There are already about 30 million programmers, and their number continues to grow. Despite this, companies face a shortage of developers. A vast market and a sharp deficit — two sweet phrases that can be quite profitable 😉 If only you can manage to gather such valuable personnel on your platform. Here’s what they’re already being attracted to — and this can be replicated, as the market is truly vast.
THE ESSENCE OF THE PROJECT
OnlyDust calls on developers to “forge their own story”, or in other words, gain status and experience through OnlyDust.
A developer can achieve this by participating in the development of open-source projects, which are offered on the OnlyDust community platform.
Any member or partner company of the community can launch a project on the platform. The list of projects largely consists of Web3-related projects, linked to blockchain and cryptocurrencies. But this doesn’t spoil the general idea of OnlyDust 😉
Why should developers participate in these projects?
Firstly, for self-education:
Practical work on a real, not a tutorial, project is the best way to learn a new topic, new technologies, and acquire practical skills and experience working with them. If more experienced developers in the topic participate in the project, it’s also an opportunity to learn from them how they handle such tasks in practice.
Secondly, each contribution a developer makes to every project (written pieces of code, code reviews, and other useful things) earns him a reputation, which accumulates on the platform in the form of badges, achievements, and points.
In this way, the developer can present his profile, adorned with “medals”, to other developers or potential employers to prove his worth, even if his resume does not have lines with relevant experience.
The community regularly hosts online and offline events where community members can interact with experts and other members to establish personal connections that may benefit them in the future.
The first type of “future assistance” is job referrals from other community members familiar with you due to collaborative projects on the platform. Furthermore, personal encounters at events can also lead to such referrals.
If a referrer already works at a company where the developer is aiming to get hired, that’s fantastic. Another way to meet a potential employer is to participate in a project initiated by that company on the OnlyDust platform.
Why do companies initiate such projects on the platform?
Firstly, it’s for the same purpose – to meet developers, observe them while working on real projects, and try to hire the ones they like.
Secondly, it’s a way of creating a developer ecosystem that produces modules, plugins, and other add-ons and extensions for the company’s product.
Companies that initiate projects on the platform get full access to their statistics – quantitatively measuring the ecosystem’s development dynamics and/or tracking the most active project participants.
To spur the development of their projects and attract more participants, a company can establish a monetary grant program – distributed among project participants based on pre-defined rules.
The startup launched its platform only last year, but in this time, 1,734 community members have already participated in 56 projects, and project-initiating companies have disbursed almost a million dollars in grants.
OnlyDust has now raised its first investment of 3 million euros.
Interesting Fact
There are already a vast number of developers – globally, the count is around 30 million. However, there is still a pronounced shortage in the market. As a result, the cost for companies to attract skilled developers is increasing.
However, new people constantly join the profession – as we can see from the graph, the number of programmers continues to grow steadily. To address the shortage, companies could actively hire novice developers without relevant entries in their CVs.
But how can companies ensure that these novices are genuinely skilled? One or two technical interviews typically don’t give a real understanding of this. As a result, companies either hire unskilled individuals or filter out capable candidates with an inadequate CV.
On the other hand, every month a significant number of new developers enter the market who cannot find decent work because they lack relevant experience on their CVs. But these entries can’t appear unless someone hires them for a suitable job. It’s a vicious cycle that’s not easy to break out of.
One solution is platforms like OnlyDust. Here, developers can show potential employers the results of real project work rather than just their CV, and companies can find those who want to and can work in the desired area with the right technologies.
Even if a company encourages community members with real money in the form of grants, it may be cheaper and more effective than spending money on generic job advertising and then having HR and tech professionals filter the influx of applications.
Using a similar model and also focusing on crypto projects was a startup called Buildspace. Their difference from OnlyDust was that they encouraged programmers to work on their ideas in the evenings and on weekends. The startup earned by giving companies access to the activity statistics – for the same potential hiring purposes.
Last fall, Buildspace shifted away from the crypto theme and maintained its primary format as 6-week member batches, still working in the evenings and on weekends on their ideas. At this point, the startup raised 10 million dollars in investments.
The startup “The Full Stack” created something like a “LinkedIn for developers” for similar purposes – but instead of a traditional CV with a list of past positions, members can post information about their projects that they have led and are leading as hobbies or side activities. They only managed to raise a small investment though — just 100,000 euros.
Where to run
Despite the fact that AI has already learned to write software code, I think the demand for programmers won’t significantly decline — because human intelligence is still irreplaceable 😉
This means that there will still be a lot of programmers, their number will continue to grow, newcomers will still face employment challenges for a decent job, and companies will face challenges in hiring worthy specialists.
Platforms that gather programmers will remain a sought-after place where programmers can showcase their best sides, and companies can hire the best.
One of the right models for this is a platform where developers can collaborate on their and others’ projects. It’s no wonder that GitHub has recently been actively used by recruiters and companies as a tool to search for hiring candidates 😉
However, this model is not the only one. For example, the startup daily.dev, which I wrote about in the spring, created a “place where developers grow together” – essentially a place where developers can subscribe to news on topics of interest to them.
The trick of daily.dev is that platform users earn badges and achievements for regularly reading news. The startup makes money by inserting news from companies into the news feeds — with information about new tools, vacancies, conferences, etc. Despite such a simple model, daily.dev raised 11 million dollars in its first round of investments.
So, the general direction is to create platforms where developers will want to gather. For collaborative projects, for news, for challenges like Kaggle, or something else.
The beauty of it is that, if we can gather them, we will definitely make money on it 😉 Because this audience is very valuable and scarce both for advertisers and for employers.
What would you start gathering developers for right now?
About the company
OnlyDust
Website: onlydust.xyz
Latest round: €3M, 15.09.2023
Total investments: €3M, rounds: 1.