The interview was conducted by Vika x Pupcakes (Season VI)

[edits have been made for clarity and readability]

Q: Did you hear about RaidGuild before the Team placed the bid for this project, and what did you think about RaidGuild?

Adz: It was actually slightly before my time, I think. So I think they were originally invited by some of the other members of the Foundation who knew them from MetaCamp. I think Dermot and Ben knew some of the RaidGuild guys, maybe from MetaCamp. And Zak, who joined our team, had gone through a RaidGuild cohort. So that was their connection. I knew about RaidGuild because I used to work in Bankless DAO, I was part of a couple of different organizations within Bankless, but one of them was Bankless Consulting and one of my close friends within the DAO was a big fan of yours, and told me about RaidGuild years ago. At the time, we were trying to think about onboarding journeys, and we were looking for inspiration and looked at how you guys did it as one of those case studies.

Q: So that was a RaidGuild apprentice, somebody who went through the cohort but didn't become a guild member or was it an actual guild member?

Adz: Honestly, I don't know whether he went on to become a guild member. I think he might have done it. I think he's still active. He's probably in Discord. I think he's Doctorrobinson.

Q: Do you have any feedback or can you share how the completed project has impacted your business?

Adz: There are a few things RaidGuild has worked on with us. The first piece of work they did was on a POKT Bridge. It was predominantly a technical piece of work, with a little bit of design. We were very excited to work with the team again when we had a website rebuild, which happened pretty much almost immediately afterwards. We keep coming back to you guys for work, which I think is probably the strongest endorsement.

I'm planning to set Sero up on a retainer within Pocket Network to help us maintain our website. We hope that we continue working closely with you either as project needs arise or, you know, you guys were ecosystem partners in an event we ran in Denver. There's a team from RaidGuild that is going create a gateway on POKT Network, Porters. So there are lots of different ways that we're going continue the relationship, but it started with a largely technical piece of work on a wrapped POKT bridge.

Q: It sounds like your needs and expectations were met, given that you're thinking of continuing to work with us. What aspects of working with the RaidGuild team did you find most satisfying?

Adz: Oh, good question. From a personal standpoint, this may not be easily translatable. I think for me, it is the strength of the culture. I really appreciate the values, the integrity, and the professionalism of all of the team. It feels like a team that we can build a relationship with, and the relationship is evolving. I think it's because of that strong fit, which is obviously hard to replicate.

Let me think more specifically. I did appreciate it very much, I wasn't aware of your strength on the design side. I've always thought of you very much as a dev-shop, and I've been very pleasantly surprised by that. My one hesitation when we were looking at the bids for the website was that I had no doubt you could nail the technical aspects but I just hadn't seen as much of you or thought of you as much from a design standpoint. We had Bennisan and Bingo working on the project. I think I'm really happy actually with where the design landed. I still feel like it's too restrictive from a colour standpoint. So there is more work I would like to do on that, I don't feel like we've fully nailed it at this point. But we moved, I mean the website was embarrassing when we came to you guys. I joined POKT, and I was very embarrassed by our website. And I'm not embarrassed about it anymore, which is really nice. I think the functionality within it is really good. We're probably going to add more content and enrich it further. And we'll look to come back to you guys for that.

The other thing I would say to you guys, I did a fair amount of work with Sero. Sero was involved in the website rebuild. He's the one we're going to put in the retainer to maintain the website. He also did another user research project with me. I just want to give a shout-out. He's fantastic. Amazing growth mindset. Again, I don't think that that kind of project was something that you guys had done a lot of or that he had done a lot of, and he was just so receptive to feedback. He went over and above to get us to a place where we were happy with the output. I think it was a really tough brief. If you do kind of taps on the back or endorsements or anything, then he definitely deserves one in my book.

Q: The interview we’re conducting now will be posted on our social media channels (Twitter & Warpcast) and as a blog post. Would you be interested in retweeting our content on your social media?

Adz: Very happy for you guys to create content. Very happy to quote, retweet or do whatever we can on our side to support it. If you're interested, I think there's a narrative theme that I find very interesting, particularly that questionnaire you sent us in the discovery phase. I'm a brand strategist by background and I found that questionnaire really interesting. We actually had some very strongly dissenting voices within our community once we pushed our brand update. And it was nice to be able to go back to the output from that. I thought it was a really powerful tool for soliciting involvement and input from people. Some of the questions I found were really thought-provoking. It's nice being on the receiving end of some of those things. It's quite nice to see how they work when you're in the receiving seat. But I thought it was well put together. I appreciated that you took the time to really think about our brand, our history, our perception, our needs, our wants, and our community.

It was a tool that enabled us to involve the community at that input phase, which was really, really powerful. And then also, when I got to output, it gave me something I could go back to when we had dissenting voices because nobody ever agreed on design. You're never going to get a consensus. In fact, if you did, you probably landed somewhere really terrible. And it was nice to be able to go back to that. The people who were most in disagreement hadn't even bothered to fill out the form. So it was nice to be able to go back and say, well, look, guys, you had your chance to input. I chased you, I asked you, and you didn't give your opinion then. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do about it now other than monitor, look at the data, see what's performing and optimize from there.

Final remarks

Adz: If you were asking me the classic net promoter score question, I would have no hesitation in recommending RaidGuild to anyone. And we love the work that you did. We think that you've got extremely talented, high-integrity contributors. We have and we will continue to work with you guys and come to you when we have stuff that needs doing. We're generally super positive.