Building in Public and Getting Paid for it

I've wanted to build an open source project and an open startup for a while now. I like using and reading those kinds of things so I wanted to do it myself. I've gotten a good head start with Zenbase. I've gotten stars on the repo and support from both Sia community members and Gun community members.

---

Revenue

Last month my revenue for this project came from building it in a hackathon.

By chance, until the 17th this month, Gitcoin is doing a matching round on their grants. Great timing. Every dollar donated gets matched for a multiplied effect

https://gitcoin.co/grants/1629/zenbase

So far I've only gotten a friend of mine to donate.

Revenue is the best form of validation.

Earning revenue as early as possible validates that it's something that people find valuable enough to pay for.
Donations even more so, because people are investing in the future development of the product vs just getting access to it.

---

Building in Public

I've never been that great at marketing so building in public is a great learning experience.

Having a tight feedback loop with people in your target audience is essential to building a product people will actually use.
Building a community around your project is huge for having launches that are more than just crickets. A lot of the top projects on places like ProductHunt get to the top because they could rally their community to upvote

---

Goals for this week

Overall, I think I'm going in the right direction.

I've gotten a roadmap planned out. Both to provide me with some direction, and I'm posting it in public to provide some accountability to whoever eventually does donate.

The MVP of the basic database functions seems to work well. The proof of concept works and that's awesome. People can already use the library as is. My main goal is to improve usability. I think this is something huge that people get lost on, especially in the blockchain community. The technology is incredible and innovative but no one will ever use it because it's usability sucks.

I'll have to go more in-depth on that later this week.