Building a developer ecosystem

Transcript

please join me to welcome anthonyy on stage I need a mic since it's 8 minutes I'm definitely setting a timer right uh hello everyone uh nice to

meet you I'm Anthony uh from inco Club this is a Whistle Stop tour where I try not to insult any Partners or clients um about building a developer ecosystem um I'm British um not French um French surname very very British from London um I run something called Cod Club we're a developer education Community some of you might have done our events before hackathons boot camps accelerators helping people Advance their career in emerging Tech web 3 and Ai and there's a nice uh fluffy uh pitch which I've already uh said um this is mainly aimed at protocols with lessons if you are a developer that you should take uh if you are trying to advance your career in web through um but

broadly it's lessons from having worked with many many protocols Over The Last 5 Years seen all the good bad bad and ugly uh and how they should actually be building their developer EOS system most do not follow these tips some the very successful ones absolutely uh do so two perspectives um 75% of it is the protocol hopefully the most useful bit is if you're a developer how knowing this and what protocols do and don't how should you adjust your strategies accordingly so first this is kind of a stupid question um why should you build an ecosystem most protocols um do try and do it some don't it's actually not the thing you necessarily need to do if you're a protocol um uh there's kind of a a token incentive thing here you can be very successful as a protocal with a

very high market cap Without Really Ever engaging a developer or having anyone build anything like particularly good look at look at meme coins but there are meme chains there are chains who don't really try and do it at all um that's because fundamentally you've got to ask yourselves a question with web 3 in general but particularly with protocols um is the product the token the gambling assets or the protocol itself uh given the number of users in web 3 often it is actually the token so if the use the product is the token and you're a Founder who knows this you're probably going to optimize for pumping that and that is not the same as building a developer ecosystem building an ecosystem is hard fundamentally what you're trying to do uh is create value value is startups um things that

themselves have lots and lots of value that that's hard um if you're a Founder who managed to create one your own startup your own protocol that was hard enough to try and see others uh particularly during your token investing um might be pretty hard uh to do but it's clear that um the long-term win uh if you want to build a protocol that is sustains its its market cap um that actually fulfills its technical Vision it's technical promise you probably need to build an ecosystem um uh but but this is hard you f fundamentally betting on people to become full-time developers um on your stack on your technology um um uh being your evangelists for you so here's basically um uh um a strategy

um so to speak um fundamentally you need a narrative and the tech don't always need the tech but fundamentally you're going to need a narrative to develop us and narrative is not the same as as good Tech you have there are many protocols who perhaps um are very good at convincing developers maybe they're a fork of something popular um uh um but don't fundamentally have anything technically brilliant um and some have phenomenal Tech but are terrible at talking about it um but broadly here's the E step guide that schools should follow but do not follow at step one is you got to build the tag um this should be obvious lots of protocols might launch a token without building the tech so how the hell is anyone going to build on it uh that sounds far more exciting than this um uh one is you've got to

build the tech tech your protocol I'm sort of um assuming protocols do that for free two is decide the narrative you'd hope when fundraising The Narrative is clear the narra being why should you build on my chain um most people don't though um because um building something technically elegant that might make a token look particularly interesting is not the same as this is whyi as a developer would bet my career on it and build a startup on it um it might be a long very long-term vision for the future that you raised on that um is not something that people can necessarily build on now but step step three is is assuming you do have um uh Tech and narrative you need content that matches that narrative and content is things for developers to sync their teth

into events like this um eth brog things where people can engage with particular set of themes particular set of challenges and and build on it and and this is hard I mean code tries to work with protocols or our longest term clients to do just this what is the you have a technical pitch you want to make to developers what is the actual um strategy um the Cadence of events um uh the the way you want to engage developers the incentives you had that matches that narrative and and and again it's a very hard thing to do if assuming you've got all these things right you've got the tech you've got the narrative uh you've got um a Content strategy an event strategy now you need to build an actual strategy to on the ground acquire developers and startups again pretty

hard um it's doing events like this it's doing your own events it's doing online events um and um deciding which ones to do is a pretty hard decision some Protocols are very aggressive the ethereum community is most of it success probably has come from an outstanding Community approach LED in most part by decentralized groups like this eth Prague and eth Global on the hackathon side um who did it on their behalf um other protocols don't have that luxury they have to be more aggressive and centralized if they're going to acquire developers and startups so this is an event strategy with clear progression between events um um it cannot be a scaton approach um um salana have done it extremely well the salana hacker houses the salana online hackathons it's

not random it's clever I know for a fact because we work with them a lot they have a list of every developer and their ecosystem um uh uh tagged by GitHub um they know what events are going to help increase that figure and increase the quality developers that they have tags um it's a very clear strategy and Cadence becomes the most important thing and this is what most protocols usually fall down on they' actually it's not about the event itself it's about what comes next and how many events there are we found it often takes maybe four five six even up to 10 events for a developer to become fully acquired by a protocol and I'm kind of using also the Electric Capital reports it's fantastic if we haven't read it of full-time developers to Define full-time developers but it probably takes like 10 events and so

like 10 events might take two years to do so your event strategy has to be two years long and then You' got event to execute that strategy which is Trivial in a way but very hard um um actually to do so then you collect the results then you nurture the teams and the end goal is you need to fund these people if you are a developer here and you're betting your career um you need to be funded somehow you're going to be a found are going to need a job there needs to be uh funding and ideally you want external funding uh VC funding to come into place and if you do this well you'll get lots of positive ex analyses and you could expect if this goes really well the better ecosystems the polygons the salanas the the ethereums lots of good protocols minimally a few very good

protocols but but value creation that sustains a token price and an ecosystem and minimally you're going to have a core set of evangelists evangelists so I have 45 seconds for for for the developer side um you are bets on ecosystems maybe a lot of you bet on the ethereum ecosystem or or or or instances of the ethereum ecosystem I think you should identify the ones that the high the high kened Cadence ecosystems the people who actually know that it takes 10 events to acquire you and have adjusted their strategy accordingly because they'll still be there in a year two years providing funding and opportunities where others may not you this is the most important thing you should look for um fundraising data this is the key barometer of if an ecosystem is going to be able to support you in the long run are things getting VC

funded like right now or in the next 6 months um things like Dove metrics historically but there's if you just Google crypto fundraising rounds this is the key indicator um soly we use it to to look at ecosystem success and ecosystems we want to work to work with adds in code and you should play a high Cadence High curiosity game which anyone attending events like this especially if you're not native to to Prague is already playing this game so in conclusion ctis are misaligned duh it's crypto tokens um uh if you're a protocol you need a clear event strategy um uh that is almost certainly two years two years long and has Cadence um and um progression of events more than anything else uh than one or two high quality

ones and unfortunately the results will postdate tenure that most people as life cycing a startup and a protocol is two years long these results might take three or four years so um you may not even see the fruital labor again incentives dis aligned but consistency and Cadence on both sides is almost certainly the way forward and again it's hard to do it in crypto because we are so short-termist naturally by the vitude of token price and I've got a minute over time I will quickly shill stuff um if you like incode events or you want to do more events we have lots of events we have an IG L hackathon going on now a web 3 AI hackathon a Brussels Hacker House with a web 3i Day reaking Day and a modular defi day and lots of boot camps where we train hundreds thousands

of developers every corer where you can get the most um thorough training You' expect in web 3 and not pay a single penny uh thank you very much thank you very much Anthony for this speedrun uh with that