UCTalent.io - Cardano Web3 Talent Platform, where users build profile, grow network, own future!

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Duong (Django), Nguyen Ngoc

[GENERAL] Email address of main applicant

duong@uctalent.io

Additional applicants

Hieu Tran

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

11

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language.

No

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

No

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.” .

No dependencies

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

Yes

[GENERAL] If NO, please describe which outputs are not going to be open source. If YES, please write “Project will be fully open source.”

Project will be fully open source.

[METADATA] Category of Proposal

dApp

[METADATA] SDG rating

SDG goals:

Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all

SDG subgoals:

Achieve higher levels of economic productivity through diversification, technological upgrading and innovation, including through a focus on high-value added and labour-intensive sectors

Key Performance Indicator (KPI):

Annual growth rate of real GDP per employed person

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

Problem:

• During economic recession or downtrend, because there is less capital to invest, high-tech job in both startups and corporates is much less than period of uptrend or economic growth. Every unemployed day of talents is waste because we cannot get back.

• In the other side, companies do not have much budget for recruitment, so that there is less available new position, less hiring promotion for fewer available position. If that is startup, they are saving the raised fund to wait for the next round, if that is corporate, they are reducing cost to adapt with lower revenue to wait for the better economy.

Target users and need:

• Software (high tech) talents want to find a job in blockchain/crypto/web3 to work on as full time or part-time with good income in future. Good income in future means that it could be worth in the future with economic recover and price in token increasing. Talents need a way to get pay fairly with whatever price of token in the future.

• Blockchain/crypto/web3 startups on Cardano want to find a right talent with less cost and could pay by token with different options with future market evaluation. The startups want to have a mechanism to attract right talent without any recruitment service, and they do not want to pay with their token at unfair low price. They could pay for higher salary with future price of token that they believe it is more fair market value

Solution

• Make a posted job attract right talents by itself through referral reward smart contract. Every posted job will include a referral bonus in the job refer smart contract, so that referee will get bonus when their referral candidate get offer. By this way, the professional talents who know much more a job requirement and their friend as talent will refer the right talent for it.
• Make a hiring smart contract to offer talent with future and schedule payment by cryptocurrency. The payment will be processed monthly or by project in the predefine schedule in the future with price in the future define by some Oracle data or Dexes. The compensation could be in stablecoin or mix of stablecoin and project's token or project's token in the same way that applicants can be offer with option salary in cash or in cash and stocks or purely stocks (which is rarely happened with normal position/candidate).
• The reason talent can accept project's token is that they will be considered as one founding member and receive more when the project is successful in the future.

This is kind of marketplace/platform business so that we need to solve supply and demand equation and grow both in the same time to have market liquidity and gain positive network effect.

So here is our approach/go-to-market strategy:

• Step 1: Bootstrap talent supply by providing a web2 job board for web3 jobs with a loyalty program to attract blockchain/crypto/web3 or software talents. Platform will pre-define metadata for job and talent profile and capture as much correct as possible to have high-quality data of talent profile and job description to use as input data for later functions.
• Step 2: Develop UCTalent pioneer program (UPP) - loyalty program to encourage talent to invite their friends as talents to join so that they can earn more loyalty point and convert it into UCTalent token in the future.
• Step 3: Integrate UCTalent platform with Cardano wallet like Nami, Lace
• Step 4: Building some tools and feature to attract and onboard hiring companies like talent boards where hiring companies can search and contact direct talents.
• Step 5: Develop the first referral bonus smart contract to introduce end-to-end hiring process in UCTalent platform and onboarding startups into the new hiring flow.
• Step 6: Develop the second hiring smart contract to create more jobs with flexible payment option in future and by hiring startups' token and onboarding startups into the new hiring flow.

Prove the impact

• The best way to prove the impact of this proposal is usage of users with the UCTalent platform. The more talents join and find a job offer on UCTalent platform and the more Cardano startup hire talents through UCTalent platform, the better impact the project can bring to Cardano ecosystem.

• In business point of view, the impact of this proposal is the efficiency improvement of recruitment process that happened through the platform. It means that hiring companies can save time and cost to find the right talents, and the talent can minimize the unemployment time to generate more value for themself, hiring companies and society.

[IMPACT] How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?

The benefit of Cardano ecosystem with our proposal is that:

1. Bring more software talents to Cardano ecosystem by introducing referral rewards by smart contract on Cardano which is paid by native assets on Cardano. It also means will bring more users to the Cardano ecosystem
2. Helping Cardano startup connect and hire right talents to build their product/solutions with less cost and shorter time. There are more than thousand developers who has joined the Plutus Pioneer Program. If UCTalent is successful introduced hiring smart contract, so they can contribute more projects to help startup in Cardano succeed and in turn Cardano ecosystem succeed too.
3. Increased Adoption: To build a successful web3, a startup need to build a website firstly, not just blockchain or smart contract part in web3. UCTalent can make startup to adopt Cardano more to take advantage of Security, Decentralization, Transparency and Community because they are less worry about to blockchain/smart contract talent resource which they can easy to find on UCTalent as long as their project and idea are good enough.
4. Community Growth: Our project will engage a mostly with startup founders, recruiters and developers. So that we can strengthen and grow this kind of community, which is very important for Cardano ecosystem to grow.
5. Real-World Use Case: Our project will provide a real-world use case about recruitment to Cardano. This section is very big and have a lot problems to solve. UCTalent also aim to become the first decentralized talent social network on Cardano, on blockchain in gerneral.

[IMPACT] How do you intend to measure the success of your project?

Two types of measures will be used to measure the success: 

Quantitative Measures:

• Number of talent: How many talent users have joined UCTalent, complete profile , create and link with wallet address in Nami, Lace
• Number of applicants: how many talents has been applied a job through the UCTalent
• Usage of referral reward smart contract: Number of jobs uses referral reward smart contract and total amount of reward will be given to referrer.
• Usage of hiring smart contract: Number of offers will give through hiring smart contract.

Qualitative Measures:

• Real use case of Cardano ecosystem: The platform UCTalent has the product market fit to prove the real use case on Cardano with positive monthly user retention ratio
• Cardano adoption: More startup will feedback that they consider to join and start to explore Cardano smart contract resource on UCTalent
• Community growth: There are few strong communities on UCTalent like Cardano founder community and Cardano smart contract developer community.

[IMPACT] Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?

Our plan to share the outputs and results of our project as below:

1. Token Distribution: Only 15% of the newly minted tokens is allocated to the dev funds, the majority of UCTalent token will reserve to grow the platform and incentive users/communities (talent, hiring companies, founders and developers communities).
2. Community Updates: We plan to regularly update the Cardano community on our progress towards milestones, insights from our work, and opportunities for community members to get involved through blog, social media, etc.
3. Webinars and Workshops: We will host webinars and workshops to share our knowledge and experiences with the broader community so that communities can learn from our experience to build web3 platform on Cardano in real time.
4. Partnerships: We will actively seek partnerships with other Cardano startups, and recruitment solutions to onboarding them into UCTalent and help them succeed with us.
5. Open Source Contributions: We plan to make our code and technical documentation available as open-source resources. This will allow other developers to learn from our work, contribute to our project, and potentially build upon our solution.

Upon successful deliver this proposal plan (phase 1), the project will continue to develop verifiable talent resumes with Atala PRISM, scale the UCTalent platform, develop UCTalent side-chain to reduce transaction fee and introduce private data protection-based blockchain with solution like Cardano Midnight and then make UCTalent become a decentralized protocol.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability?

Commitment: Our project team has almost completed to develop and release step 1 in our go to market strategy: Bootstrap talent supply by providing a web2 job board for web3 jobs with a loyalty program to attract blockchain/crypto/web3 or software talents. Platform will pre-define metadata for job and talent profile and capture as much correct as possible to have high-quality data of talent profile and job description to use as input data for later functions.

Check our https://app.uctalent.io/jobs and https://www.uctalent.io/

The team: We are an enthusiastic team about web3 with different roles and backgrounds:

Design UIUX, Marketing, Product and Software development. We has experienced to build few startups in platform business: classified C2C marketplace, ride-hailing platform.

• Key members:
• Duong Nguyen(Django): 10+ years in data analytics, product management and tech startup experience (top 1st classified site, 2nd ride-hailing app, 3rd ecommerce delivery app in Vietnam ), will take these roles in the team: Product, Strategy, HR, Finance & Overall. (Profile)
• Hieu Tran: 11+ years in Software development and tech team building, will take these roles in the team: Technology, Delivery, Agile Development. (Profile)

Enthusiastic with Cardano technology and mission: We have interested in Cardano in long time, in which our key member, Duong (Django) is taking Cardano Solutions Architect - EMURGO Academy batch 81, and is a tala PRISM Pioneer to learn to build the real application on Cardano. We believe it is time to start building some complicated and real application Cardano.

Whole team (11 people) works and commits together as the founding team members, where no one receives any salary yet. The team will contribute and share the 15% newly minted token based on each member's effort and responsibility. Check the introduction deck

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What are the main goals for the project and how will you validate if your approach is feasible?

UCTalent mission: Unchain and remove any constraint and limit for global talents to reach the best opportunity to grow, build and own a better world.

The project (proposal) goal: build foundation and deliver a the first version product that has market fit for decentralized talent social network on Cardano. In this 1st product-market-fit version, users can join, create profile, apply or refer friends a job and earn referral reward through smart contract which is executive on Cardano.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed breakdown of your project’s milestones and each of the main tasks or activities to reach the milestone plus the expected timeline for the delivery.

As of today July 12th 2023, the step 1 in got-to-market (above) plan has been released. So here is our milestones in next 11 months.

Milestone 1 - Attract talents join UCTalent and make them engage:

(The first 2 months, 2023)

• Release UCTalent pioneer program (UPP) - loyalty program
• Acquire 500 talents and have at least 100 applicants through UCTalent platform
• Integrate UCTalent platform with Cardano wallet like Nami, Lace

Milestone 2 - Onboard companies to have full recruitment flow

(The next 3 months, 2023)

• Release talent board function
• Release post job function and applicant tracking tool
• Partner and onboard at least 20 Cardano startups to post their job listings exclusively on our platform within Q4 2023

Milestone 3 - Release the first referral reward smart contract

(The next 3 months, Q1 2024)

• Release the first referral reward smart contract on Cardano mainnet in Q1 2024
• Having at least 100 reward through UCTalent referral reward smart contract

Milestone 4: Release the first referral reward smart contract

(The next 3 months, Q2 2024)

• Release the hiring reward smart contract on Cardano mainnet in Q2 2024
• Having at least 100 job offers through UCTalent hiring smart contract

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please describe the deliverables, outputs and intended outcomes of each milestone.

Here is our deliverables outputs and intended outcomes of each milestone.

Milestone 1 - Attract talents join UCTalent and make them engage:

(The first 2 months, 2023)

• Source code of UCTalent pioneer program (UPP) and working function on UCTalent platform
• Provide list of 500 talents and 100 applicants through UCTalent platform
• Source code of wallet integration and working wallet that are integrated UCTalent platform

Milestone 2 - Onboard companies to have full recruitment flow

(The next 3 months, 2023)

• Source code of talent board, and working function on UCTalent platform
• Source code of post job function and applicant tracking tool, and working functions on UCTalent
• List of 20 Cardano startups on UCTalent platform

Milestone 3 - Release the first referral reward smart contract

(The next 3 months, Q1 2024)

• Source code of the first referral reward smart contract, and working smart contract on Cardano mainnet in Q1 2024
• List of 100 reward transactions through UCTalent referral reward smart contract

Milestone 4: Release the first referral reward smart contract

(The next 3 months, Q2 2024)

• Source code of the first hiring smart contract, and working smart contract on Cardano mainnet in Q2 2024
• List of 100 job offer transactions through UCTalent hiring smart contract

[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

Check more on the Link

[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

It has the potential to dramatically increase the recognition and adoption of Cardano to many software engineers and startups in South East Asia. In addition, the creation of a new business model is expected to bring its benefits on a global scale and become the first and competitive social network on Cardano.

[IMPORTANT NOTE] The Applicant agreed to Fund10 rules and also that data in the Submission Form and other data provided by the project team during the course of the project will be publicly available.

I Accept