PolkaWorld：How to build a community of 10 thousand people in half a year

I am Xiaojie, cofounder of PolkaWorld which is a Chinese Polkadot community with more than 10 thousand members. At the end of Chinese lunar calendar 2019, I want to summarize what happened of PolkaWorld in the past year and tell you the story of how we start PolkaWorld.

1

I entered the blockchain world since September 4, 2017 ( The time when China banned ico ). Before that, I have been doing things related to the Internet operation for 3 years. Although I knew “blockchain” for a long time, but I just know the concept.

The real start of blockchain research is after me joined my ex company “SV insight “. We are the first one to do the systematic blockchain online courses, AMA and interviews with project founders. When the market is all crazy people, we educated so many fans who really love blockchain, and our community is also called “a stream of clean water” by users.

At that time, I was responsible for the whole Chinese community and online courses, so actually I contacted with many projects and interview with many decent industry pioneers, and with them i have deep understanding of the blockchain step by step, and became more and more curious about the blockchain world.

But SV insight change the business direction a few months later, and the heavy operation work made me feel that I didn’t really live in and participate in this crazy blockchain world. 80% of my work is focused on how to improve my operation skills, and only 20% of my work can make me think about more interesting things about blockchain. (What i mean, it’s necessary to constantly improve your basic skills. All senior skills need to be built on your basic skills.)

Taking 20% of my time on blockchain can’t satisfy my curiosity about the blockchain world. I hope to do a job that can make me more involved in the world, so I chose to leave SV insight in August 2018.

2

The first thing when left SV insight was summarized the work in the past year, and think about what things i am really good at and enjoy.

Usually I like the immersion learning method to get all the information I need quickly. But in the blockchain industry, when I don’t have a “God” perspective, I hope to get information quickly from the top people who are in the industry. So I find I’m always enjoyed the process of producing courses with every teacher, especially with Judy, managing director at DHVC, except learning blockchain knowledge, but learning the logic and perspective of how they understand the blockchain world. At the same time, I hope these good views and understanding can be known to more people who want to enter the blockchain world.

So, maybe i’m a little bit crazy, I want to try to do something like this — to transmit the correct understanding to everyone who is interested in blockchain, and make learning innovation technology as a trend.

So we set up HashBang and provide the blockchain knowledge as a service. We want to build the blockchain community (what I’m good at) through knowledge services (what I can enjoy), hoping to let more people understand the industry in the simplest way, and to connect the pioneers in the industry about how they understand the blockchain world and the logic of doing things.

At the early time, HashBang didn’t set up a centralized team. As a continuous entrepreneur, I always know the high risks and uncertainties of entrepreneurship. I must responsible for myself and other partners in the team. So in the beginning, I made a 3 months plan. During the 3 months, first, to verify the whole HashBang ideas. If it’s all going well, we can set up a centralized team. If it’s not going well, I’ll stop it immediately. Second, I hope to use three months to cooperation with the team and see if we are the best when we get together. Although they are all my good friends , and they all agree with the ideas at present, but the relationship of trust doesn’t mean that we can doing things perfect together. All things will encounter various problems in the process of implementation. I hope to unite the team within all kinds of troubles. At the same time, I also hope they can enjoy doing the HashBang things. So in the early stage, me (Community), Kiko (Content), Qinwen (Overseas), Chris (Marketing), Dasiy (Designer) and Mr. Li (Technology) formed a distributed online team. Except Mr. Li and me, the other four people all have their own full-time work and only cooperate part of the work in their spare time.

But in fact, before I formed an online team, many friends were helping me. Traditional Internet operation thinking way makes me care about users, especially the core users. So to be honest, I became good friends with a lot of community users, Frank, Adrian, Teco, Ray, 三月既望, 胡言乱语, Zengmi, Angelina, Romeo, Lawrence… In fact, geting know Qinwen also from a community user survey I did. QW was the Middle East director of LongHash at that time, and now is the Chinese community manager of Web 3 Foundation. To be honest, the thinking logic of QW investor background help me learn a lot in the process of entrepreneurship.

I think this is also the charm of the blockchain world, which makes me make many friends who are willing to help me. I remember that Zhiyuan Xu once said to Xiaobo Wu （Two famous media people in China）, “ In an rapid changing times, when everyone is in a state of constant panic, friendship provides him a real comfort, even a kind of strength.” I really feel the power from all my friends in a bear market.

So in this way, we began to work on blockchain courses: course quality control manual, course topic selection, finding teachers, setting up teaching and research groups, producing content with teachers, preparing all online materials list, teacher recording, course editing, course internal testing, course online, course spread, daily operation, user growth, channel cooperation… The whole process is all done by ourselves.

So we have cooperated with 5 top experts in the industry, such as Shuo Bai, doctoral director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ben El Baz, Chief Strategic Officer of Hashkey Pro, Chao Pan, head of MakerDao in China, etc., these courses are not only recommended by Wanxiang’s Dr. Xiao Feng, a16z crypto partner Katie, Founder of MakerDao Rune, but also have a good reputation among users.

So at the end of three months, I decided to continue HashBang, Kiko decided to join full-time!

In fact, in addition to the courses, we have also done a series of AMA (ask me anything). We invited 25 people from Polkadot, ChainX, Nervos, coinlist and other projects to discuss topics including Staking, ctypto economics, digital currency transaction ecology and quantitative transaction, so as to help more than 3000 high-quality community users understand the forefront of the industry.

In this process, our understanding of blockchain and users are constantly improving.

3

However, I have to face a reality, we only made a profit of 53789.3 RMB through the course sales in the past five months… Although only I and Kiko are full-time, it’s difficult to support us to continue HashBang.

In fact, we have found difficult to profit in earlier time. Looking at the slow growth of the number of income of the course every day, we are worried and thought many solutions. We wondered that are there fewer people learning in the bear market? Is the poor quality of our course? Is the content unattractive? Is it because there is no course channel and flow? After analyzing the reasons, we have done a lot of optimization, and even increased the conversion rate from page to purchase to 8%, which is generally only 3% in the traditional Internet. But even so, the effect of optimization is not obvious.

Facing the reality, I have to admit that the business model of HashBang may not work in the current blockchain environment. We need to find new breakthroughs.

I calm down again to sum up the past five months. At this time, I feel once again that if an entrepreneurial team wants to survive, it can’t just do what it likes, it must have the ability to make money to support the team. I don’t know if you guys have such a feeling — — to do something in the blockchain industry is to bet on things. I know It’s a bit arbitrary and irrational to say so.

But from the perspective of Internet products, when you make a “product” (it can be understood that any entrepreneurship is to make a product), we often start from one point, such as HashBang is to do courses, AMA and community. But we need to figure out which side this point should be attached to, who is competing with this side, how can it unfold, which economy is this side, and whether this economy is rising rapidly or sinking?

A sad life is to be diligent in a normal way.

The more miserable life is to be a diligent point in a normal side. You think about the future every day, but the side is sinking.

The saddest part of life is to be diligent in what seems to be a good side, but in fact, the economy attached to this side is sinking.

If a person can only receive the timing benefits of point efforts in his life, and has never enjoyed a linear cycle of results reporting, this is called the hard-working life of the poor.

The flow of blockchain itself is very small. If we stand on a very difficult side to do point things, we will get the half result. So, I hope to find a development side in the rising economy of blockchain. In the process of this, we did catch up with many things and made many attempts, such as quantification, stablecoin, wallet, asset custody, etc., but these have not been perfectly combined with the points we love and are good at.

Yes, it is very important to know what you are good at and what you are not good at! In other words, team genes are very important! Looking back on the past, I found that we have always been good at and interested in knowledge-based and technology discussion communities, but on the way to find another opportunities, we have always been focusing on investment things.

4

In April 2019, Kiko and Qinwen and I happened to join a Polkadot meetup in Shanghai. Although it was in the bear market, it was full of people.

In fact, as early as February, when we were preparing the course of Incentive Design, we had noticed Polkadot and Cosmos. Later, we started a Staking series AMA in May. In the first AMA, Qinwen (now the Chinese community manager of the web 3 Foundation) invited Jack Platts, the director of cooperation of the web 3 Foundation, to share the Staking of Polkadot.

This time, we felt the community attention to Polkadot directly, which prompted me to learning Polkadot again — not only what it is, but also how we can participate in it.

After talking with a lot of developers, teams and capitals, I found that Polkadot is a very worthy ecosystem. Whether the Substrate technology framework that can be used to build a chain, or the Polkadot design that improves the scalability and interoperability of the blockchain, or Gavin wood’s expectation of Web3.0. I think the development of Polkadot will be the next big milestone in the blockchain industry. I have a feeling that Polkadot is just what I am looking for — a rising “side” in the blockchain economy.

It suddenly occurred to me that I want to start a Polkadot technology community, but I need a partner who know the Polkadot technology very well. After having this idea, I asked my friend to recommend PolkaX, the most familiar Polkadot technology team in China, and contacted the founders Li Peng and Guanghua at the first time. After chatting with Guanghua for 20 minutes, he replied to me with a message: “ Dose the community is kind of like ethfans?” I immediately replied “Yes!”.

As i mentioned earlier, team genes are very important! When looking for partners, investors and project parties must see what the genes of partners. Because what genes will determine what they can do. Looking back on the things we do, what we are really good at is content + community, and we think in the blockchain, community is the starting point of everything. I think the community is not only need a powerful operation team, but also a skillful technical team to guide us. A good community that can provide a good service for the eco and create opportunities is not only need solid operation, but also strong technical support. “Operation + technology” is the most stable structure that can start things in the early stage.

5

On May 18, 2019, I took the high-speed rail from Shanghai to Hangzhou to visit Guanghua. I remembered that ChianX mainnet was launched in those day, which is the world’s first chain based on the Substrate to launch the mainnet.

Here is a brief introduction to Substrate, which is the next generation of blockchain technology framework. It is abstracted by Parity when developing Polkadot. It not only has higher flexibility in development, but also greatly improves the performance, governance, and upgradeability of the chain developed with substate. At that time, ChainX was the only Chinese team that cooperated with Polkadot’s official to develop the substrate chain. As the “first people to eat crab”, ChainX needed to overcome difficulties in the process of exploration and contributed a lot of code to substate. It is no exaggeration to say that ChainX’s technical strength in the aspect of Substrate is the first in China.

This is the first time to meet Guanghua. Before that, we only talked on wechat for 20 minutes. Honest to say, it’s hard for me to build trust with people I meet for the first time. But with Guanghua. I met him on 18th to reach a cooperation intention. On 20th, I signed a cooperation agreement with Guanghua. The name of PolkaWorld was decided in the second week. I immediately bought the polkaworld.org and Guanghua set up the PolkaWorld website.

On June 1, PolkaWorld was officially launched. In the first month, PolkaWorld got 3687 members, while HashBang increased 3000 members use five months. I felt the improvement of work efficiency attached to a rapidly rising side for the first time.

One afternoon in early July, sitting on the sofa outside the shared office, I wrote a long email to Dr.Gavin Wood and explained why we want to star PolkaWorld and what kind of help we need from him. 15 minutes later , I received the email from Gavin, saying that two weeks later he will be in China and hope we can talk more. At the end of the email, he also used Chinese “安康”. It is really respectful!

Later, Gavin came to China in July, and we jointly hosted Polkadot China trip with Web3 foundation. In September, Gavin came to China again. PolkaWorld held the world’s first Substrate developer competition “PolkaWorld Hackathon” in Hangzhou. 22 teams from four countries showed their projects to Gavin . Among the 22 teams, two have received grant from Web3, Bandot and bifrast, and the recently popular project Acala network, their original idea, Polkawallet and Laminar decided to do such a thing, was also generated in this competition.

6

Many people have asked me, there are so many blockchain projects, why we chose to build a community of Polkadot？

Today, more than half a year later, my answer is because I think Polkadot / Substrate framework is most likely to generate a large number of really useful blockchains and build a healthy ecosystem.

Few days ago, we held Subdev Beijing 0.1 in Beijing. A traditional developer asked me a question: “what is the business model of the blockchain projects currently?”. This is a good problem, because any technology want to move forward, it must be able to value its ecological projects.

Substrate provides some components and modules, so that developers can focus on their own business logic instead of consensus algorithm, network security, governance, etc. Therefore, this allows developers to think fundamentally about a real business model of blockchain projects, and purify the industry. As Gavin said, there is no stupid money in this industry anymore, and the capital will judge the business model in the end. At present, DeFi is a direction, and we hope to see more good business models in the future.

One point I want to say here is that there is essential difference between projects based on substrate and projects through erc20 of Ethereum. In 2017, people can create a project through the erc20 contract of Ethereum, and now there are only a few DeFi projects and a bunch of air coins (with no business model). With the emergence of substrate, developers can use customized functions, which can fully support the innovative ideas of developers, so it is more likely to produce a new business model.

There is a saying that “if someone invites you to board a rocket, don’t ask if your seat is comfortable, just go!” What PolkaWorld doing is inviting more people to board the rocket, not only as passengers, but also as builders, and fly into space together.

This article is also an invitation — if you don’t know Polkadot and Substrate yet, maybe you can start by following PolkaWorld.

The following video summarizes what PolkaWorld has done for more than half a year. Enjoy the video！

This is not the end. 2020 is a new beginning！

I wish you a happy Spring Festival with all PolkaWorld team!

Connect us：xiaojie.pang@fxhashbang.com

Follow us on Twitter：@polkaworld_org