We completely agree that it’s critical to have building / use evidence before investing further resources @jackanorak. We took this approach when we started Superchain Eco over a year ago. Since, our platform has attracted nearly 10K unique users, over 38K visits and nearly 750K reach on X - an overview of our analytics can be found here.
​The Superchain Builder Hub Mission request is critical for ensuring a well-resourced and capable team can coordinate ecosystem resources efficiently and remain focussed solely on the Superchain.
​In our case, the only funding we received was RetroPGF3 rewards, which ran out in Q2. While we’re big fans of RetroPGF, the unpredictable nature of the participation requirements post RetroPGF3 makes it extremely challenging to allocate resources effectively. We didn’t qualify for round 3 due to not being a smart contract solution, and we are unsure what the inclusion requirements for the upcoming Governance Round ​a​re. If we don’t get anything in that​ round, we will have to go additional months without any funding, which we can’t sustain forever and will ​impact productivity.
Based on our growing numbers (see analytics), we feel the right step is to improve the platform and grow the team, but we’ll need some certainty (through a Mission grant e.g.) to take that step.
We believe having a hub will greatly reduce information and coordination costs, while also creating a primary distribution platform for Superchain created resources that aren’t suitable for the main optimism.io platform. A great example is the Superchain Eco project overview, which the primary Optimism.io website already points to (when clicking on Apps).
To @binji-optimism’s point, we believe a Hub should maintain close relationships with Optimism Unlimited and other Optimism Collective teams to ensure effective collaboration and avoiding unwanted overlap.
To @Sov’s point, we saw the Mission requested and left a comment - as our platform already includes an MVP of each of the elements mentioned, and with our existing users - we believe it would make sense to improve those MVPs instead of having a team create and host these resources in a separate location.
A proper Hub team should consist of at least 2 researchers/comms, 1 developer, and a designer. The proposed MR budget would not cover the entire year of that team, so RetroPGF would continue to be relevant and something to align with!
Hopefully one of the Grant committee member sees sufficiency merit in this Mission and approach to sponsor it and move toward Collective vote!