Eomji Park - Why Developers Drift Away: Strategies and Challenges in the Web3 Ecosystem

Transcript

[Applause] hello everyone can you hear me well lovely so uh first like a uh thank you Michael for kind intro and also etherum jury team this is always great to come to engage with local community today I'm going to share like why developers drift away but truly what we're going to discuss is like what is the motivation developers come to the ecosystem how they can stay and what kind of like strategy we can take so let's get started first uh inot Club perhaps some of you never heard about this or like heard about us summer but don't know what we are doing so we are education community so we are helping you to develop your career path through different types of like learning program

building program and also like a different career path program which is like but cams hackaton accelerators and Hecker house and so on so last uh years we have been working a lot with the different protocols and projects to uh run developer training program or early stage projects on boarding program we could see specific patents and today we are going to share about that so first thing uh perhaps some of you coming and thinking about what is the key like to uh have a lot of developers on ecosystem everyone is cing about this and uh I must give a lame answer the absolute answer is there's no one specific solution fit to every protocol maybe if you think about what protocol has the most developers maybe like three four come to your mind do you see any like

specific things they ordering together I'm sure sure that it's really difficult to find the mutual patterns like everyone doing that there's the best practice stuff so there's a lot of components you need to do but you cannot exactly copy the other strategy uh and there's like a multiple reason first is like open and decentralized nature of the web three ecosystem make us create uh make it difficult to creating like some developer retention like we cannot generate like how to say natural luck in in fact and this limited control over our audience is actually a feature that's what what we love about web3 like we come for permission list like system that anybody can come and build and

Deploy on your network and if they don't like they can leave so we actually like it but when we are on the shoes uh in the shoes of like on boarding developers we start to worry about how can you lock them in why we actually came to this ecosystem because we don't want to be locked by something so let's think about how can we provide specific value to Developers uh low switching cost so like as we discussed about like creating locking effects like a we have a very low switching cost you cannot like a um you cannot charge them a membership fee of the uh one year so that they will stay in your platform so it's rather easily people can come entering and exiting your platform so you can see that platforms are uh making different vampire attack especially if you have a

uh similar tax stack you will have like a similar events trying to luring others into your ecosystem which works or you need to think about that same way you can lose your audience as well so why developers are coming to web 3 uh I specifically said that why developers but we can ask same questions to ourselves as well because a lot of people are coming to web 3 due to in the beginning maybe similar but yet broad reasons one is like of course like a passion for learning something new a lot of PE people coming in rap 3 especially even during the be Market are like of people who are genuinely curious about something new that doesn't mean necessarily they are staying around because when they see another new and interesting thing they may run away but

this is still like interesting point that like early stage like developers uh users are coming into the market because they're very very curious and they will become your Market users and advocacy uh becoming an advocat and another thing is of course like attraction of the uh ethos like decentralization and autonomy now a lot of debates going on with a mass adoption making less dislike effs visible but still we cannot you know neglect that this is like a great ethos like driven a community another thing is of course you desire you have a desire to be part of some revolutionary shift so there's some technial like a paradigm changes happening every 20 30 years uh perhaps like a fast is like 10 years but

there are certain things you have missed when I was young you know like when people are building like a uh internet like I was like a user but I couldn't contribute at all when there's Doom bubble everyone making an app I was like basically teenager but then like when smartphone comes when people start to making app again like I miss that wave and I see that like a blockchain is another interesting paradigm shift and I want it to be in and I see that a lot of people coming in there and of course afterwards like okay we heard a lot that people come for tax thing for community so you see that a lot of smart people like working with you so those for thinking people collaborative Community make you stay and of course like last but not least we cannot light to

ourselves that a lot of people coming for the potential Financial upside as well but those like uh grips like it should be match your ecosystem needs so if you're building your own ecosystem or project and you want to onward a developer you need to think about why you need those developer in your ecosystem and if your stage of your projects or protocol is serving those let's say this is like a kind of simple ones like when you think about you want to raise your awareness you want to test your product Market feeds you want to like test your latest protocol updates support some toolings and infro projects by those developers coming in so you don't need to hire 100 developers where your community going to be building or like a finding some solutions like you

couldn't serve it yet so maybe your protocol is like a keep stopping like you need to kind of test it with a community members or nurturing ecosystem projects startups and finding talents if your ecosystem looking for developers and thinking that this is all you want at once you are having a very wrong strategy because not every one of these can come all at once together if your protocol is so young that there's no tooling and no like a uh jobs are like ready there how would you like a handle like some startup coming and building on top of it and they even don't have a basic tooling so I'm not saying one is Superior or it should be Bas uh chronical only but what I want to say is like when you're setting up the strategy you cannot simply ask your team uh

achieving these six goals with like a one thing uh should be like a different approach and different things by stage and program so let's think about why developers are coming but why they're staying in your ecosystem and not going away and before going further I want to ask passions what scale are we talking about because all of you want to have million de developers in your ecosystem in the future but what is the scale now we are talking about in the end of 2023 you know Electric Capital had a developer report about over ecosystem so there's a less than 7,000 full-time developer and then this definition of full-time developer is the people who work more than 10 days a month so it's basically like last than two weeks you

know and we consider as a full-time developer monthly active developer around the ecosystem is like 22,000 so let's making a simple like calculation over this like how many Protocols are are fighting for getting developers of course it can easily we can say 100 but let's say there's like a top 50 protocols actively working on onboarding developers if you divide like 20,000 by 50 it comes to like something like 400 500 developers might be active while only 30% of them are actually full-time so 150 fulltime why like 500 in average which when you ignore that ethereum has

the biggest community in this sense so in reality all of you going to have a smaller set so this simple math we went through so uh 400 like developers why 120 going to be a full-time developer in your ecosystem do you feel like it's small group or it's a big group of developers like 120 developers in your protocols small right feels really really small but let me ask this question if you're onboarding 400 developers every quarter do you have 400 jobs in your ecosystem do you have 400 opportunities they come not only taking one tutorial and finish but do you have any other opportunities they can stay and do something if you don't have maybe you don't want to on board 2,000 developers at once and it's

a little bit illusional so those retention huddles we need to think about why developers doesn't come back to your ecosystem and we are talking about like a high number why we actually don't have infrastructure or even opportunity to serve them so you you see that like there's like a little batches so that what we need to do is we need to improve the developer experience fun now by creating different types of opportunities it should be created like so they like you shouldn't just simply follow the other ecosystem how they're doing because there's a even huge culture difference and also you need to align that with stage of your ecosystem depending on if you're already launched your task net mayet if you already start

to have some startups that they start to offer some job opportunity or are you still like working on basic tooling if this basic tooling is driven by your core developer team or Community team so all these kind of things going to be playing a role to on board developers in your ecosystem so let's think about some simple funnel so there's like you know funner when you think about like oh there's a developers appeared you may encounter developers in maybe conferences like some general hackathons so that they may not take your Bounty but they saw your name they had a chat with you maybe like they saw you in some like a YouTube or Twitter space so like there's some example that they just discover you and they just know your name but they don't know exactly what

you are doing and they don't know exactly like what kind of thing they can do and then when it comes to a little more like a interest like they will start to look into your documentations they read some articles and here it comes that they be they may see that a lot of Twitter thread of their RS of your ecosystem they start to kind of get engaged and they are following those Market users or their friends are talking about like hey I was building this and they have something something or like there's some kind of basic education to CH they start to going to w much because in this evaluation stage they start to actually spend time because first one is like you know they didn't decide to spend time it just got exposed but at the second stage they start to like spend time and try to

evaluate if I want to use my time more and then they start to learn more so once when they said they're like okay it's worth it to spend time a little bit they will start to have some dedicated learning experience it means that they may follow your boot camps they will take some specialized workshop on specific SDK or like certain API they will start to build something uh even though there's no direct rewards there they will request oneon-one support with your team they will talk to your engineers they come to your office hours and after those like they need the opportunity they actually can build so they learn something and they start to build something and building is sometimes like they're very creative but sometimes you need to give some guidelines which can be uh one is like a very specific hack focusing on you know

your ecosystem or like you start to kind of make the meeting in the community events they start to feel more belonging in this building period period they're not only building projects they actually start to evaluate the culture of your ecosystem as well so they come so in the learning evaluation period they just check the documentation in the documentation if do documentation sucks they may just leave because they just don't see that why I need to spend 20 hours to figure out this bug to having a simple test when they pass this one they come to like a you know learning and spending some time after that like still they may not decide to build and they still going to think that this is worthy of learning and I got some new you know extra batch I collected but I will not

stay uh but if they said that okay this was quite like a a lean experience I start to build a little a little thing and then actually they start to evaluate your culture as well at that time it's really important that what kind of contact they have if you see like a one of the biggest sta communities it's crazy how many times they are spending time with the developer in 101 inter Direction I know this is not scalable but your Market users in the beginning the small set of people who going to be the advocate of your whole ecosystem you need to actually spend time with them because a lot of them going to be following your ecosystem in a way unreasonable way at certain point they like it then it's beyond the tag they like the culture I'm not talking about

fun way just like a meme culture but in general people start to like you know build a relationship they start to feel belong there you didn't ask but they start to explain about your technology to someone else and then their friends come and building together and this afterwards like you need to then have like this like lawyer users uh they become your Advocate you need to offer programs like ambassador program like maybe you need to create accelerator incubator grant program who want to be a startup in there or you offer Bounty program who doesn't want to fully commit but they want to freelancing arounds because like they can just take you know contributing to the creat a dashboard or they want to like fix some box for you you or different career opportunities and many more these are not set in stone

in exactly chronical order because maybe some of the events you want to use for different purpose but what I want to say is you need to think about how developers come to your platform how to discover and they become a lawyer and uh Advocate users in your ecosystem you keep need to provide certain opportunities otherwise you may just like going to say uh in a paper number like we have like 2,000 developers got than ecosystem but definitely there will not be 2,000 different activities around in the ecosystem so that's pretty much it in a nutshell and uh what I wanted to say is like obviously there's no single key and

one uh solution I can say that like in this stage of your protocol you just need to follow this formula but you can say that this is quite complex and still a lot of parts are not scalable solution but you need to go through the funnel so you uh my suggestion is like a per first you need to of course like talk to your own devil team deell is the best uh there's a several de here so de is the best like you need to talk to them how to build those like relations with de uh developers it takes time to see your community sentiments and what kind of like a opportunity you can offer and then of course you need to create all those educational contents around so developers going to be keep learning and going forward um

you're going to offer like job opportunity or any other opportunity they can stay longer and becoming a person who can contribute and they can create opportunity for someone else so that's pretty much it and if you have any question I'm very happy to answer I WR uh I wrote my Twitter accounts there so they like happy to uh happy to um send me a DM if you have any other cashion also inod Club so we are education Community uh we have a lot of different education program for developers so if you want to take some program as developer you're very welcome if you're ecosystem building um developer Community you want to discuss about education program I'm very happy to discuss as well thank you very much thank you so much uh omti do we

have any questions from the audience hello thank you um I actually have a question uh regarding the hackathon part uh we found out that a lot of people just show up for the hackathon they build on hackathon and then they just leave because the reason they were hacking on the hackathon is because of the bounty and because they they were actually interested in in continuing working with with the protocol and that was actually made us Drift from hackathons a little bit wonder what strategies do you

recommend or would you uh Define for making this people stay instead of just dring away so very good question so a lot of hackaton um this is not only actually the worries about the protocols but that's the worries about the hackers as well because often hackers are asking us that like okay I started to become a multiple hackaton winners and people are keep asking me to building on different protocols I don't know what to do uh and then even though they have some motivation to building like the same thing further and they start to get some like you know Temptation that others are asking if you build this one is it going to be like kind of short-term rewards so this one my suggestion is like if you're thinking about different types of hackers who come to build like a father

but who just like build for the Bounty are they bad actors I would say they are not actually Bad actors rather we need to design Bounty more clearly and cleverly so those bad so to say Bad actors who are perhaps like quite skilled uh yet they are not intend to say in your protocol you need to use them as a product tester so your hackaton projects that must be a tester so that there's a very specific new protocol updates you want to make them some hackaton project so that your devel team doesn't need to build a demo anymore so you need to make them build a demo for you you need to make them testing things for you those those hackaton prizes are kind of freelancing bounty so they're like there's a competition building uh they're building

a demo for you and then they're leaving your ecosystem still still fine they contributed their own way if their idea is very Innovative and open source because it doesn't exactly belong to them because it's kind of Open Source projects then others can build on top of it and I see it as a contribution so if you're rewarding certain hackers building exactly same thing then you should stop rewarding them but rather make them try very new thing a little bit like push the boundary and then they leave still it's worthy that you use them as your extended Dev real team and then maybe each time when you have a new feature to try out you can invite them again because they will be very interested in trying something new and then building a prototype for you and they will leave again which is

completely fine so my suggestion is like a please like a don't reverse someone building exactly same thing you need to perhaps even like a making a two different types of track for people who are making copying at is when they're beginner but if they're like a good developers even though they don't want to stay around use them as like part-time contributor try to build a ler if there like a making great prototype that's a great win any other questions do we have any other questions hi um so I thought you made a lot of uh really good points throughout the presentation and I'm curious if you

had any um stories or kind of real world examples that you could share of protocol or of projects that uh do those those things either really well or haven't done those things really well mhm so there's like a a few case I can share so one thing is like at the individual developer let's say so it's around four and a half years ago at the death connect Amsterdam we were giving a like this discovery time we were giving us some like a workshops on recast and there was like a a lady like sitting in the crowd and she was there even not because she wanted to come her friends was coming she was web to person she just came there she was developer at IBM or like some kind of web company and then she started asking some provocating

like a cions you know and after those Workshop like she sent a message that she's actually interested in and she wanted to learn so we provided like a solidity boot camp slot to her even though she didn't have any like um experience previously and then after like solidity and expert solidity you see that like a those people start to come to the hackaton and around um so last year in Denver so around a year later uh we got the news that she became a solution architect that open Zeppelin it took a year and then a lot of hackaton you want to have a kpi in like two days three days or in a month but it take a year for developer on boarded in the ecosystem and ending up having a job so that they can have a sustainable

their death journey by themselves not protocol injecting money to their like a uh their how to say like activities same thing with like startups like we got some startups like asking us they're like okay uh we are we are keep suggesting building something from scratch all the time so I'm not saying that every hackaton should be like this but in inot club what we do is like we allow people entering the hackaton with the existing project but what they need to do is they need to build something like a new feature on top of it and they will be only judged by the edit part so that if you're in in a motion of the longevity you can still incentivize them building something making a fair playground to compete with the others without stopping them and by doing that

you see that like Sometimes they come they don't need to ex let's say you're building a game and you want to testing a vrf you don't need to like a build a game in the hackaton but they were making a lunch menual selected vrf app which they're having existing project they're going to implement it so those kind of cated approach depending on the stage of your ecosystem stage of projects you need to offer differently so some success stories I will say is like those type of developers who successfully ended in the job or those hauton projects who successfully raised and then ending up in the ecosystem but there's a cases that also they move the different ecosystem depending on the support so like a those one um if you're protocol I don't know if you're protocol

uh a case or if you're the project case but if you're protocol you want to create your program and those like Market users you want to stay in contact very tightly thank you so much uh om uh another round of applause please okay