Hey everyone, it's been an insane last two months. Over 35,000 devs, $200,000 in booked revenue, and multiple web3 companies created + launched by buildspace alumni. Crazy to think 6 months ago we were building ZipSchool -- a product for kids K-5 (you can still use it if you want hehe).
TLDR: We've become to default place devs come to join web3 (ex. see here, here, here, and thousands of others here). We'll also be raising money. Focused mainly on raising from founders/ex-founders. If that sounds like you, pls DM me :).
Going to combine the November and December update here.
Quick reminder. In the previous update I sent at the end of October, I said:
- We were going to double our base of devs in November.
- We'd continue to experiment w/ having companies hire from the buildspace network. At the end of October, we had recruiting partnerships w/ ~20 web3 cos like Uniswap, OpenSea, Alchemy, and others. If they hired someone directly from buildspace, we'd receive a 20% recruiting fee. We basically became a mini web3 recruiting agency to learn. But, in November we decided to ship more of a self-serve product because demand from cos quickly became unsustainable.
- Doubled from 12,000 devs in October to 24,000 devs.
- Went from 7000 unique enrollments in October to 8200 in November.
- We ran a single cohort with 4500 devs. previously, our largest cohort had 1745 devs.
- Shipped buildspace pro, a product for companies to browse through users who have created detailed work profiles on buildspace which you can do yourself here. Recruiters at companies simply connect their wallet, and browse. Sorta like Linkedin for Web3.
- Shipped partnership w/ Solana (5th biggest crypto) and created two projects here and here.
- Shipped partnership w/ Avalanche (11th biggest crypto) to create a DeFi project here.
- Shipped partnership w/ ThirdWeb and created a project around DAOs here.
- 176K impressions on Twitter in Oct to 1,580,000 impressions in Nov — no paid marketing.
- Went from 24,000 devs in November to 35,000 devs.
- Went from 8,000 unique enrollments in November to 14,000 in December.
- Ran a single cohort with 5500 devs, previously our largest cohort had 4500 devs.
- Onboarded 40 companies to buildspace pro and had ~5,000 new work profiles created by users interested in being seen by web3 cos, up from 1,000 in November.
- Grew our open-source content to 1.2K stars and over 180 unique contributors here. When we started this initiative in October, we had ~300 stars and ~40 unique contributors.
- Locked down $200,000 in booked revenue from a large protocol I won't mention right now. The protocol has already sent this $ to our account, but this isn't realized revenue. We promised this protocol 2,000 new developers using their protocol ($100 per dev). When we do that, it's realized revenue. It's works like an ad.
- We have multiple other protocols interested in a similar deal with minimum budgets starting at $250,000. After a protocol spends the minimum budget, they'd continue being charged for new devs. We're not fully confident on this model as a long-term plan, but, will continue experimenting with it.
- Tons of new projects and companies launched by our alumni. Highlights: WAGMI Cards (#1 on ProductHunt), TitleDAO (YC Alumi), W3 Crypto (made it to TechCrunch), Luumen (crypto accounting tool), DoggosNFT (over $333,000 in total volume) and so many others.
- A majority of the revenue we're bringing in we'll be putting into a public, on-chain treasury that users with buildspace nfts can govern to do things like get irl events funded (ex. buildspace tokyo is already being worked on by our users in Japan), give grants to support projects coming out of buildspace, or whatever else users propose! Our users are creating the value, so, they deserve to capture it and we feel this is a good start.
- We're still a team of 3 people total. To continue our growth, we'll be working on hiring a dev advocate/content lead to continue building out projects, a designer, and two full-stack engineers. If interested, definitely DM me :).
- Aiming to be at 50,000 devs by end of January.
See here and scroll/read for an hour. One of my favorite trends is people meeting up irl to work on buildspace (ex. here, here, and here). We even have users make top tier memes now lol (ex. here and here).
One of our engineers, David, has exited buildspace to focus on some web3 ideas of his own! He was there a year ago when we were ZipSchool and were working on a custom, live video platform for kids to learn science from top teachers. And, he was there for all the crazy pivots in between then and now. Without David, we would have never been able to iterate at the speed we did in the last year. So, thank you David!