Holding Up My End

Had an epiphany a couple weeks ago.

Innovation in #Web3 is like feeding a kitten in a Dethklok mosh pit: if nobody looks out for you, you're catnip sausage.

It's incredible ANYBODY pushes through the noise to try something new. Yet many of you do... and I hadn't been holding up my end!

Yielda (so new it isn't on my LinkedIn profile yet) launched on three testnets over the past few weeks.

I'm working the Web3 space to recruit #testnet players in advance of our #mainnet launch. Testnet cash is worthless, so... hard sell. Takes most of the fun out of clearing ~150% in 30 days!

But in recent weeks I'd found a small core of early adopters. They are playing Yielda in testnet... how cool is that??

Now I have a stack of bugfixes and improvements that will vastly improve the mainnet experience. With so much going on, it's easy to take that for granted.

Well, it turned out most of our early adopters are also #makers!

Just like me, they have projects & products in development. Just like me, they need early adopters. Just like me, they're pulled in a thousand directions.

But where they had pitched in anyway, I had not!

So a couple weeks ago one of my early adopters asked me pointedly if I had tried HIS project. I had not.

And I was annoyed.

Which at 53 I've learned is reliable evidence that somewhere, somehow, I've screwed something up. And when I dug into that... well.

Early feedback from anybody is useful. If you have capital, you can buy as much as you need. But early feedback from another #founder is powerful! And the most valuable coin you have to offer in exchange is the exact same thing.

This is time and attention well spent!

Marketers bleat so much about the Web3 "community" that it's easy to forget words mean things.

Community means shared experience. It means give & take but more give than take. It means raising your shield to cover the grunt next to you in the line of battle.

Words are wind until they drive practice.

My practice had been to leap out of bed & tackle my projects. I fight the good fight until I crash. Next day: repeat.

So two weeks ago I decided that, for the next 30 days, I'd do something different.

I changed my work pattern. Every day for a month, I'm spending my first burst of attention—the first hour of my working day—on somebody else's project. Days off don't count!

Means different things on different days. All part of the fun.

So far I'm 14 days in. I'm posting daily updates on the Yielda Twitter account, and I thought I'd start posting them on LinkedIn as well to expand my reach. I'll tell you which project I worked on (unless it's confidential) and what I spent my hour doing.

Sometimes I just spot a project in need and lend a hand. That's fun! But I do find it is more efficient if I have tasks lined up, so I am delighted to take requests. Here's the kind of thing I've worked on so far:

• Code & architecture reviews.
• Open-source bug fixes.
• Product user testing.
• Business plan & white paper reviews.
• Website & offering reviews.
• Targeted professional introductions.

Note that by review, I don't mean a public endorsement. I mean a deep dive with a ton of notes, shared privately unless I've sanitized them for public consumption. I do not pull punches, so take what serves you and leave the rest! ??

If you'd like to add a task to the queue, just reach out to me here!

Meanwhile, here are the details of my first 14 days in this arena:

1. Play-tested a Web3 game. #
2. Reviewed a DeFi platform. #
3. Made some targeted professional introductions. #
4. Reviewed a pre-seed pitch deck. #
5. Documented a bug fix for an open-source project. #
6. Reviewed a consulting website. #
7. Mentored a young developer through a critical career decision. #
8. Reviewed a consulting website. #
9. Helped with some performance optimizations for a high-frequency trading operation. #
10. Brought a few other devs in to help with the HFT performance thing. #
11. Reviewed a consulting website. #
12. Spent a second hour on yesterday's victim. #
13. Reviewed a launchpad startup's white paper. #
14. Wrote an article to promote a very interesting project & made a key introduction. #

More to come!