Lessons Learned: Full-time indie dev, funded by OP collective

I am now building Redprint toolkit as a full-time indie developer. It is a forever free, modular, and open-source toolkit for L2/rollup/App-chain development. I am honored to noted that we have been selected as one of the grant recipients from OP Collective. In a few respects, this has totally changed my perspectives. Here I’ll share what I learned : Freedom, and Boldness.

Freedom

In the tech industry, I've seen many startup teams embrace entrepreneurship and pursue their passions with determination, creating products that aim to improve the world and humanity. They earn their own freedom to keep working on what they love. These are the people I aspire to be like.

However, some high-impact ideas are economically infeasible. They do not only require funding and profit, but they also often challenge traditional ways of thinking and established paths. These norms can hold us back, forcing us to make small or even strategic tradeoffs. Sometimes, to achieve our mission, we must sacrifice our true free will and freedom.

Nonetheless, this wont be necessarily true for web3. To tackle this, Optimism Collective empower builder’s freedom by rewarding them with grants. Now, there are two main types of funding where proposals can be drafted to apply for:

1. Missions grant : This can be thought of like the prospective grant. If the milestones are considered to be aligned with one of the Collective Intents, and the grant amount is justified, your project will be awarded upfront!!

2. Retro Funding : As specified, it is retrospective. This grant is allocated to reward work that has already been completed for its impact.

The takeaway here is that both of them need measurable, public, trackable metrics, so that such metrics can be reviewed by evaluators. Therefore, I recommend that there should be both metrics which assesses quantitative growth and qualitative impact. If the metric is too tailored into some specific domains, it could possibly be difficult for those evaluators. I would say we are still not at the stage that every commitments made will be appropriately justified. Hence, I recommend to present such metrics in a simplest way as much as possible.

Furthermore, I highlight that these two types of grant are governed and managed by two different parties. This means that project which have been awarded by prospective grant could possibly be good candidate eligible for retrospective grant too if your occurred impacts are measurable!.

These two funding system do not only reinvent a new way to make a meaningful impact while making money, but they also allow us to earn our freedom by doing what we like as well as liking for what we do.

Boldness

For context, I am self-taught developer. I have no computer science degree, but I decided to break away from the so-called “conventional path” and joined the Web3 tribe. To achieve true freedom, I believe I must distinguish myself from others and have the courage to be an early adopter of innovative and unique ideas. Though the stakes are high, the potential rewards make the journey worthwhile if I succeed in being a pioneer.

When we brainstormed and drafted proposal to submit the grant, we realized that we need not only align to Optimism’s the Collective Intents , but we should realize and embrace its culture too.

Paul Dylan-Ennis pinned down the ‘s Optimism culture as Regenerative

Regens: Many influential voices within Ethereum are committed to a regen or regenerative approach to building technology. Rooted in Vitalik Buterin’s interest in politics and social science, many regens engage in governance experiments designed to reinvigorate, improve or even replace contemporary institutions. This subculture is characterized by its experimental nature and interest in public goods, engaging in experiments such as Quadratic Funding, Soulbound Tokens (SBT), and retroactive public goods funding. Regens are usually less focused on financial applications and more drawn to the idea of building a new decentralized Web, sometimes called Web3. Regens usually, but not always, tend to hold more progressive forms of politics and are associated with an aesthetic called solarpunk. You can find regens in public goods communities like Gitcoin or Optimism.

I use my proposal : Redprint as an. example.

To sum up, we rethink the product model from paid SaaS to 100% open-source and free software/toolkit as public goods. This product model sustains only if Optimism ‘s public goods funding system works in the long term. Nevertheless, this concept is very early, experimental and questionable in some aspects.

Essentially, the key is to adopt a regenerative approach which does not exist in traditional world before. I believe that keeping boldness and sparking the flame of possibility towards undone paths could possibly lead to impacts that make the world better. If those impacts are significant and realized by regens, these impacts will be continuously rewarded by the Regens’s community.

To illustrate more, I used the Optimism’s presensation to picture its vision of public goods:

Essentially, it can be though that regens are going to create a whole new ecosystem with regenerative approach on Optimism network, and this is just beginning!! This starts with open-source software but it is not limited to just this category. In the near future, rewarded projects can be any bold, un-funded and high-impact works, such as education or even medicals. Subsequently, more and better solutions will be invented to address our world’s unsolved challenges. With such new whole new funding system, the next generation will build a future far beyond what came before.

Final thought as final lesson

Building high impacts on the real world requires boldness and bravery. One can argue that keep grinding on this experimental concept like this is extremely risky. There is no guarantee that It will work in a long term. However, I personally believe that this is also an opportunity to explore. Building up skills and knowhow definitely takes time to success. Our time is more valuable than money, and we live in one of greatest time in the internet history where we have freedom to explore and commit to what resonates our own values while earning income .

That is it !! , and if you would like to support my open-source work, PLZ visit https://redprint.ninja/ or give the Github stars at my repos ( Redprint Wizard and redprint-forge )