed fundraise.
Any startup can apply on our website, no warm intro needed.
If we’re interested, we’ll reach out and schedule a call. We move fast when there’s a fit.
Depending on the size of the raise, it may need to be part retail, part institutional. We can help introduce teams to funds to help fill out the round, or they can bring their own.