Tiers and Labels — Who Builds, and Who's About To

One question, answered with observable evidence: who actually builds here, who is about to, and how do we know?

This document adds a second axis to onboarding. It changes nothing about how welcome the door is. It just makes the room legible — and it makes the community's job legible.

Learning is a journey, not a category

This is a community of learning. Watching is the first step of building, not its opposite. The moment you learn, some of what you learned turns into action. So the population here is not two groups (audience versus builders). It is a journey with three places on it:

The audience — in the learning. Watching, reading, testing, giving feedback. The mass, the demand, the market.
The potential builders — the part of the audience that could build if the friction were removed. A meaningful percentage of the people watching — no one is counting yet; the Registry will. They are the focus, not because they are rare, but because their friction is specific and removable.
The builders — people actually building: tinkering, shipping, operating.

Part of the DAO mission is to turn people from being passive to being active, from consumers to producers. That is what this document is for: making each step of that journey legible, so the community can act on it instead of only celebrating the people who are already at the end.

Two axes, one room

Axis	What it measures	For whom	Gate
1. Participation	Learning, watching, testing, feedback, showing up	Everyone	None. This is the warm axis. It is what the rest of the onboarding docs already describe well.
2. Building	Completed work, with real people on the other side	Those who ship	Observable. Derived from artifacts, never self-assigned.

Most activity on the warm axis is real and needed. The community runs on its audience as much as on its band. The audience is also the market: the people who use, buy, follow, and measure what gets built.

And the warm axis is the upstream of the building axis. A spectator today is the most likely builder of tomorrow. A model that draws a hard line between audience and builder cannot see the potential builders in between — and they are the highest-leverage population in the room.

The five labels

Labels are derived, not declared. You do not pick your label. Your label is the highest tier whose evidence you have, computed from the Project Registry. Self-saying "I am a builder" is not evidence. In the AI era, almost everyone has built something, so production is the floor, not the filter. What separates tiers is what happens after production.

Label	Evidence (all of it, observable)	What it means
Audience	Participates on Axis 1 (reads, comments, tests, gives feedback, attends). No own row in the Registry.	In the learning. Complete and valid on Axis 1. The demand. The most likely future builders.
Potential Builder	Intent is visible and the friction is named: answered Q5 ("building something, or dreaming of building") or Q7 ("what kind of help would move you") in the introduction, or has a Registry row whose `Looking for` column names a specific block (help to start, a teammate, a tool explained). Nothing shipped yet — the evidence is intent plus friction, not output.	The focus. The community's job is to remove the named friction with one next action, not to cheer them on.
Tinkerer	Has a Registry row with status `idea` or `building`, actively moving (the `Looking for` column is empty or about substance, not about starting). No completed public cycle yet. No real external responder yet.	The bench. Almost everyone is here at some point. The gate out is one finished cycle.
Shipper	At least one completed public cycle (e.g. the 90-day pop-up, with a public finish: the day-90 presentation with tracked numbers) and at least one real external responder (a person outside the team and the friend circle who used, bought, subscribed, or gave feedback on the thing itself).	A builder. The first tier that counts for bounties and DAO contribution credit.
Operator	Two or more completed public cycles, at least one self-initiated (started without a call, a prompt, or a cohort) and visible, attributed contribution to another person's build.	The core. The people the DAO funds and the projects lean on.

Removing friction (how potential builders move)

Potential builders are not lazy; they are blocked. The frictions are specific:

No time — the build has to fit inside the bandwidth they stated in Q6.
No first step — they have an idea and no idea how to start. The Registry idea row is the lowest-friction artifact that exists; "only an idea" is a complete row.
No teammates — they don't know who to build with. The Who-Does-What Map and the Sunday Co-op exist for exactly this.
No idea what to build — they have energy, no target. The 90-day Pop-Up Business Challenge provides one, with a deadline, an audience, and teammates who are counting on them.
Fear of showing unfinished work — the showcase thread already celebrates "failing the AI job, sharing anyway" (VainLab). That is the norm here.

How it works:

The maintainer reads Q5 and Q7 of every introduction. The reply contains one next action, sized to the person's bandwidth. Not five. Not a syllabus.
The 90-day pop-up is a friction reducer, not a credential exam: no start gate, any skill level, mixed teams, AI and system thinking as working tools. Its job is to turn "I want to build" into "I'm in a 90-day build."
Friction is removed by one specific person, not by more content. More content increases consumption, not conversion.
"Potential Builder" is a working state, not an identity. It becomes Tinkerer the moment the build actually starts, or returns to Audience when the friction becomes "I don't want to build right now." Neither is a failure; both are on the journey.

The evidence, precisely

Completed public cycle = a Registry row that reached shipped (or usable, with a public finish: numbers, a retrospective, and the closing decision made in public). In-progress work, however impressive, is not a cycle.
Real external responder = a person outside the team and the friend circle, who engaged with the thing itself (used it, paid, subscribed, filed real feedback). Audience size on social posts does not count; engagement with the artifact does.
Self-initiated = the project started without a call, a cohort, or a prompt. (This community has no start gate, so this is directly observable: the first post of the project's own thread.)
Contribution to another's build = attributed help in someone else's Registry row or project thread: a merge, a fix, a review, a documented hand-off. Not a mention, not a "good work" comment.

What does NOT count (anti-metrics)

The track you picked in the questionnaire (self-assigned).
Volume of posts, demos, or ideas. High volume with low completion is the Tinkerer signature, not the Shipper's.
Attendance, hours on calls, seniority in the community.
Number of Discord messages.
How long someone has spent in the audience. Time spent watching is not a demerit; it is the path of the journey.

Completion is the only credential on the building axis. On the journey, intent plus named friction is the only requirement.

How labels move

Audience → Potential Builder: intent becomes visible — an idea named in Q5, a build-help request in Q7, or a Registry row with a friction named in Looking for.
Potential Builder → Tinkerer: the build actually starts — the row moves to building. This is the conversion moment the community is paying attention to.
Tinkerer → Shipper: evidence appears (a cycle completes, an external responder shows up). The maintainer updates the Registry row. The label follows the artifact. No meeting, no vote, no announcement needed, though a shout-out in #introductions is welcome.
Down: labels are never revoked. A Shipper who stops shipping stays a Shipper with a paused row. Honesty about status (paused) is respected; silence is not punished.
Backwards: people also move back along the journey. A Shipper whose project pauses returns to the audience for a while and keeps the record. The journey is not a one-way corridor.
History is kept: what a person shipped is on the record. Tiers describe the present; the record describes the whole arc.

Same room, different people

The Sunday Co-op Engine, the Friday showcase, and the 90-day challenge are attended by people from every point of the journey at once. Nothing changes about how those activities work. What changes is that each person in the room now carries a completion signal inside the same activity: their Registry row, its status, their shipped count. The room stays open. The legibility is new.

Entertainment and building both belong here. The difference is no longer a vibe. It is a row in the Registry — and for the people in between, it is the one piece of help they asked for.

What labels are for

Bounties and DAO contribution credit follow the label, starting at Shipper. This is what "contribution over talk" means in practice: a rule you can point at, not a sentiment.
The focus: the Registry rows that are potential builders (idea/building with a named friction, or Q5/Q7 intent without a row yet) are reviewed at the daily onboarding call. One next action each.
Routing: a newcomer who wants to build gets pointed at the friction they named in Q7, and at the one next action that removes it. The 90-day pop-up is the fastest defined path across the whole journey.
Selection: when a project needs a core, the core is not chosen by who talks most in the room. It is chosen from Shippers and Operators, by fit with the project.
Nothing else. Labels are not rank, not status games, and not a leaderboard for the audience to compare against. They exist so the community can see its builders, so builders can find each other, and so the people in between get the specific help that unblocks them.

Corrections and additions: tell the maintainer. Keeping this document true is a contribution.