[Progress Report] June
Hello friends, this month I was traveling through Berlin Blockchain Week, EthCluj, and just leaving Cannes after a delightful week at EthCC. Below is a brief summary of my observations and the recording from our monthly team meeting.
I have also started posting more frequent and shorter notes and insights in our internal Telegram chat.
Total Treasury Balance: $2,966.00
My main goal in June was to validate the need for product design to inform the strategic direction of Deep Work. I interviewed founders, presented on product design in web3, facilitated public workshops, and most importantly, collected feedback from our ideal audiences.
Opportunity space in web3
Technical teams have promising digital infrastructure, and visionary founders have great ideas, but many lack user adoption and long-term retention. To avoid becoming irrelevant, they can improve UX and run research-driven experiments to validate real-world use cases and create value.
Deep Work positioning and strategy
Our extensive background in facilitation, UX, prototyping, user testing, copywriting, and org design can support teams. In surfacing what makes them unique, align on a hypothesis, create prototypes together, and interpret user feedback to inform strategy. An unbiased external organization with experts who understand web3, we can hold teams accountable to stay focused and achieve their mission.
Our shared values also attract collaborations that are addressing problems in the real world, rather than building financial instruments.
Reinforcing our distribution channels
The conferences were an opportunity to test existing distribution channels. After Devcon in Bangkok, I realised that almost all collaborations came from meeting up and being present with friends. This time, most of my time I spent meeting friends 1:1 and having a great time. To anyone whom I had the chance to meet in person - I deeply enjoyed (re)connecting with you!
Case studies and "how-tos" are interesting to our community and clients. So if you are working on something (especially in collaboration with other Deep Work members), let me know, and I will turn it into a case study and publish it on Substack and Twitter.
This also means that Deep Work's brand will continue functioning as a referral mechanism for individuals.
Initiatives for the rest of the year
Until Devconnect in Argentina, I plan on iterating on the following:
Take focused calls with potential clients and adjust our offering to their requirements.
Repeating a version of the workshop at Protocol Berg. It's for technical teams who need to break down the use cases for their infrastructure and build targeted prototypes.
Repeating the presentation. I received great feedback on the content, but ate something bad the day before EthCC, which impaired my performance.
Facilitate online sessions with founders/teams to validate the user journey/prototype design exercise.
Finish the one-pager to help teams design user-facing prototypes (and potentially create an AI agent).
Partner with builder programs and hackathons to educate teams on creating apps/products people need.
Experiment with coliving setups that can be used to test and validate socio-technical infrastructure IRL.
I will list all initiatives in Deep Teams so you can apply there anytime if you would like to collaborate.
What other Deep Work members are working on
Sarah discussed her work on the Arbitrum growth circles, program design, and instructional design for educational games.
Catherine expressed interest in finding new projects and opportunities, and asked the group if anyone had any leads or notifications to share.
David is looking for development projects, particularly related to blockchain app development.
Feel free to leave some comments, have a wonderful start to July, and see you all in a month!
Andrej