Polygon X Devfolio Fellowship 2022- A Recap
It’s been over a week since the Polygon fellowship concluded and what an experience it was. A lot has happened since then and this blog is all about my experience and learnings!
It all started on in June, 2022 when I got the acceptance for the fellowship. Didn’t expect that I’d make it given that there were over 10k+ applications and only the chosen 50 would make it!
But this happened! I made it to the Buidler track 🤩
I was really excited to start building on my idea while learning from fellows and a great pool of mentors. To kick off, some amazing sessions around DAOs on Polygon, IPFS/Filecoin and a couple of technical sessions around interacting with blockchain data were organized and then we finally started the fellowship. An interactive introduction session of the fellows was followed by ideating with mentors to build products that would make an impact in web3.
Week on week there were multiple catch ups with mentors and building was on. I Initially thought of building a data monetization and ownership platform but web3 security lured me into building RadarFi — a security layer solution for web3
3 weeks into the fellowship, and then came the “Polygon Hacker House” (drums rolls please)
Where do I start? 9 days of pure learning and buidling, finding a community of amazing builders, networking & getting a chance to pitch to VCs — Hacker house was indeed an embodiment of collaborative learning
The IRL hacker house was pretty lit. From almost every web3 founder and buildoors to Sandeep Naliwal himself addressing the fellows, the list goes on, on how valuable and fun the hacker house was.
During the course of the Hacker house, I met all the amazing fellows of Polygon, building some dope web3 products. Staying in an amazing place for over 9 days, Polygon felt like Family.
From the informative sessions and the late night Poly lounge sessions to the late night building, the hacker house just kept getting better. The Poly lounge sessions by Polygon team (Akash and Saksham) were the best. Every night the team brought in the best founders, product builders, designers and amazing fellas from the web3 community.
It was fun and insightful to learn from their experiences and also get feedback on the product we were building. One such session was organized where we could get feedback on anything and everything starting from finding the right product market fit, designing the website, building the right UX to actually marketing the product and building a brand around it. All this packed with some immensely helpful sessions during the day made the experience so wholesome.
After an amazing IRL kickoff of the Hacker House on Day 1 & a day full of interactions with mentors and fellows (and some amazing surprises) on Day 2, Day 3, 4 and 5 were packed with some very insightful sessions. The sessions not only covered the technical aspects of web3 but also the design, product and market aspects.
Had a lot to learn and takeaway from the sessions by Aditya Rola from CapX, Mudit Gupta from Polygon, Madhavan malolan from Questbook and Pranav Maheshwari from Graph Protocol
There’s one thing that Pranav said that’ll stick by me is
Work for impact not money
The energy and the enthusiasm that the hacker house was brimming with fueled every builder to take their ideas to the next level and put India on the web3 map!
Some moments from the hackerhouse:
Over the days, I pivoted my idea multiple times based on the feedback from mentors and speakers and got to know a lot more about the web3 security space than what I already knew. The ecosystem that was inculcated at the HH actually helped me frame my idea and implement it more pragmatically.
Days full of learning, nights coupled with cold brew and building + some really fun interactions — that’s how I’d sum up the hackerhouse.
After some serious building for a week, finally came the Demo Day
Demo day was all about asking good questions, receiving constructive feedback, and getting the adrenaline rush of actually pitching to VCs. It was surreal to pitch the idea with all the market research, product market fit, demo and the future plans. Got a lot of feedback from VCs, ideas on marketing the product, finding the right users for the product — the experience was phenomenal.
Just when I thought that It couldn’t get any better, there was a downpour of swags and giveaways to top it all off, from the Polygon and Devfolio team.
Amazing things happen when people come together for greater good. Kudos to the Polygon and Devfolio team for bringing together builders, designers, mentors and web3 OGs all under one roof to help turn our ideas into actual products at Polygon Hacker House 2022!
The Hacker House concluded with a graduation ceremony. Honestly brought back a lot of memories and was a perfect end to a jam packed week. 🎓🥇
But wait, there was more, to celebrate, Devfolio organized a Polygon web3 mixer. A perfect way to interact with the web3 community and have some fun.
The 3 weeks that followed the Hacker house were full of testing and building the solution even further. The fellowship helped me connect with folks from the industry to test my solution on real world data and validate my MVP. My solution RadarFi preaches for DeFi Security solutions you can trust. It’s a real-time security monitoring layer that can detect Transactions fraud, Reentrancy attacks and Crypto crime.
Do check it out here and join the waitlist for early access: https://radarfi.softr.app/
The last 3 weeks were all about iterations of testing, scrapping and building things differently. Finally it all came to an end with another Virtual Demo Day where we presented what we built to web3 OGs and got constructive feedback to take our projects further.
Honestly, the last 2 months were nothing short of an adventure. What a splendid learning journey it has been. It wasn’t about building just a project but more about building a product that impacts and helps make this space more safe.
I take along with me some amazing web3 frens and connections, lifelong advice from the amazing folks of web3 and the spirit to never stop building.
That’s all folks!
Adios!
Never stop buidling 💪
