April 2022

I started Dmod when I was 15 at the very end of 2020 wanting to fix a broken system on Discord. A system where community management teams, most frequently made up of very young students, were spending vast portions of their days keeping members safe and engaged in exchange for no pay or recognition.

I wanted to build an ecosystem where community admins and moderators could receive educational resources, impactful tools, and paid work. To achieve this, we built a dedicated moderation bot jam-packed with advanced features. We contributed to and wrote content covering various topics in community moderation, management, and news. Most notably, we created a community agency called Dispatch, made up of ~30 experienced community moderators and admins.

This was a huge learning experience for me. It was the first time I was managing a team larger than 5 people. It was the first time I was managing money - we reached $300 MRR in our first 2 months of starting the agency, which at the time, felt massive. I was learning how to handle internal disputes, training, culture building, and social media management. I made more mistakes than I can count, but we also had some great wins.

Here are some of our wins:

• At our peak, our team moderated 2,658,876 people
• All of our code, finances, and roadmaps were 100% publicly available from the very start
• Dispatch became one of the first examples of community managers and moderators for hire on Discord
• Our team was made up of people who had experience working in official communities such as Streamlabs, Mario Kart, Wendy’s, and many other impressive company Discord servers

While it’s true that we had our wins, it’s obvious that we’ve also fallen on harder times. The past months have been rough on the team and our supporters, and I’m thankful to everyone who’s lent a helping hand in one way or another over the past year. I can’t help but believe there’s more to work on here at Dmod, so when Alpaca, the community manager for Trey’s Trades, offered to take things over, I was more than happy to accept.

My dms are always open on Discord and Twitter, never hesitate to reach out.

Sincerely,