What did you work on?
Project name: Developer Marketing
Objective: To create a developer marketing program
Impact: We hope that attracting more people who will contribute to blockchain will not only grow the community but also improve our collective understanding and ability to apply the technology across industries.
What did you learn or accomplish?
The mentorship project started with researching and understanding Hyperledger Foundation, its ecosystem and marketing and communications maps and channels as well as reviewing the marketing strategy.
We created developer and member personas. I was fortunate to be able to participate in the Blockchain Hackathon in Paris and was able to use my contacts to understand more about developers. We also created a persona messaging grid to deep dive into the personas.
Towards the end, we created a marketing campaign targeting a developer community of 30 million. The campaign leveraged the fact that developers tend to game and, similarly, gamers make great developers.
My mentor was Ben Thomas, Hyperledger Foundation’s Marketing Manager.
What I really appreciated about Ben is that I always found it easy and fun to engage with him, even at times when I knew his schedule was jam packed and stress levels were running high.
He shared the ins-and-outs of marketing, introduced me to Hubspot, and guided me through all the deliverables while providing valuable feedback in the process. He had a great mentorship style in which he would share a process or brief and then let me take ownership of it, guiding me as required.
Ben also recommended a book, Jono Bacon’s “People Powered,” which describes how communities can supercharge your business, brand, and teams. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and we spoke at length about the content and shared our insights.
In one of our sessions, Ben had arranged for Hyperledger Foundation Executive Director Daniela Barbosa to join us. What a remarkable woman! On review of the Developer personas that I had created, she challenged my assumptions that all the developers were male. It highlighted a bias I did not realize that I had.
What comes next?
I am in the middle of my MBA, so I plan to continue with classes after the New Year. In the not-too-distant future, I hope to use blockchain technology as a tool to improve health care for everyone.
