Tracking ROI for Developer Marketing and Relations in the Polkadot Ecosystem

Intro

Hello Polkadot Community,

I'm Rick, one of the creators of OpenQ, a Developer Relationship Management Platform. We've collaborated with leading chains and web3 tools like BuildGuild, Filecoin, Polygon, Scroll, Aptos, Near, and Consensys to measure the ROI of developer marketing and relations initiatives through detailed developer activity stats.

In this post, I’ll outline what we do, our goals with Polkadot stakeholders, and our plans as we prepare for a treasury proposal. Your feedback is highly appreciated.

Why OpenQ What Is The goal?

First it's important to address a major issue within the ecosystem. Polkadot currently faces challenges in leading developer marketing initiatives and accurately calculating the ROI of these efforts, as well as setting clear KPIs for each initiative.

The primary reason for this challenge is the fragmentation of efforts across various teams. Numerous initiatives funded by the Web3 Foundation are being executed without a standardized format for data collection, making it difficult to track the outcomes and understand how these efforts are enhancing developer community engagement over time.

Furthermore, there's a significant gap in understanding the overall impact of marketing and developer relations spending on ecosystem growth due to two main reasons:

1. The lack of centralized data collection across different teams complicates the aggregation and analysis of results.

2. There is no dedicated entity collaborating with these teams to measure and interpret developer activity metrics and integrate this data with existing records to present a comprehensive view of developer activity within the ecosystem.

This fragmentation leads to another issue: since teams do not collaborate closely, there is no shared knowledge base on what marketing strategies or developer relations efforts are effective. Without a unified database accessible to all relevant parties, it's impossible to build upon previous successes or learn from past mistakes.

Lastly, the lack of oversight by the foundation means that both the foundation and community members who vote on new or continuing initiatives lack the necessary information to make informed decisions.

As Polkadot continues to decentralize, our vision at OpenQ is to become the central entity for all data collection related to developer marketing and relations initiatives, addressing these challenges directly.

Here’s why OpenQ is crucial for the Polkadot community:

1. Centralized Data Collection:
We collaborate with stakeholders to accurately measure the impact of initiatives such as educational programs, hackathons, and other events that attract developers to the Polkadot ecosystem, optimizing efforts for growth.

2. Unified Ecosystem Effort:
As a data hub, OpenQ fosters collaboration across Polkadot, reducing reliance on external sources like the developer report from Electric Capital and improving ecosystem representation.

3. Enhanced Ecosystem Visibility:
Our tools help the community track and report developer activity, contributing to a transparent view of ecosystem health and strengthening Polkadot's global standing.

How Our Platform Works

For a demo, check out my recent ETHcc presentation at the WebZero-organized Polkadot demo hour here.

General Flow

Access and Collaboration
Our platform is accessible to various teams within the Polkadot ecosystem, including a general team for the Web3 Foundation, ensuring broad access to insights.

Core Functionality: GitHub Code Search
A powerful GitHub code search and scraping tool lies at the heart of our platform, enabling users to analyze extensive code data without limitations.

Campaigns: Organizing Initiatives
Create "lists” to track marketing efforts like hackathons, educational programs, conferences, meetups or even the whole community. Our platform can also identify whether projects are deployed on Polkadot based on open source data we track and provide comprehensive overviews.

Our Objectives

1. Measure ROI of Developer Marketing Initiatives
Accurately calculate ROI for marketing and relations initiatives, supporting sustainable growth and empowering stakeholders to measure their impact to drive more value. Also showcase total developer activity.

2. Comprehensive Developer Data Aggregation
Aggregate developer data, both top-down and bottom-up, identifying active and at-risk projects to help stakeholders provide targeted support.

3. GitHub Repository Discovery for New Projects
Use our project discovery tool to identify and support new projects within the Polkadot ecosystem.

4. User-Friendly Platform for All Teams
Offer an easy-to-use platform for marketing and relations teams to add projects, measure impact, and enhance the accuracy of developer data through crowdsourcing.

5. Identify Activity from Closed Source Projects
Address the challenge of capturing closed-source contributions, requiring manual effort but offering significant long-term benefits.

Working With Stakeholders

Stakeholders are entities involved in developer marketing or relations initiatives, including marketing, event, or dev rel teams funded by grants, investors, or revenue.

Here’s who we’ve engaged with so far. If you're not listed, contact me via Telegram to work with us together: @rickkdev.

Stakeholders:

WebZero
Polkadot Academy
Parity
Web3 Foundation
Missing-link
Chainsafe

Naturally, stakeholders will include developer tools for the Polkadot ecosystem, which are public goods funded by the Web3 Foundation. We will assist them in tracking their impact and developer usage, ensuring their tools are distributed effectively while also gathering feedback for improvement. These projects can reach out to us and request access.

Technical Details of Our Platform

The OpenQ process initiates by importing data such as repositories, GitHub users, or organizations. For those starting from scratch, we provide features to assist in discovering relevant projects. Imported URLs are first sent to a Kafka queue, which then passes these URLs to a parallelized Go program known as Gitguru.

Gitguru is essential for cloning each repository, analyzing each commit for specified dependencies across various files, and identifying genuine and relevant users by tracking when they started and their engagement over time. Our dependency tracking system searches within files to check if a specific dependency is used, which helps in determining whether a project is deployed on a particular blockchain or uses a specific tool.

After Gitguru has processed and created a deeply searchable database of GitHub repositories and users, the next step involves our second module, the Evaluator. The Evaluator assigns various scores and metrics to these repositories and their contributors based on their activity and dependency usage. Following this individual assessment, we compile a comprehensive analysis for all projects evaluated. This includes calculating the total developer activity over the past 12 months, providing a timeline of activity which serves as a crucial KPI for understanding growth and engagement trends within the ecosystem. This metric is vital as it showcases the dynamic engagement and development progress over time, helping stakeholders gauge the effectiveness of different initiatives.

Timeline and Funding Milestones

To achieve our objectives, we have structured our project into four key milestones, each with specific goals and budget requirements:

Milestone 1: Data Collection and Initial Analysis (3 months - $30k)

Gather and analyze existing data, onboard ecosystem leaders, and enhance metric accuracy.

Milestone 2: Ecosystem Leader Improvements (3 months - $25k)

Collaborate with stakeholders to review and refine data, improve accuracy, and apply actionable feedback to enhance ecosystem strategies.
Our primary goal is to evaluate each developer marketing initiative comprehensively, determining their effectiveness and areas for improvement. This analysis will recur throughout each milestone, with stakeholders conducting monthly reviews based on the data we provide.

Milestone 3: Continued Feedback and Results (3 months - $25k)

Continue refining marketing goals and strategies through iterative assessments.
Key questions include:

Did teams improve their outcomes? Are there events or strategies that consistently underperform?

Additionally, monitor and verify data submission from all teams. While participation isn't mandatory, only data-submitted initiatives will be included in the comprehensive community report in Milestone 4, highlighting effective strategies and areas needing improvement.

Milestone 4: Final Analysis and Community Engagement (3 months - $20k)

Finalize Analyses: Ensure all data and results are accurate and comprehensive.
Publish Results: Release a detailed report to the Polkadot community, outlining effective strategies and areas for improvement.
Community Engagement: Host a webinar and kickstart discussions to present findings and discuss future plans.
Continuous Improvement: Plan to extend this process, incorporating community feedback to enhance reports and potentially increase their frequency to quarterly updates.

Cost Overview

AWS Services: Compute & Storage | Managed Solutions: Postgres, Kafka, Kubernetes | Non-AWS Managed Solutions: MongoDB Atlas & Confluent: Monthly expenses of $4-5k/m to cover our platform cost for general data scraping, management as well as monthly updates and frontend. Initial data evaluation will be more costly due to the need to clone all repositories, rather than just updating them.
Customer Support and Stakeholder Onboarding: Extensive support is required to help teams and stakeholders understand data collection, submission, and analysis. This ensures the creation of effective strategies and high post-event engagement.
Due to significant fragmentation, we need to allocate more resources to ensure adequate support.
Reporting and Community Webinar: Costs include preparing and delivering detailed reports and hosting a community webinar at the project's end, requiring year-round preparation to integrate all team data effectively.
Consulting Services: We provide in-depth consulting to enhance the value and effectiveness of each event and initiative, aiding in strategy development and increasing developer engagement. Our core expertise lies in developer relations, with both founders bringing together over a decade of combined experience in the field.

FAQ

Where and how does your project fit into the ecosystem?

Our platform supports marketing, developer advocacy, ecosystem management, product development, grant review, and leadership roles.

Who is your target audience?

The Web3 Foundation, key ecosystem participants, Parity, and those responsible for ecosystem growth, improving developer experience on Polkadot and its Parachains.

What need(s) does your project meet?

Quantifying Developer Activity: Identifying active developers in the Polkadot ecosystem.
Impact Assessment: Helping stakeholders measure impact and prioritize tasks.
Measuring ROI: Evaluating the ROI of events for developer growth or retention.

How do you plan to finance the project in the future?

We plan to license the platform annually, ideally through yearly grants after proving our value.

How do you intend to use, enhance, promote, and support your project in the short term?

We aim to become the go-to brand for measuring developer activity in web3, already partnering with organizations like Polygon, Consensys, Aptos, and others.

Summary

To wrap things up, OpenQ is here to help the Polkadot ecosystem grow by tracking and measuring the impact of developer marketing and relations efforts. Our goal is to give stakeholders the data they need to make better decisions and drive real growth. This is crucial for the treasury to make informed choices about which partners to support, whether they’re launching new initiatives or continuing existing ones. We want to help kickstart a new phase of ecosystem growth for Polkadot.

We’ll be submitting our proposal to the treasury soon and would love to get your feedback. Feel free to reach out directly on Telegram at @rickkdev if you have any questions or want to discuss potential partnerships.

Thanks for your support!