For the last couple of years we at the Starknet Foundation (SNF) and with support from the Starknet community at large, have been onboarding literally thousands of developers into the ecosystem through an educational initiative called Basecamp. In 2 years we have organized 68 cohorts in 9 different languages for 5,000 students. It’s important to highlight that the majority of those metrics comes from cohorts organized by the community with financial support from the SNF via grants.
With such stellar metrics, why are we saying goodbye to Basecamp? The goal of Basecamp was to be the starting point of an onboarding pipeline that would turn developers curious about Starknet into founders with successful products on mainnet but that hasn’t quite happened. For example, 20% of the winners of the last hackathon organized by the Starknet Foundation were Basecamp graduates but only a handful came from cohorts organized in the months leading to the competition. 20% of winners is not a bad number but the fact that they come from older Basecamp cohorts means that the pipeline is somewhat broken. Basecamp graduates don’t feel prepared to participate in the next phase of onboarding right away which increases the risks of losing them altogether.
We believe that the problem is that Basecamp is still too shallow to provide all the tools a person would need to participate in a hackathon. Basecamp is taught live and it usually consist of 5 or 6 weekly 2-hours sessions. Why not then have 10 sessions instead of 5 to increase it’s depth and better prepare students? We have done experiments with this in the past and it became clear that there’s a significant drop in graduation rate for cohorts with more than 6 sessions. It’s very hard for anyone to make a 3 month commitment just to learn a new technology. The live session model doesn’t allow for an increase in content depth.
Another problem we detected, specially when working with the community was consistency. Some of the organizers we have worked with have done a fantastic job in terms of preparing the content, attracting students to their cohort and delivering overall great sessions to their students. Others organizers… not so much. Some don’t know the content well. Some know the content but are not good at teaching. Some struggle with some fundamentals like using a good microphone or even having a decently fast internet connection for their online sessions. The value a student get from Basecamp varies significantly from organizer to organizer even after increasing our efforts for a stricter vetting process at the SNF. You simply don’t know until you give someone a chance.
We’re saying goodbye to Basecamp but only to replace it what we believe is a more effective program to fix our broken onboarding pipeline.
**The Starknet Academy (SA) is the new onboarding platform for Starknet that allows people to learn at their own pace and to pick the content that is most relevant for them.** The platform is still under development but we expect to complete the planned MVP soon so we can do a proper launch on social media.
For the MVP we plan to have a fully configured platform with 6 courses that are ports of the content recorded for the last Developer Basecamp and Founder Basecamp organized by the Starknet Foundation. This of course is just the starting point for the platform as the goal for phase 2 is to create new content specifically made to be consumed as a self pace videos and that will better prepare to people to compete in hackathons, launch web3 startups or integrate Starknet onto an existing product.
Our hope is that the Starknet Academy will better serve our onboarding pipeline by reducing the onboarding time, better prepare people to participate in hackathons and eliminate the quality consistency problem of Basecamp. Because the ultimate goal of the onboarding pipeline is to support the creation of more startups on Starknet the content of the SA will be broader than Basecamp as we want to provide the best support possible for developers and entrepreneurs.
If you are reading this you are probably a Basecamp organizer with questions about the future of the program. The sad news is that the grant program is effectively closed and we won’t receive new applications to organize a Basecamp cohort. If you already have confirmation from the SNF for a Basecamp cohort that will take place in the future we will still honour that commitment.