Developer Acquisition Campaign

Lead a small team of sales professionals to pitch Cardano to potential developers, focusing on dev awareness and on-boarding.

7+ Years of sales experience in a top performing team in my industry. Management/training experience.

OVERVIEW

The challenge for fund2 is clear. Encourage developers and entrepreneurs to build things. Let's keep it simple and do exactly that: reach out directly to developers that could quickly learn Plutus/Marlowe to explain what Cardano is and encourage them to become a part of the Cardano community. The more developers in our community, the easier it will be for entrepreneurs to build exciting things. This proposal is to build a small team of qualified individuals with a diverse set of expertise/experience to spend the next 6 months actively networking, cold calling, emailing, DMing, and figuring out any other way to reach developers where they are and make sure they are aware of the opportunities in the Cardano ecosystem and how they can get involved.

TIMELINE

Month 1

- Team Building: Using the catalyst fund community, twitter, discord, and telegram, establish a team of consultants (max of 5) with a diverse set of skills, knowledge, experience, and expertise in order to maximize potential networking opportunities/on-boarding efficacy. Ideally this will include at least one developer to be able to answer technical questions any of us might have when reaching out to Haskell and Solidity devs.
- Developer Research: Work with other developers and community members to build profile archetypes for perspective developers. Research what developers are seeking and how best to attract them.
- Template Creation: Build a sales template with a clear standard for 1. how to approach developers 2. how to present Cardano in a way that excites and encourages developers to get involved 3. where best to direct devs to learn more, work on a project, or get involved in the community.
- Project Collaboration: Work with other project catalyst proposers and implementers to create a short list of projects in need of developers and projects that offer more resources for new devs to learn Plutus/Marlowe.

Month 2

- Training: assure all team members have a clear, basic understanding of Cardano, Haskell, and Solidity.
- Sales Channel Research: determine what the most effective platforms, groups, and organizations are for reaching devs.
- Assign Responsibilities: determine who will be responsible for working each channel, what the expectations are, and how many hours they will work

Month 3-6

- Acquire Developers: each team member will be responsible for acquiring 1 new developer every two weeks. "acquire" means either 1. connecting them with an existing project. or 2. confirming they are learning the Plutus/Marlowe language.

- Measuring KPIs: measuring which channels are performing best/worst and adjusting the team's efforts to focus on the most effective activities. Measuring who on the team is performing well and who isn't. If a team member does not acquire at least 1 new developer during a 3 week time period, they will be cut from our team and their remaining funding will go back to the catalyst fund.

GOALS
- 40 New Developers: 5 team members actively connecting with developers in creative and effective ways should yield at minimum 1 new dev/team member every 2 weeks. With a goal of 10 new developers acquired every month for the whole team.
- 5 Projects Staffed: a portion of new developers acquired should go straight to working on projects that need help building something. Hopefully this number is much higher, but we will commit to connecting at least 5 developers with projects in need.

EXPECTATIONS
I am extremely excited about Cardano and I want to be a bigger part of building it. I think this is the best use of my skills and it will directly impact this funds challenge in a clear and measurable way. I currently work a full time job in sales but will be leaving my job at the end of November to focus purely on my entrepreneurial endeavors. I suspect most of the people involved in this team will also have other priorities as well, so I envision it being part time or about 10-15 hours a week for each team member. I am certain that we will be able to accomplish our goals set out in this proposal.

FUNDING

Ideally there would be some sort of commission system for compensating team members for acquiring new developers, but I am unsure how the logistics would work for such a system, so instead I am proposing a flat 100,000 ADA, split equally between all team members (max of 5)