Contribution Labs Team Offsite | Bogota Edition
A recap of one of the best weeks in my startup journey.
Contribution Labs does team offsites every other month to balance focus mode and in-person serendipity. Last week, we traveled to Bogota, Colombia to hit four birds with one stone: Zeitgeist initiation, ETH Bogota, DevCon, and team bonding. Here’s a recap of one of the best weeks in my startup journey. Enjoy!
Zeitgeist
Zeitgeist is a laboratory for building crypto-native products and protocols, run by Sina Habibian. The cohort-based program for founders runs three months long and gives you lifetime access to an incredibly supportive network within the crypto space. Traditionally, Zeitgeist has been remote, but it became apparent that in-person interactions are needed and do wonders for bonding.
I never went through programs like Y Combinator, South Park Commons, or had much consistent access to founder communities, so I’ve always felt a small gap in my startup journey. I hope Zeitgeist can play this role for me!
The four-day initiation consisted of introductions, community-facilitated problem-solving discussions, and presentations from crypto OGs about governance and security. On the last day, we celebrated over drinks at a local restaurant. I’m grateful to have met some really cool people doing incredible things to build the world they believe in. ✨
ETH Bogota
ETH Bogota happened at the same time as Zeitgeist, so unfortunately I couldn’t participate much in the hackathon. However, everyone else on the team did, and it was a blast. 💥
Just two days prior to the hackathon, we landed on an idea that resulted due to a million learnings and insights from building our current product. Token-gated forms for crypto-enabled communities. Of course, we had to name the product DeFormed. Cody, Isaac, Tracy, and Albert pulled an all-nighter to scrap it altogether and presented hackathon judges the following day.
The result? Judges handed their phones to us in exchange for Telegram contact details so that they could use our product when it’s ready. After hearing about this, I had a feeling we were onto something.
The following week, we decided to take DeFormed to the next level. I learned Webflow to quickly put together a user-facing landing page to accrue design partner signups. Just yesterday, we launched DeFormed on Twitter to validate the market need to accelerate the design process.
You can check out DeFormed here (and yes, I’m very proud of the animations since I’m only a wannabe designer and not a coder 🤣). I’ve been wanting to learn Webflow for the longest time, so I’m incredibly happy to have finally accomplished this goal.
Albert then quickly pulled together a Tweet thread to let Crypto Twitter know about this product:
I was blown away by the responses. 🤯 It felt like we caught lightning in a bottle: close to 1000 likes in 24H, 100+ retweets, and nearly 100 design partners from some of the most established web3 organizations. The community's enthusiasm has been amazing, and I’m so excited to take this to the next level. I can’t sleep just thinking about what this could be.
One of our major investors once told me to focus on building something useful, not just lovable, and this has always stuck with me. The concept is so simple, yet so useful, and we wouldn’t have realized this without continuous shipping and iterating.
The lesson?
It also amazes me that we were able to pull together this type of market validation in 10 days. Startups are so fun.
DevCon
I’m convinced that there needs to be a conference pass edition specifically designed for conference attendees who don’t actually attend conferences (me). Even though I’m a total introvert, I love using these events to catch up with people: friends, investors, and partners. It’s always fun getting to know them beyond a Zoom screen.
I always walk out of these week-long events absolutely exhausted but grateful for every individual that I’ve crossed paths with.
Team Bonding
This recap isn’t complete without mentioning all of the team bonding that happened during this 1.5-week trip.
We met our new teammate, Isaac, in real life for the first time!
Isaac is our resident protocol engineer and brings his web3 wisdom from his time working as Bittrex’s technical lead and as one of the founding members of Microsoft’s blockchain team. He’s probably also one of the most interesting human beings I’ve ever met and rightfully earned his reputation as an onion among the team — so many layers, hobbies, and experiences peeled back and never ceased to amaze us all. 🧅
Not to mention, he introduced us all to Mahjong, which quickly became the default post-dinner activity for us all. We even found an anime-based mahjong mobile app to fuel our addictions.
The team also spent some time touring Bogota. We hiked the Monserrate, walked through historical sites, went fruit-tasting, did coffee-tasting, and shopped for emeralds. Kei bought his partner an incredibly beautiful emerald stone that’s going to be crafted into a custom necklace. I’m super excited to see the final result. 😍
Outside of tourism, we also shared our personal stories, chatted about process improvements, and jammed on product strategy. So many bonds were formed at these company workshops, but of course, more memories were formed at rAAVE (tbh I didn’t make it, but heard it was super fun)
Excited for the next team offsite in Taipei. 🇹🇼
love this update so much :)