From Hackathons to Kernel, Starting a Web3 Company - Rachel Black

next up folks we have rachel from good ghosting she's going to be doing uh from hackathon to colonel and starting a web 3 company rachel how are you today hi hi i'm good can you hear me okay we totally can welcome cool awesome awesome and you've got my screen all right it's sharing fine um cool awesome okay cool well thank you for having me uh my name is rachel and i'm going to talk about a from hackathons to a git coin colonel with my project uh good ghosting and before i actually just dive into that and talk about our kind of journey and how we came right is london and bitcoin kernel and all these things i'm just going to have a quick vision of the project and what we're trying to do uh so people have some context there so we basically want to end uh boring savings so we know that kind of saving is very hard and then even when we do save it's really poorly rewarded certainly in kind of traditional finance luckily we don't need to just deal with that because you know we're in crypto and we've got d5 and there's so many exciting things that we can do uh in this space you know importantly there are much higher potential returns and that's that is important uh but things like composability and building on top of you know open protocols and really excitingly bringing you know gamification and more engaging kind of finance models there as well um but still d5 is hard for a lot of users and i pulled these uh twitter these tweets out over summer and i think it still pretty much holds up up like what is yield farming um all of these things like we're seeing a lot of people get engaged with crypto again with with the bull run um but how do we build something that's going to take them from you know knowing about crypto maybe using a centralized exchange like coinbase to actually uh using a decentralized finance product so this is where good ghosting comes in we offer like an accessible route into defy it's one that's still going to give our users meaningful returns and importantly we want to help our users build better financial habits so helping them to learn save and giving them kind of incentive to to start building up those assets on a kind of regular cadence um so yeah that's kind of that's our vision and with that in mind uh we kind of had this idea of an mvp and this was actually ideated uh back here at east london uh which is march last year which i think was pretty much the last kind of in ireland event that i went to um so it will always be dear in my heart for that um but yeah our mvp game uh will be it will follow this logic uh users basically join a saving pool um and they'll make regular deposits during that time so for example paul's going to go for four months and then every month they need to deposit 200 die we convert that diet into a diet so it's accruing interest during the time and then at the end we can do like our bookkeeping and work out who was a regular saver who managed to hit all of their saving uh regular goals and who wasn't if you weren't able to save regularly too bad unfortunately in the in the context of this game you are kind of you've lost the game essentially but it is no loss so you will get your principal back that is your money that does belong to you but if you were able to save and you hit all of those goals and you were a regular saver that's awesome that's really the kind of what we're looking for and what we want to incentivize our users to do so those savers they're going to get something a bit extra they're going to get a slice of the interest and if you think about it say if you had you know 100 people in the pool chances are that you know 30 maybe 50 of them might drop out they might not make those regular savings so you should really just by the law of averages get a higher return than you would do if you just saved by yourself you know worst case scenario everyone does hit all of their regular savings well i actually think that's success because we've actually onboarded people into some really positive behavior so thinking about our roadmap and how we kind of uh got started with this uh project so yeah back at east london when we could meet um for real um we we ideated this over the two-day hackathon and we're really like happy to to win a prize there it was an amazing experience staying up to kind of 4 30 in the morning and you know drinking a lot of energy drinks and ultimately building something really fun over the short of a short space of time then after that um we actually this summer um kind of reformed the project again as part of the gitcoin kernel program this is something that i i took part over i think it was july august time it was a really amazing program i definitely you know big shout big shout out to the bitcoin team they did a great work of pulling in amazing uh mentors and really facilitating some really interesting conversations uh as part of that and in the git coin colonel program was able to reform a team and we've been working on this since this since summer but it hasn't stopped there uh we had a number of um we've had we've hit a number of different milestones so we uh got a grant via avi which is really nice um an ecosystem grant there as well uh metagama delta and makerdale also have given us a grant to help us bootstrap the project and we also ran two successful uh gitcoin grants uh campaigns i think we got around 77 in our in our first campaign around 60 in our second i was really nice to see that community feedback and community support and know that there's definitely interest in the project that we're building um so that was really amazing to see so yeah i've got this is our kind of prototype for mvp um so basically this is the kind of good ghosting smart contractor the logic for the game i explained at the beginning so essentially users put in dye and it gets converted to adi we have been doing a lot of stuff and we've been thinking really hard around uh how to make this you know gas efficient because of course like the last few weeks and over summer it showed us just you know how high gas can go um we've put in the first stage of that and that is basically we batch all of the kind of transactions so users pay and die and we batch all of those deposits and we do a single transaction um into ave and that would be something that we would pay you know as a project um but of course we want to you know build out from that and we're you know actively looking at matic or polygon um as a kind of solution to to make it optimized for our users but yeah this is basically the the simple um kind of contracts for our first game but really this is just the beginning in terms of what we want to do so coming back to our original vision which is making savings uh more engaging and stopping them being really boring and a chore which they are at the moment um there's a lot of things we want to do so of course we're working with ave which is amazing but we do want to kind of broaden that out and bring on you know other protocols uh things like yearn etc and actually something that i think is really exciting is this idea of a kind of community created games with the mvp we're basically setting all the rules we set like the time frame we set the amounts um and we're doing that just to get it out there but we're not really the best place people to do that um i think it's going to be a lot more interesting when we have a community creating their own games setting their own parameters how much they want to save and actually changing some of the logic of the game as well so at the moment we have quite a punitive model so if you don't save regularly then you kind of lose out but i think there's many different ways that you kind of reimagine this and it could be that you know the funds are getting redirected to a cause that you support could be that um everybody gets the assets that they put in and the share of that but you'd only get like a good ghosting token if you were a regular sober etcetera so i think there's a lot more we can do on that and we're looking at tokenizing the game as well um and of course adding you know more gamification so we think that you know we think that and it's been shown just you know with like challenging banks that people do want to kind of have bring this kind of interactivity into their finance and we're thinking about kind of things like you know maybe you get a badge if you're the first person to deposit in your round uh quests maybe this kind of leaderboards all these sort of things and kind of really borrowing quite heavily from from the world of game gaming and gamification and then just some stuff around making it more accessible because we really see like this sitting in between uh challenger banks and you know more crypto native protocols um so things like fiat on-ramp making a mobile application just make it much easier for users to onboard and get the most out of the application also notifications you know it's it is hard to keep track of things and you know we're looking at ethereum push notifications is a pretty cool solution for that um yeah so this could be the future of saving uh we're seeing like a fiat on-ramp mobile application social pools you may be joining a pool that your friend has created or your colleagues created um i'm really bringing that gamification to finance to make it much more enjoyable than the kind of drudge that it is at the moment we had an application on covan and we ran a load of um alpha testing we did some user testing with this and we got some really good feedback from our users um so people really like the idea of you know being in a pool this this social element is is really fascinating to people i think it's almost like you kind of want to know that you're doing well but you also want to know how other people are doing and it can be really really interesting to kind of delve into that um yeah and just kind of making something that's going to want going to make people want to save um but yeah we've got a lot um we're doing a lot we've got a constant code review which is um we're very grateful for the metagama delta grant for sorting that out and also constant as well for that um and then we're also racing around and we're looking at you know polishing the front end obviously the gas optimized version and then we want to scale up and kind of be this bridge from c5 to d5 um so here's a little sneak peek of our ui um so this is kind of a user that has uh just about to make a deposit of a 200 die uh trying to make it uh you know pretty clean and you know enjoyable for the users to use and we're just gonna build on that as well um yeah and this actually comes to ties into the next point we're actually going to be launching a um beta tested a beta we're going to be launching a game on covan tomorrow um so if you are curious you can join us and we're going to be doing an onboarding call i think it's 7 p.m cet so if you scan that and also paste that link in there you can join our discord and we're going to host it on there and get to grips have a feel for our ui and start messing around with the with the project we'd really love uh some feedback on this because we really want to be you know building in a user-centric way and getting knowing what works for our users and building that feedback into into our product um yeah and you can also follow us on twitter and we've got a website goodghosting.com and you can even email us if you want to be traditional there as well um but yeah i think that's that is just a very quick whistle stop tour of it um i don't know um if anyone has any questions or if there's anything that's come up in in the chat at all shannon hi rachel thank you for that that was awesome and very concise you're well ahead of schedule um yeah people are just celebrating it they want to know more thanks for showing us where they can get in touch with you uh curious to know what you're most excited about right now i'm actually really well making it gamified and making this kind of um making it so that people can you know want to save is is really exciting in this and i think there's i think d5 is such an interesting space because i really like this idea that you can build on top of other open protocols and i think this is what really gives it you know so much power so you know projects like pull together is a really big inspiration uh for us as well and like thinking that you know we can integrate pot maybe there could be you know a part of a saving pool that goes too poor together and if they win that could be shared amongst the pools um so i think that's really exciting and i think as we kind of at the moment when we've launched this it has been very much our team kind of making the decisions but as we kind of open it up with things like the factory contract and making it accessible for our users to create their own pools create their own parameters i think that's when it's going to get really interesting because i mean yeah really interested to kind of see how people can take this and use it that's awesome i've been part of the pull together email list and and paying attention to the community for a long time now i'm curious what does the user ship look like these days for our product yeah yeah so we i mean we haven't like launched in the world because we've been working you know on covant so far and we do want to because of the nature of our application i think at the moment it is likely we're going to have to integrate some sort of layer 2 solution just so that users can pay a more granular amount than gas prices currently allow um but having said that we've grown like a reasonable size community i think we have around 400 people in our discord um people keep dropping in and are interested and i want to get involved in the project um we've had a few shout outs and crypto youtube as well so it's nice to see the idea get traction even before we've launched for real um so yeah we're very much all about talking to our users and any feedback please let us know because we want to be very user-centric with our design decisions that's great and discord is the best place discord is the place this is where it's all going down and yeah we'll be doing this on boarding with our beta test application tomorrow so if you're about at i think it's 7 p.m cet i'm based in berlin um so we will be running a little session then and the rest of the team will be down there as well be amazing to see some people from east denver pop in awesome well everybody show up see whoops looks like we accidentally lost her so thank you very much rachel it's really wonderful to hear about all the things that your project is doing and it's really cool to see things how they've evolved for you and and the project over time so it's really cool excellent here sorry about that um we've got rachel back go ahead rachel hi shannon well that was awesome any final words you'd like to add uh no i just want to say like a big shout out to i mean to eat denver for um letting out letting me present also you know thank you to all the kind of bitcoin colonel and east london as well it's been really amazing to be kind of part of the community here awesome we're so happy to have you cool coco awesome