Gm ☀️. Need help?
I’m excited to publicly share what I’ve been building at GMneedhelp.
GMneedhelp (GMNH) is a community-owned learning platform making web3 more accessible for its next 1B participants & contributors (esp under-represented ones) by providing on-demand personalized support.
Built on Solana, we will operate as web3’s “concierge layer” enabling:
- Ask a question on crypto 101, tech support or culture on web platform
- GMNH crypto-expert community members reply with FREE individualized guidance & earn rewards.
But why does web3 need this?
The barrier to entry in web3 is high. Like learning anything else complex, it requires understanding brand new concepts and a shift in your mental model. It’s daunting & easy to get stuck. The path to learning something complex looks much more like a traditional product funnel than a curve. There’s many points of friction along the way that require help to overcome. Without help, you end up stuck & likely abandon.
There are two reasons why traditional online learning (Google/YT/courses) hasn’t been able to solve this friction:
- Getting unstuck online takes too long - This is due to the signal-to-noise ratio being low. Sure, the answer is out there but requires you to spend countless hours consuming content to find it. To drive this point home, here’s a screenshot from searching for “what is web3” on Google. In our era of instant gratification, this👇 is ngmi (not gonna make it).
2. Who to trust? - This is especially true in web3 when everyone is pumping their bags (talking up stuff they own). It’s impossible to tell if the information you’re getting is objective or not.
So how can we solve both of these problems?
Access to personalized help from someone who’s BOTH knowledgeable and you can trust.
Those with access are better equipped to learn, participate & contribute to web3. I know by personally educating hundreds of ppl in web3 with HAX (crypto education community I run) & seeing this in various NFT/DAO communities I’m part of. The data bears this out too: for example, men are 2X more likely to own crypto despite women making up 53% of crypto-curious users. You know, probably nothing..😉
How do we organize and fund the human capital required to provide personalized support for everyone trying to learn web3? Communities across Reddit/Twitter/Quora/Discord/etc have offered the best solutions thus far. But b/c they rely on good intentions (vs. hard incentives), obtaining high signal and trusted help is difficult. Fortunately, web3 offers the solution needed to learn web3 (meta, right?).
Crypto incentives enable access to underutilized resources such as computing power, file storage, or network bandwidth. Why not do the same for knowledge and tap into the Internet hive-mind? There are hundreds of thousands of people online who are knowledgeable about crypto – but need better tools & incentives to put it to use.
GMneedhelp will help crypto newcomers get “unstuck” by facilitating a 1:1 conversation with a trusted GMNH community member. Instead of vying for upvotes and badges, building on web3 enables community members to:
- Stake mindshare to earn ownership in platform via $HELP token
- Participate in governance
The GMNH community will ensure members who answer questions are knowledgeable and trustworthy through self-governance (vs. relying on curation by upvotes). Much more to figure out, but I imagine something like: 1) onboarding process for new members, and 2) enforcing high quality via slashing penalties for poor responses.
Our alpha (launching in early Feb) will look like a web3 version of Quora:
- Learner asks question via web interface for FREE (stored as NFT like below in their wallet)
- GMNH community member picks up question and async answers (stored as NFT) that only learner can view
My favorite part of our approach is that users don’t have to own crypto to use the platform (huge existing barrier). They can play with wallets / NFTs for free (platform pays for tx fees) which will empower historically under-represented folks to participate in web3.
Other key differentiators in our approach compared to web2 (Reddit/Quora) are:
- We empower learners to be pro-active and ask by not providing ability to find previously asked questions
- Users own their Q&A data (not the platform) & can utilize it to build on-chain reputation.
Using the “what is web3” example from above, my vision is for a learner to get an answer like this from GMNH:
Web3 is a new way for people to organize human connection and capital via digital ownership. Examples include the Bitcoin networks or a NFT community.
GMNH’s long-term vision is to completely re-imagine learning online through the power of community. Over time with scale, we will offer:
- Near-instant answers (< 1 min)
- Live interaction over audio/video.
- Topics beyond web3 support backed by sub-communities
How can you get involved?
If you want to help build or see a sneak peak of our prototype, my Twitter DMs (@karsenthil) are open or TG me @karthiksenthil.
If you’re knowledgeable in crypto, passionate about helping others learn web3 and w designing our community with me, join our Discord server. If you’re new to crypto and want to be an early user, join our waitlist here.
A larger, more inclusive web3 ecosystem is better for all of us -- and a high-quality support layer is needed to scale adoption.
Let’s go BUIDL! ☀️❓ #GMNH
Special shout-out to Tom Wu, Alanna Gregory, Arian Razzaghi, Kinjal Shah, Prusha Patel, Nisha Patel, Jon Walch, and my parents for their thoughtful feedback and edits.
