Saga

Saga had the infrastructure. Almost nobody was building on it. I was the founding developer relations hire. There was no program, no events, no content, and no record of who was building what.

A public launch was already on the calendar.

The Innovator Program was the spine. A project joined, got technical support and co-marketing, and we learned what was hard about building on the platform.

Around it I organised hackathons, roadshows, content, and community teams. A six-week hackathon on DoraHacks. A premiere during GDC week. A branded hacker house in Austin for Consensus. The largest Web3 gaming summit of its year at Gamescom, co-run with Polygon, Avalanche, and Immutable. A weekly interview series ran under all of it. Video, Twitter Spaces, and writeups, so the ecosystem heard from the builders.

The program and the events fed each other. The hackathon supplied the Innovator Program. The Innovator Program supplied the demo days, with teams who had something to show. The interviews gave people a reason to be visible.

Three demo days. Each one judged by a different pair of outside firms. Teams spent six weeks in front of investors and studios who could act on what they saw. I would use that structure again.

224 projects joined in under twelve months. Four out of five were games. 2,200+ developers registered across the GDC premiere and the Austin hacker house. The hackathon put $50,000+ into the ecosystem across six tracks. The ecosystem was in place for the public launch.