Agora - Optimism's RetroPGF Round 3 Summary

Developer Ecosystem

Mac Budkowski

Individual

0x3e...F760

macbudkowski.com

Founder & Host @ Web3Talks.xyz | Web3 Educator | Contributor #1 @ Goldmine3.xyz

Appears in

14 ballots

Contribution

Almost all my web3 projects were focused on helping crypto founders & devs. Primarily by finding know-how that's hard to get and sharing it for free. 1. Web3 Talks: a podcast where top crypto founders take us on a backstage tour and explain how they built their projects. It has 48 episodes so far, incl. interviews with founders of ZORA, WalletConnect, Farcaster, Zapper, Gnosis & many more. 2. Goldmine3: Listeners asked me for a way to browse through stories & tactics shared on the podcast, so I built a searchable repo of real web3 case studies. 3. Product communications guide: As I've spoken with 100+ crypto founders, I found they find it hard to explain what their products do. So I wrote a guide with 40 examples of good & bad practices. 4. GoerliETH: I distributed ca. 30,000 GoerliETH

Contribution links

Podcast's website (incl. links to podcasting networks)

Repository of growth/product/tech case studies from top web3 founders

Web3 product communications guide "How to explain what your web3 product does"

Faucet I co-created during ETH Denver that shared 20,000 GoerliETH

Goerlinator's contract

Me personally sharing the remaining 10,000 GoerliETH with ETH hackathons

My essays on blockchain & crypto

Impact

I noted that most of the content focused on app developers was technical. There were many technical intros, guides & documentation, but I felt that this “How to build a web3 startup” piece was missing. When I started (Nov 2021), if you’d like to learn this knowledge, you’d have to know a web3 founder personally or join acceleration programs where they’ve been mentors. But if we want more crypto apps, we need to make this product-building know-how accessible to everyone, regardless of their skill level, wealth & network. So I open-sourced it. Since the podcast is focused on niche, tactical know-how, it only had a bit more than 1,500 subscribers. My guide also had a bit more than 1,000 readers. But most of these people were crypto devs & founders, and some of them shared their praise.