Paragon Social Apps

This one’s as much a leadership story as an engineering one. A dev-shop owner I knew had a Solana client, Paragon, that he didn’t have the capacity to take.

I was just recently experimenting not only with Solana but also with the idea of starting my very own dev shop. It felt like a natural fit to hand it to me end-to-end (put together a team of my own and drive the whole thing to completion).

The product was a social-staking protocol: restrict supply through staking & drive demand through social activity. At its core it’s just staking, except users only earn rewards by taking certain actions (liking, commenting the right things) on social media.

My mission was to scope it, architect it, build a team, and deliver end to end. I spent one week scoping and architecting the core idea.

And I started tapping into my network to hire a backend dev, frontend dev and a smart contract dev. Met some cool new people & got to interview and make hiring decisions for the first time in my life. I even poached somebody from my old days at Toucan.

Within less than 2 weeks we started shipping on most of it except frontend (somehow this was harder to fill).

The core loop is a good example of deciding what belongs on-chain and what doesn’t:

We shipped on time in about twenty weeks, and both the client & the dev shop owner liked us so much we went on to work together on more projects.