[Top Builder 2024]: Plebwork_R2 (Thibaud & Ambre)

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🏗️ Top Builder 2024 Application Form to track progress through Round 1 - 3 ~ Currently in Round 1

📝 Instructions

1. Only complete this form if you have been chosen for Top Builder, by PlebLab.
2. Provide detailed information to assist the judges in evaluating your project.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 The Team

• Team Name: Plebwork
• Number of Founders: 2 + 1 extra dev
• Team Background: Full-stack software developer, Jack-of-all-trades web developer and product designer. Involved in the bitcoin industry full-time for 5 years mostly in non-technical roles.
• Bitcoin & Lightning Involvement: Light experience in bitcoin development, but sufficient for putting together a reliable MVP. Good understanding of technical concepts broadly. Involved in a bitcoin custodian, a small bitcoin broker in France and recently with Wasabi Wallet.
• Origin Story: We had issues finding good bitcoin developers for a wallet project. Navigating the Upwork jungle of shitcoins, Solana and Ethirium noise was brutal, and quite time consuming. On the flip side, struggling to find regular part-time gigs with reliable bitcoin businesses has been a motivation to build this marketplace.

💡 The Idea

• Project Overview: Plebwork is where bitcoiners work together. It's a marketplace for freelancers in the bitcoin industry with built-in self-custodial payments and invoicing, powered by BTCPay. No fiat, no shitcoinery. Anyone can join from anywhere, especially pseudonymous plebs wanting to dip their toes in the bitcoin space while still holding a normie job.
• Website: plebwork.com
• GitHub: https://github.com/plebwork/
• Project Stage: Development of the MVP for a few months and currently working on the last mile for the MVP with testing and deployments.
• Supplementary Materials: Provide any proof of work, workshops, or demo videos.

📚 Additional Information

• Additional Links/Info: not much for now, but work in progress!

📌 Submission Type

• [x] Initial Project Creation

🚀 Current Project Progress

• Progress Made: Design, architecture, frontend mostly finished and backend as well. Need to run deployments, backups and extensive testing.
• Challenges Faced: the hardest part is narrowing the MVP feature set to ship it ASAP and test if there is actual market demand.
• Future Roadmap of what's next: lots in the roadmap potentially but right now shipping the MVP as a public beta is the focus.

⏳ Round 1 Milestone

• Keep in mind that completion will need to be by February 10th, 2024.
• First-round milestone the team has set for themselves: Deploy functional MVP with alpha testers: 5 clients and 21 plebs to test and fix all possible bugs.

📝 Submission Complete

• All required information has been provided above.

📅 Top Builder Program Structure

Registration Opens: Monday, December 18, 2023

• Application: Interested teams apply for Top Builder.
• Selection: Teams will be chosen based on their application. See FAQ for details.

Round 1: January 13 - February 10, 2024

• Workshops: PlebLab weekly workshops start, available live and online.
• Chat Access: Selected teams join the PlebLab internal chat.
• Mentorship: Begins for teams.
• Project Milestones: Teams are set and judged on their first-round milestones.

Round 2: February 10 - 24, 2024

• Team Reduction: PlebLab cuts half of the Top Builder teams. (Only half continued in Round 2.)
• Project Milestones: Teams are set and judged on their second-round milestones.
• Workshops: PlebLab weekly workshops continue.
• Mentorship: Continues.

Round 3: Starting February 24, 2024

• Team Reduction: PlebLab narrows down to 6 Top Builder teams. (All will be pitching in Austin.)
• Final Milestones: Teams set final project milestones for the last round.
• Preparation: Teams prepare their pitch in front of judges. Final teams are contacted to come to Austin for Startup Day.

Final Round at Startup Day: March 14, 2024

• Preparation: Teams work on their final pitches at PlebLab.
• Presentations: Final teams present before judges on Startup Day.
• Deliberation: Judges decide during a happy hour.
• Announcement: The winner of Top Builder is announced at Austin BitDevs.
• Celebration: After-party for Top Builder.

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Here's a video of our working web app for Plebwork! Hope you enjoy :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-W--TJBLkY

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Some more POW brag about closed issues and merged PRs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2XzwRfcWrQ

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✅ First milestone met

First-round milestone the team has set for themselves: Deploy functional MVP with alpha testers: 5 clients and 21 plebs to test and fix all possible bugs.

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⏳ Round 2 Milestone

• Keep in mind that completion will need to be by February 24th, 2024.
• Second-round milestone the team has set for themselves: launch public early access on plebwork.com

⚒️ Product

• Stable production deployment of a functional two-sided marketplace on plebwork.com
• Database backups in place
• Clean build pipelines with CI/CD for local, staging and production environments

📈 Marketing

• Launch of the "Early Access" marketing campaign with features highlight video.
• Soft circle a few clients to onboard them to post gigs on the marketplace
• Release of our product marketing video
• Get our first mainnet transaction on plebwork.com

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🕰️ Progress for the Week of Feb 12-18, 2024 (J-8 before cut)

⚒️ Product

• ✅ Separated our staging and production deployments with automated CI pipelines
• ✅ Upgraded our production infrastructure to have automated database backups in 24-hour windows
• ✅ Fixed URL redirect bugs, UI issues on different screen sizes and broken review flow in the chat after a transaction
• ✅ Performed 50+ successful testnet transactions and 1 mainnet tx!
• ✅ Simplified wallet connection for pleb with only one xpub and address + added mandatory privacy disclaimer
• 🔄 Auth providers: still unstable for Google and X but fixed for GitHub.

📈 Marketing

• ✅ Reviewed another iteration of our launch video with our first pleb freelancers (eating our own dog food)
• ✅ Reached out to a few clients who agreed to feature some job posts for the launch (beta testers list growing!)
• ✅ Fixed some copywriting on our marketing website and updated our transactional emails
• ✅ Slowly growing our X followers and Telegram group (I guess that counts)
• ✅ Creating TOS + privacy policies
• 🔄 Pitch of Plebwork: bare bone flow
• 🔄 Update lean canvas

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🕰️ Progress for the Week of Feb 19-25, 2024

⚒️ Product

• ✅ Fixed auth provider bugs for X and Google registration to production accepted
• ✅ Processed 3 successful mainnet transactions across 3 jobs
• ✅ Entirely cleaned our backlog of bugs and fixes
• ✅ Added "wallet is linked" feature on the pleb dashboard (our first feature request!)

📈 Marketing

• ✅ Wrote and tested our first pitch to validate marketing positioning and explain better what/why we do
• ✅ Had 30+ conversations with clients about joining Plebwork, currently working with 3 (10% conversion!)
• ✅ 19 plebs signed up on Plebwork.com but only 10 created profiles

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Another milestone for us! We launched our early access video on social media: https://twitter.com/plebwork/status/1761051649269809295

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First media coverage by Bitcoin Magazine: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/business/new-freelance-marketplace-launches-where-users-get-paid-in-bitcoin