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Posted on May 21, 2022Read on Mirror.xyz

How To Serve Web2 Developers To Join Public Chains

After the collapse of the Terra economic system a few days ago, a very interesting thing happened, Polygon offered a good support plan to terra developers, Polygon wanted to pull terra development resources join them, At the same time , other projects followed Polygon's example. I'm familiar with this kind of thing, during the public chain war in 2017/2018, this kind of thing happened a lot, I had led the team to implement this kind of "resource grabbing" strategy, so I'm familiar with the process, at that time many smart developers were already implementing "cross-chain operations" in their products, where developers wanted to get support from multiple public chains, and at the height of the scramble, developers treated public chains like grocery shopping at the market.

The above story may raise a few questions for operating staff of public chains, firstly how do we solve the competition from other public chains? secondly, how do we attract developers to join and stay in the community? Combining the past experience and understanding the real situation, I would like to analyze and try to optimize this problem from the opposite direction?

To put it simply, the public chain community should reduce the sense of competition, and instead, public chains should effectively combine and maximize their mission, technical capability and service capability and who consider the pain points of developers and how to provide services , developers is like team members/partners, and think about the developer community from this perspective.

The real developer service is sticky, which includes excellent development support, product operation support, human support, financial support, security guidance and all the support that developers need.

This kind of statement seems to be very common, nothing unusual, but it is really a completely different feeling in daily work, for example, many web2 companies are good at doing hacking growth, but it can not run a DAO community for a long time, this subtle difference is easy to let people take the wrong path.

In the crypto world, we always have to put service,contribution,fun at the first level. once I ran a public chain technology community, I realized that serving developers well is a very challenging thing to do. We need to know what are their real pain points are and we could know how to accomplish that. The portrait of developers is not uniform, just like our colleagues, each has their own characteristics, and developers have different abilities, and even their passion,guts, courage, sense of humor, and desire to communicate are all subtly different.

Suppose we make a list for each developer's pain points and needs, if the list contains 10 sub-categories, you will see the detailed difference here, their intensity of needs is different, and all this needs to make targeted support. As a public chain project party, you can fully combine the following roles and see yourself as a combination of these roles: a member of the development team, a translator, a product user, a team manager, an NBA coach, a VC investor, a product manager, both a staunch supporter of developers and a moderate critic.

Take Flow, IMX, Gala, Polygon Studios for example, although they all claim to be the best game ecology, their differences and moats from each other don't seem obvious. If Alice is a game team leader, she could only see from the publicly available information that each platform has a slightly different technical framework, a slightly different project history, and they all have some incentive programs, but who has the better infrastructure? Who can give me the best support when she run into problems? Which platform should she develop on?

If above questions are solved, the question of public chain competition is also answered. with my past experience of operating public chain technology communities, I would like to propose some pain points and solution ideas for your reference.

Now let Alice and Bob play the roles of game developers and public chain team's support team respectively, and then let's propose developers' pain points and public chain team's solutions . from my experience in supporting technical communities, the usual concerns of developers contain the following categories:

  1. Lack of human resources: Alice has very strong experience in game system design, but now there is a shortage of artists, operators and public chain SDK developers, how to find support?
  2. Weak development environment: Alice wants to decouple the game design and economic system design and smart contract design as much as possible, so she wants to have mature function interfaces for them to use, she doesn't want to develop these contracts again because she is scared by the legendary Crypto hacker, hah!
  3. How to design the Token system: the ability to publicly issue game currency, design open game system and trigger them be organically combined in a game, FT and NFT can flow freely which is too attractive, but this is also a very big challenge, if you look at AXIE and Luna, you will know how difficult it is to design a robust economic system, so Alice what to do?
  4. System security issues: Alice just heard that AXIE was attacked, the NFT selling system of some projects was attacked, the economic system was consumed by vandals, smart contract vulnerabilities were discovered by hackers, what should be done to prevent it?
  5. Financial support problem: Alice is concerned that during the game development progresses, they need external financial support more and more, maybe the team's own funds will be depleted in two months, how to get financial support? Where are these funds? Who can help her? If the fundraising is successful, what kind of agreement should be signed with VC investors, or how should the team manage these funds?
  6. Fiat OTC issues: In many countries and regions around the world, cryptocurrencies are not free to circulate freely with legal tender, such as India, China, Vietnam, and even in the U.S., free exchange of fiat currency faces certain difficulties, such as how to make sure the other party's fiat currency is compliant and not black money, and many times they put themselves in a legal gray area when exchanging, which may put themselves and their team face legal risks, which also leads to them not being able to feed their team with the game revenue. This has become a very big obstacle for developers to join the Web3 field.
  7. Legal compliance issues: how to adapt the in-game economic system to the legal restrictions around the world, for example, some regions stipulate that Crypto Token is not available for public fundraising, but buying NFT is indeed possible, or certain well-designed airdrops are also allowed, how to introduce produect to the game players in the Crypto world outside and how they buy in-game assets with fiat currency in compliance conditions. These designs and infrastructures are very challenging to build. Points 6 and 7 prevented many talented development teams from entering this world.
  8. Web3 culture meme:how do you master Web3's meme culture and leverage your game's advantage? What is the difference between a DAO and a traditional game user community, and what is the basic idea of DAO operation? How to lower the threshold of game users?
  9. Market partner issue: how to cooperate with CEX and market makers? How to find the key external partners for the game and how to cooperate with them (Cooperation in Crypto may be different from traditional business cooperation, such as formal sharing contracts, etc.)
  10. Open questions: there are some big open questions, such as what is decentralization? The relationship between privacy and freedom? What is the relationship between cryptography, mathematics, cryptocurrency, freedom, and what does DAO mean?

Next let's research how to solve these problems as much as possible, what are the solutions? How should public chains do it? What is the goal?

Note: the great services are sticky, and services that are sticky and popular with developers are part of the moat of the public chain ecosystem.

Classified from the perspective of resources, the pain points of developers can be divided into three dimensions:

  1. Many problems that developers need to solve by themselves, the community and the public chain team can provide certain consulting and education work, such as contract development ability, community operation ability, all these pain points can be found in the community and which are with suitable candidates to solve, the public chain provides the support is resource integration.
  2. There is another kind of problems that need to be solved by the public chain team, such as the development of public chain infrastructure, robust and rich development libraries, stable coin system on the chain (such as Flow's FUSD), system security support, ecological fund, promotion support and other kinds of services.
  3. The last category is the basic services that require public chains to integrate with traditional commercial companies, such as OTC compliance channels and legal compliance service support that developers are concerned about.

How to carry out the specific work? Let's take Flow as an example of how to achieve this goal in an effective way. A broadly inclusive developer community (Flow Developer Community) and a unique gas pedal (Flow Accelerator DAO) are probably the best vehicles for integrated developer services. The former aims to serve the widest range of developers and meet their basic needs, while the latter focuses on game project incubation.

Assuming that Web3 game products like AXIE and STEPN can be incubated, the resulting benchmarking effect will accelerate the development of the entire ecology. The first two can jointly carry out such services with the community and ecological partners, such as Flow setting up a service organization like SeedClub or supporting the community to set up a similar organization. I think the service form like SeedClub will strengthen the stickiness of the developers of the game public chain, which is conducive to establishing a real moat and broadening the diversity of games.

SeedClub is product acceleration service, founded in the summer of 2020, the original SeedClub started as an 11-person Telegram group chat and has grown since. The main vision is to help great dreamers and communities get started. SeedClub's acceleration direction is very focused, mainly on social projects.

The acceleration Dao is the center of the SeedClub ecosystem. It continues to incubate community projects through 3-4 phases per year. The selected teams get 6-8 weeks of coaching in each phase, and finally help bring their projects to market. During the 6-8 weeks of coaching, there are 2-4 online meetings per week. Either for coaching on specific directions, internal discussions, matching resources, developing collaborations, and strengthening connections with other incubated programs.

In my experience.this job requires intelligence, experience, and a spirit of service, and I know what’s the challenge in this task and i’m in charge of similar job in the incubation lab of a top exchange. This job requires someone with real entrepreneurial experience to guide it, and you can imagine being the head of YC and you know how difficult this job is.

The basic logic of SeedClub's services can be seen in their community, where their coaching is mainly adapted to the different stages of the project.

For example: finding like-minded friends, finding builders, developing a small community with a common mission from a dream; Token model and strategy, how to issue token, when to issue token, whether to raise money, whether to airdrop, how to avoid Token from entering the hands of speculators; fundraising guidance, treasury design, legal compliance, team member recruitment, service revenue, DAO cooperation and other topics. each direction is coached by the top practitioners in the Web3 space, such as founders of mature projects.

In addition, each accelerated project is assigned a WayFinder, who is a precise match of experts from the collaboration network based on the project's characteristics. They provide silent support from day one, playing the role of the accelerator team's strongest supporters and most important resource pool in the early stages, the team can find WayFinder ,whether it's a technical problem that needs to be fixed or a need for cheering when things get tough.

The acceleration Dao itself has developed a standard complex SOP process. From how applications are organized and screened, how the curriculum is set up and how each project is matched with mentors and resources based on its different characteristics. Even applications for eliminated projects enter a process that provides feedback as well as some help for the projects.

Since SeedClub is a community that needs to be profitable, it has Dao token economy, but if the public chain team establishes such a service system by itself, it could not design own Token, but I would suggest a public chain like Flow to support the community to establish a service organization like SeedClub, which can design its own token, and the Flow team can participate in it or not. depending on the resources of the Flow team, and then the Flow team can focus on operating the Flow Developer Community, Accelerator DAO is only a part of the broader Developer Community support service, and later we will discuss the specific work plan.