Ask: Searching for our founding designer. If you know one that'd be interested, please connect me with them farza@buildspace.so! And if you yourself are interested, drop me a DM w/ something you've worked on I can check out :).
Hey all! Last two months have been wild -- going to combine our January + February update into one.
TLDR -- in the two months we've grown from 35,000 devs to 50,000 devs, did an additional $1.6M in booked revenue from protocols partnerships, and are now profitable.
Still $0 have spent on marketing since we started buildspace. We'll likely change this in Q2.
January we spent almost 100% of our time hiring and raising money. We have now gone from 3 people to 8 people. We also have good news around our round, but, that I'll share in the next update!
Excited to welcome:
- 🇦🇪 Farhaj - growth - ex-founder of OKO
- 🇪🇸 Tair - eng - ex-founder of Dockbit
- 🇩🇪 Yannik - eng - ex-founder of Mindpalace
- 🇨🇦 Aleem - eng - ex-founder of PadawanDAO
- 🇳🇿 Raza - eng - og buildspacer, a rock of our community
February, we spent a majority of our time trialing candidates, locking down new partnerships with protocols, and executing on previous partnerships -- here is one we launched w/ Polygon.
Our core metrics have actually been down as we focused mostly on hiring. This is fully my fault for not focusing on hiring earlier so we could continue the momentum. Lesson learned! Regardless, we had 28,680 project enrollments, 24,787 new accounts made on our platform, and 7,000 new profile updates -- these are people filling out more details about themselves (ex. work history, projects, etc).
Retention is our #1 focus -- buildspacers have very little reason to come back every week or even every month at the moment. Previously, this wasn't something we cared about a ton because we originally created buildspace as this one-and-done type experience with the intent of getting people hired full-time.
Since then, we've moved away from hiring as the core focus of the platform and are moving more towards being more of a network of web3 builders and web3 companies which we already have a ton of hunger for.
Some things we'll be doing:
- Discord has become impossible and pretty noisy/low-signal. We'll slowly be getting off Discord and will be building experiences within our product for our community, starting with our community treasury voting system.
- We'll be shipping a way for our users to actually begin connecting with each other directly on the platform. We also have over 200 web3 companies we're already working with that will also have access and be able to connect with buildspacers.
- We'll continue shipping new content in-house w/ some protocols we've partnered with. But, we're now also working directly with content creators who will begin offering buildspace nfts at the end of their courses (ex. top crypto courses, udemy courses, massive youtubers w/ courses, etc) -- it'll be plug and play.
- These protocol partnerships/content partnerships we do have essentially become ads -- where companies pay to access the buildspace network. We're still experimenting with different models but ads seem interesting to us if our NFT-holders capture a % of the value. We don't really have an interest in creating another ad network that just rips off users. So, experimenting with how our NFT-holders can capture value is something we'll be messing with. But, our monetization experiments are still early.
Our community continues to amaze us. Over January and February we've seen some amazing events that were fully self-organized by the community + funded by our treasury.
- buildspace africa -- 200 attendees in Nigeria and they even made a hype video.
- buildspace india -- planned for April 3 in Bangalore.
- buildspace women -- initiatives to for women in web3.
We've also funded a couple of other groups:
- buildspace gen-z -- a group that runs hackathons and workshops for our gen-z members.
- buildspace classic -- a group that runs cool initiatives for our members over 40.
- buildspace founders -- founders in web3 that our treasury will grant capital to.
Wild.
Wow, that's pretty crazy momentum! Onwards and upwards!