Inside the Solana India Hacker House
6 Days, 600 Builders, 78 projects submitted - a peek into the largest ever Solana Hacker House
In the post, I’m going to give you a tour of the Bangalore Solana hacker house that happened last week. Here’s how the post is structured,
An introduction to Solana & Hacker Houses ( HH)
Welcome to the Bangalore HH
Overview of Key Sessions
Demo Day - Project Alpha 🔥
Evening Socials
Special Shoutouts
How can you get involved?
What is Solana?
Solana is a layer 1 blockchain that was founded in 2017 & shot into prominence over the last 18 months because of its high speed & low fees. Since then, there’s been a rapidly growing ecosystem of projects across applications that have chosen to build or migrate to Solana. You can learn more about it here.
Why Hacker House?
One thing you learn very quickly in crypto is that remote-first is the default. Projects are often started by a couple of folks but very quickly take a life of their own because
code & whitepapers are open-sourced which enables an instant global reach & permissionless contribution
token incentives are borderless, people who contribute are confident they can benefit from the upside of their work
This is a feature. But it also means that as developers & contributors start exploring the ecosystem they find it difficult to put faces to the discord & Twitter handles they’ve been working with. This is why all web3 projects have meetups of some form, so much so that it has become a meme.
Hackathon 🤝 Meetup
So, what is a hacker house? Here’s a blurb from the Solana website,
Each Hacker House will give builders a place to work, find collaborators, and learn from some of the greats in the Solana ecosystem. You’ll have all the essentials: good WiFi, food, power, and (of course) swag.
Hacker houses are primarily focused on developers who already are or want to build in the Solana ecosystem. It is important to understand why this is important. Programmable blockchains like Solana, Polygon, and Ethereum are all striving to build a base layer on top of which the next generation of internet apps will be built. To catalyze and kickstart this process it is crucial for them to get as many developers on board and building as possible. This is also why you’ll see unlike their web2 peers, almost all web3 protocols have “ecosystem growth funds”. Without developers building stuff, all we have is memes.
In theory, any developer can read the Solana docs and permissionlessly use the blockchain to start building, but the unknowns & psychological barriers are too high for many. These events aim to help developers get familiarised with the ecosystem and get conviction that if they build on Solana they will get performant and resilient infrastructure, fun & smart set of people to build with, and the resources they need to succeed.
This is also why at their recent flagship conference in November 2021, the first metric presented was the number of developers.
It is also worth noting that these events provide a lot more support to participants than hackathons. Hackathons can often be fully remote & the primary focus is on building products that could become live working projects. Whereas here you have a full spectrum of developers including those writing their first-ever Solana program, with no pressure of having to show something immediately.
Welcome to The Blr HH
The Bangalore hacker house was one in a series that the Solana foundation & their ecosystem partners have been conducting across the globe. It was also the largest ever hacker house both in terms of the number of participants and more importantly, the number of submissions on demo day.
Now, if you’ve read this far and feel like hacker houses are only for developers - hold on fren. There’s something for everyone. I think it’s fair to say that everybody gets a different hacker house experience depending on your skillset & level of ecosystem involvement going in. That is to say the more you immerse yourself into it, the more you enjoy it. Here’s a quick overview of the last week @ HH :
Important to note that none of these sessions happen in parallel, there is a single track so you can of course attend all of them irrespective of whether you’re a developer, founder, non-technical, investor, etc. This table is my view of what I think you’re most likely to enjoy based on your skill set and current web3 depth. If you’re interested you can find the full agenda here.
Session Overview
Now that we have a high-level view of the week, let’s take a closer look at some of the sessions.
Non-technical Track
Making great content
In this session, Tanmay shared timeless principles on building an audience for your project through content. This is key because web3 is built on the founding principle of open source community-led projects, this means that beyond the initial core team projects rely on the internet to find their first users, contributors, investors, etc.
The key ideas from the session were:
Content should generate emotions - good (joy) or bad (fear, hate); focus on good
Patterns - our brain thinks in patterns, make and break them to keep engagement
Idea density - ensure that everything you say has an idea that stimulates the audience, don’t spam
Here’s a great thread by @shryasbhurat on the session
Superteam community call
Here’s a quick introduction to Superteam,
We help the most promising projects in the Solana ecosystem in the ascending world (India, South East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa) launch and grow. We are organized as a co-operative of creatives, operators, and investors who are experienced in launching and growing technology businesses.
- Supeteam
Superteam was recently featured in the Syllabus, a newsletter by Decentraliens - a learning DAO. You can read the full post here to learn more about superteam. The community call is a weekly ritual where we catch up on the state of the DAO, here’s the agenda:
Wins of the week: Celebrate contributions made by our members to the Solana ecosystem
State of the DAO & Updates from the core team: The big announcement here is a million-dollar grant from the Solana foundation to superteam. This will be deployed over the course of the next year to help onboard the next set of contributors to the Solana ecosystem.
Working group updates: A powerful feature of superteam is that members can form liquid working groups to complete projects for sponsors or of their own. Some alpha on projects to checkout - StellarSol (pay anywhere using Solana) & One_UPI (enabling UPI transactions@ 0% fees via blockchain)
Earning Opportunities: The north star metric for superteam is community GDP, i.e. total members’ earnings through opportunities unlocked by the DAO. (Worth noting that the DAO has no take rate here) . This number currently stands at ~400k USD. Most of these are available to both members & non-members, in fact completing an earning opportunity is also the only way to enter the DAO. Here are the bounties you can attempt.
While community calls are typically member-only, this one was open-sourced for the broader Solana community. You can watch the recording of the community call here
Investor panel
This was a session on investing in web3 with Vishal Kankani(Multicoin) , Shanav Mehta(Jump), Vani Kola (Kalari) & Shailesh Lakhani (Sequoia) moderated by Akshay.
Here are some key highlights from the session:
The most underrated trends in crypto - The broad consensus here was that teams need to focus on delivering value to consumers over a long period of time. Apps that can do this while abstracting out the complexity of web3 will win.
Reversing the trend of starting in India and incorporating abroad - The panel felt that given the depth of engineering talent in India, it would always make sense for projects to hire and have a presence here. Additionally, crypto becoming a source of net inflow to the country instead of just gambling will help shape positive regulation.
Raising tokens vs equity: While members were largely agnostic to whether a round was being raised as tokens or equity, they very strongly felt that a token sale should be held off until core product loops are in place.
Employee compensation: The power of tokens in converting all contributors into investors & providing early liquidity. The sense here was that companies are built over decades, and over-optimizing for early liquidity is almost a red flag. The panel referenced a famous quote, that Illiquidity in venture is a feature, not a bug.
Personally, the most interesting question was, “what is the one thing you do & don’t help your portfolio companies with”. Here are the responses across the room
Vishal Kankani, Multicoin, said that they don’t help out with hiring. They feel like that’s one thing everyone does, they prefer to focus on things they can uniquely best do. Multicoin is a thesis-driven firm and believes that gains are made by taking deep, concentrated, and contrarian bets.
Vani Kola, Kalari, said that they prefer not to meddle with the vision of a founder. “If we knew better, we’d start the company ourselves” she said. They partner with firms for the long run & founders should expect them to have their back in both good and bad times.
Shanav, Jump, said that just because they have an engineering team, projects often assume that they freelance that team out to portfolio cos - they don’t. He said Jump gets involved across all layers of the stack from market making, GTM, strategy, etc.
Shailesh, Sequoia, said that they’re like that “one friend who’s watched a lot of movies”. Having seen 50 years of venture experience they bring a lot of experience to the table.
All of them are reachable on Twitter, if you’re building in web3 & looking to raise, or get a gig in investing, do reach out to them.
Roast My Dapp
This was a design feedback session by Yash. Participants could submit a link to their project on the HH telegram group and they would get live design feedback.
Projects submitted ranged from P2E games, NFT marketplaces, web3 freelancing tools, etc. A few key themes of feedback emerged
Build credibility & trust: As a new project, you want to use signals of larger partners, and press coverage upfront so that anybody who lands on your product feels that your project is legit and they can proceed to explore it.
Product > Illustrations: A lot of projects had used illustrations, Yash’s feedback was to use screengrabs of the actual product to help people visualize early on what exactly they’d be using
Scanworthy landing pages: People don’t ready landing pages, they scan them - communicate quickly and effectively what your product is & the action you want consumers to perform.
While a lot of these principles are not specific to web3, teams could also reach out to Yash for more detailed product feedback. This was a great opportunity for developer heavy teams to add some usability and polish to their projects.
Web3 Founders Panel
This was a panel with web3 founders -
Dhrumil (Solvent protocol): Provide instant liquidity to NFT holders by enabling fractionalizing of NFTs & issue tradeable fungible tokens against it.
Shardul (Cykura): A DEX that aims to bring efficiency through concentrated liquidity.
Sreekanth (Solrazr): One of the first IDO platforms & product launchpads on Solana.
Shek (Wordcel): A decentralized publishing stack built on Solana & Arweave
moderated by Neil Shroff from FTX Superteam , a joint accelerator between FTX ventures and Superteam.
Here are a few key highlights from the session,
Hackathons are a great place to start projects and find co-founders, Shardul mentioned that’s actually how Cyclos (now Cykura) started and he found his co-founder at a hackathon.
Sreekanth pointed out that getting the early community right is super important, take as long as you need to get it right before you scale. This is not a number’s game - a high number of followers on Twitter or discord is NOT community. You want people who are using the product, engaging with each other & are willing to contribute.
Shek & Dhrumil spoke about the importance of getting tokenomics right. Neil pointed out that there is no equivalent for this in web2, this is new territory for everyone. It is also irreversible. All the founders agreed that you should delay this until you have a strong product, community & business.
Gajesh pointed out that Twitter is the home for crypto & web3, it is important to put your thoughts out there and build an audience. It materially helps you connect with like-minded folks.
The parting note for anyone who is very new to web3 - become a user instead of being an investor. When you hear about something, first go and try the product. What does it do? Does it work? Does it match up to the landing page/whitepaper? What challenges do you face while getting onboard? This is the best way to get onboarded to web3.
Technical
Solana Dev
Larry & Jarry, from the Solana foundation core development team, had come down to help onboard developers to Solana. They started off with an introduction to building on Solana, the account model & the overall architecture. Apart from this they also conducted office hours across all the days where anyone could get time with them for in-person troubleshooting.
Additionally, Chase who leads developer relations took a session on finding work in web3.
Here’s the playbook:
Checkout Solana resources & learn the basics
Find a project you like, check their Github, and start fixing open issues (Proof of work > Credentials)
Build a side project, anything fun you care about
Tweet about 2 & 3, slide into DMs with proof of work
If 1-4 doesn’t work, DM Chase with proof you tried. Chase fixes this.
Buildspace
The folks at Buildspace conducted a hands-on workshop to get you started with building on Solana. You could walk in a web2 developer with no blockchain experience and within 5 hours you’d have shipped a working prototype.
Also, a special shoutout to them for organizing an impromptu meetup on Day 1 because the HH couldn’t take everyone in given the massive turnout!
Web3Auth
Web3Auth is building auth infra to make onboarding users to web3 seamless. They are on a mission to liberate consumers from seed phrases; by using multi-factor keys they are able to provide the best of both worlds: self-custody & seamless UX.
Neon labs
Neon is a fully Ethereum-compatible environment on Solana. This means that anyone who can build DAPPs on Ethereum can now seamlessly deploy them on Solana & benefit from its speed and low gas fees. They conducted a couple of workshops to help devs understand how they can use this and deploy their DAPPs.
They also announced a prize for the top 3 projects that used their infra, here are the winners:
Office Hours
Solana labs, Web3Auth, and Buildspace all conducted multiple office hours across the duration of hh.
Demo Day
The final day of the hh is demo day, where anybody who’s buidl something can present it to other devs, investors, and the broad ecosystem. There were a total of 78 submissions, out of which ~50 would’ve ended up presenting.
I’m going to use a question from Madhavan, founder of Questbook, to take you through the demo day.
How do you characterize projects?
This is an interesting question, given the spectrum of web3 skills that builders enter the hacker house have - it is natural to see a wide spectrum in the submitted projects. Nearly everyone who demoed had at least a working product, even if it was in a local environment. I’d categorize projects in one of three buckets:
Prototype: They typically have some basic functionality in place but need a lot more work before a private beta. I think around half the submissions fell in this category. This is probably the best way for people new to web3/Solana to get started
Beta Ready: These are projects where a core product loop is in place and ready for private beta. The business model, polish, and other details need to be worked out before a full-blown launch. A lot of these projects often start building before the hacker house but use the environment and support as a boost to get over the line
Web2: A couple of projects, especially games, had started by building core games first and are now exploring which blockchain to integrate.
What domains are builders interested in?
The NFT space saw the most number of projects submitted. While some of them were NFT collections, many were utilities and services for NFTs - projects that allowed fractionalizing, renting, ticketing, infra, real-world drops, etc. The next domain. The next domain was what I’d broadly classify as web3 infra, this included no-code solutions for building dapps, APIs for querying the blockchain, escrow solutions & a decentralized video streaming service.
The next two domains by submissions were gaming & payments. In the gaming space, while projects had working demos most of them were (understandably) yet to build out their core game loops. A few were focused on gaming infra to enable existing web2 games to seamlessly integrate web3 into their gameplay. For new teams with no gaming experience - this might be a quicker way to get traction for a product. The payments category saw a few interesting projects around sending/receiving payments for freelancers & on/off ramps.
You can find the full list of submissions here, here are my favorite picks out of the ones I saw* :
Payments
Incento: This allows you to Send, request and save in USD worldwide, instantly for free. withdraw to your bank account whenever you need too
Trustified Network: Smart contract-based escrow service to send and receive crypto payments at low fees.
RoundPe: Razorpay-style payment links for crypto. I’m unable to find links to the project or team.
Web3 Infra
OpenDAO: Allow open source developers to convert their repositories to DAOs in one click and create alternate economies using project native tokens.
Maven foundation: A decentralised video streaming service aiming to enable influencers build their own virtual economies.
Stream Money: A platform to rent utility NFTs and split the earnings-generating income for owners & access for renters.
Concise Labs: API infra for efficiently querying Solana
Shyft: CRUD APIs for frictionless NFT integrations.
Token Alchemist: Self-serve tool to create an index (combine or fractionalize) any fungible and non-fungible tokens.
Dra.gd: No code tool to create dapps linked to your .eth or .sol domains
Chain Commerce: Escrow service for p2p or p2m e-commerce
Gaming
Cricinshots: collectible cricket card strategy game
Swoop: Fantasy cricket app
Solgames:a decentralised game aggregator platform that allows game developers, players and fans to develop play, and design games
NFT Gaming Machine: An API Service helping any Web 2 game transition to Web3
Disclaimer: Not financial advice. Also, I missed a few demos so might be worth going through the full sheet anyway.
Feedback for builders
I’m going to preface this by saying that everyone builds based on their personal goals for the event. If you just wanted to get started and ship something that works - that’s awesome. Having said that, here are two pieces of feedback:
Why crypto: There were a few instances where it was unclear why this project was better built out in web3 with crypto incentives as opposed to a traditional web2 app. Being super clear on the consumer value being delivered helps avoid hype
GTM Plan: Some projects felt like, while they would happen eventually, it would need mass adoption and acceptance of crypto first. It relies on multiple offline participants to integrate and accept crypto payments. This is not a bad thing but it would help to articulate how you plan to kick off adoption.
Shoutouts
A few special shoutouts from the week
Socials
Here’s a glimpse of the evening social events throughout the week
Supermeet : FTX Superteam meetup
Sino x Alpha Wave
Getting Involved
If you’ve made it this far and feel like jumping in (or dipping your toes first) , here are a few links you’ll find useful
Getting started for Developers
Solana Ecosystem - find a project you vibe with
How to start earning in web3 - some tips to help you get started
Open roles in Solana Ecosystem
Superteam bounties
Photo credits to the Solana HH organizing team
What is the fee and procedure to join such event could you please help me with this?
Amazing!