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there is no dev community, I love you. disclaimer: this is not targeted towards any company, but probably every company in this space. dont be sad if the shoe fits well. TLDR: there are no dev communities, all our pipelines are broken, and our dev communities are wayyyyy smaller than probably COBOL dev communities. people: "No Naruto, you're just bear posting and pessimistic. you are a devrel and you should onboard more devs" okay let me break it down for you, buckle up u hopium lovers. first, let me ask, what is a dev community? according to @ElectricCapital guidelines on their website, here's what the good people at EC track the data: - source code repos - classify the candidates repos - crawling source code - cleaning data which commits and devs are counted: - Forks - original code - Branches i love EC for doing so much of data work. according to EC: - there are a total of 23,613 monthly active devs, 7$ short from prev years, newcomers and emerging devs fell. - there are 39,148 new devs that "EXPLORED" crypto in 2024 and 3000 on avg per month. this means that they somewhat did a few things mentioned above to be included in EC report. this means that general trend is downward, but even along with that, can we really say that 39,148 new devs REALLY STAYED in crypto? not really. These are the people who tried crypto, deployed a few contracts, made some demo apps to learn, and left the space because they didn't like it or found the devEx/pmf/marketing/projects bad. what is a dev community in web2? - stackoverflow - github - C devs and libraries - rust - MERN stack - kaggle - Google Developer groups (althought i think they are lacking) the two bigg, contrasting facts that these web2 communities vs web3 communities are that: 1. they are already big and communities and tech have been "adopted." 2. they are independent devs who are just helping the community because they love to do it. moving to web3, now let's talk about my initial hypothesis: that there is no dev community in web3. some of my thoughts are simple: 1. multiple orgs/companies focus on dev communities as their KPIs in the hopes that devs will build that killer dapp and the orgs can boast about how they have found a unicorn whereas the whole goal of dev communities should be a place where devs can come in learn because they can learn things. 2. as per the EC report, there are 26k monthly active devs, a total of ~35k new devs, who btw come in and out and mostly get out of crypto because they dont understand it or their onboarding wasnt a great experience. I have personally seen multiple examples of people dropping out of crypto dev. 3. it's just fcking funny to me when orgs say: "we have a community of 200k devs." yea right, those 200k are tourists, they saw your tech and followed your docs, built 2-3 demo apps and then never came back. signing up once doesn't mean they are permanent community members. 4. another funny fact: orgs try to focus on university students by doing tours to build their dev community. This was an eye-awakening moment for me when i talked to 100s of students from India. Every company would go to a university, hosts a session, and try to "onboard" these students to their dev community or crypto. but this is not how it works. extremely disagreed because i have worked on a ground level and have talked to more devs than you could. reasoning on why it doesn't work: students dont want to build on your protocol because they think it will revolutionize the world. those are probably 1% of folks who do it. They want to build on top of your protocol or community because of one of two reasons: a. they want a job at your company: i kid you not, the amount of people i have seen who build a small project and say "oh can i get a job at this XYZ company" is insane. That's because those folks actually want to secure their future, and if you are going to their university and trying to onboard them to crypto, this is what their expectation is. b. they want to be founders: i talk to at least 5 students per week who come to me and ask on how they can start their own company in crypto. This necessarily doesn't mean they will build on top of your protocol. if that were true, some of these orgs hosting university programs or summer fellowships would actually see more projects by students vs industry leader, but they dont know how to make that funnel. bonus read on university: these students don't have bandwidth to keep exploring your ecosystem if they dont find it beneficial to them. They have school work, exams, maybe a masters or web2 job search. They are not gonna stick around after your 3 months program at all. imo the only 2 orgs that have done great work with university stuff are: Solana and Polygon. At least in India, the adoption was great, the funnel was good and it was a nice work by both orgs. Polygon did lose it's touch after a while, but still commendable work. EF never did such stuff, but solana did quite a lot of them. I am sure Tomasz is shaking things up, but if we were to look at initial days of Superteam, it came out of Solana's india community, and nothing has able to beat it so far. 4.5/ another thing that infuriates me to the core: I am sorry to Indian and Nigerien community friends who follow me. i respect and love you guys a lot, but every ecosystem is using you as "builders," "devs," "dev communities" to post some videos on twitter for marketing purposes and show that they have a community. They select one of you guys to "lead" the community, and this person shills you these companies and tells you that you will get this grant or you should be a builder and they will support you, but it doesn't happen. Because there is no community. why? i have built a great community in India for almost 3 years now, and i have been connected to more devs than others. They are just college kids trying to find a job (as i said above) or farm protocol or make some money. I dont mean to disrespect someone, but this is both sides of issues devs and companies, and it is understandable from their POV. 5. back to my hypotheses, the devs that you onboard don't have a great pipeline for onboarding. What i mean is: when they set out to build products, they need initial push, meetings with your devrels, founders, grants, connections, liquidity etc. every org boasts on how great their dev support is, but believe me, as a devrel who is constantly looking at this space, other orgs, other teams, i don't think your pipeline for dev support is best. I have called out base a few times specifically because they leave these builders hanging without any clear answer. I personally myself get so many texts from devs and it's hard to reply to everyone, so i understand the conundrum, but this also means that you got to say NO to these builders instead of fake boasting your dev community. 6. even with the right support and best connections, there are products that fail. the problem is that there is no fail-safe for these. A lot of devs come to me with an idea, they build it out for 3 months, figure out it is not working out, and then they either leave XYZ ecosystem to build on or join a company as a devrel/dev/markeing or whatever. where is the pipeline that helps them with this? 7. when we onboard devs to crypto, they come for 2 reasons, same as university kids: to build something as a founder or get a job. We as an industry don't have jobs for everyone, so what's next? devs are guided to build a full fledged product for a 10k grant. that leads me to my next point. 8. grants are broken: without going on into specific companies, i can say grant pipleline is broken. Companies will throw 10k-50k to devs to build something and will never follow back. Devs mfers themselves would try to farm the grant. "oh i can't get grant from Base, maybe i should go to polygon. Oh polygon is giving me only 50k, maybe OP will give me 100k" you don't get a grant from dev communities in web2. You may be appreciated with some money for help, but we have this broken hopium cycle of giving out grants in order to people build on orgs. 9. Hackathons are F*KED: I say this while i'm planning Avail's hackathon, but i genuinely believe they are fcked. Ethglobal's devcon has $800k in prizes for hackathons. To give your some contrasting numbers: UT Austin's 2024 hackathon, which actually attracts best talent gave $10k in total at best. Stanford's 2024 hackathon called Treehacks is one of the biggest hackathons in US and it's total pool prize was close to $200k. Calhacks happened in Oct 2024 at the same time as EthGlobal's SF 2024. It had over 1k devs, way better ai projects that solved a real usecase. It had around $100k in bounties, half of ethglobal's hackathon. devs and students go to these hackathons because THEY WANT TO BUILD AND SOLVE REAL WORLD USE CASES, and they are awarded for that with redbulls, not consolation best tracks/bounties of specific project as we have in our ecosystem. when I hosted and participated in hackathonds during college life, we never went in to win money. We went in to see what can we solve, what can we build to solve issue in our neighborhood/city and community. Sadly crypto has this shitty nature of giving out participating awards where if you build a fork from 2 hackathons before without a usecase, you still win cash prize. 10. Events are broken: I keep saying this multiple times, but our events pipeline has shifted a lot from onboarding new and more people to constantly meeting our friends from different parts and socializing and drinking and whatever the fck that happens. There is rarely new onboarding at these events and they are an echo chamber now. a lot of events are gated and newbies who join these events for the first time do no know how to navigate or make the best out of it. A lot of ecos and people are not supportive either. They would be great to your face as a newbie, but when you try to connect with them in DMs post conference, you won't get a reply. 11. If nothing works, start an accelerator program: talk to me when your accelerator build big product focused companies. the only good ones that i would shoutout would be superteam/solana Colosseum and MegaETH megamafia. No others for now, but i do think accelerators are better than anything else. you just need to have a great pipeline to do so. 12. We all are fighting for same devs: If the EC reports are optimistic, 3000 devs spread across top 20 ecos = 150 devs per eco who jump from one ecosystem to another. We all are constantly trying to steal these devs from evm to solana to aptos to whatever tf. Well there is also an issue with devs here tbh, not just companies. Devs have also recognized that they can game the ecosystem now, and farm grants. So they are not going to be loyal to you until you pay $$$$$$$ amount of grants. I am aware of companies that do it, but regardless devs will do it for 6-12 months and hop on to next shiny toy. I understand that it's a bear posting and im a mere devrel, and it's my job to onboard more devs, but i think as an industry we are doing pretty bad job in that. there are multiple solutions that we could work on (im working on one), but the manpower and responsibilities that it needs are higher than most companies' capacities because every company has its own issues like pmf, revenue, token, internal issues or whatever. overall i think crypto has always had pmf problem and because of that all of the other problems stems out such as marketing, dev onboarding, grant farming, bad incentive flexing, and users in general. would love to hear anyone's thoughts and what they think about all this? feel free to disagree here. thanks to @kanishkkhurana @0xanmol @cxqmaggie @otaliptus @PSkinnerTech for reviewing this before anyone else.