Lancer

All right, we're live. GM, GA, GE everybody. Welcome to what's going to be another great DevNTell. Welcome boys. Just before we get into the meat of the preso, just going to let viewers know what DevNTell is, just in case it's your first time viewing. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute window for builders to showcase something they're passionate about or working on in Web3. This can be an awesome project you've been working on, demonstrating new and testing best practices, automation goodies, smart contracts, how to structure a project, etc. Basically, if you've got a passion for something, this is your opportunity to share with the Web3 community here at Developer DAO. And today I'm ecstatic to have Quetzal and Jack from Lancer on the show. Welcome boys, ecstatic to have you on.

Thank you. My name's Angel.

I'm Jack.

We are Lancer. We'd love to give a bit of an overview on our goals and what the product we're building is aiming to do. So Lancer, in its simplest form, is a faster and more secure Upwork using the blockchain. And you know, we pretty much created this product for ourselves. I was working full-time in Web3 as a founder of a community and NFT project, and Jack was a full-time freelancer developing for various projects and protocols in the ecosystem, and we both experienced a similar problem from two sides. I, for example, had heard massive stories, like horror stories, of founders who would pay, you know, six figures to a developer agency or dev shop and have them like never deliver or take six months longer to deliver. By the time they actually released the project, everything had pretty much died down and people would be mad at the founder. And so I really wanted to avoid that problem.

Yeah, I was on the flip side where I would work on projects and get hit with scope creep or people just not paying me for work either on time or at all, for various reasons. So I was pretty upset. And Q and I knew each other, like we'd been friends, but it was like we'd both been burned, so it was like, hey, let's not put our friendship in jeopardy and do this in some way that makes sense. And like 50% upfront, 50% at the end never actually works. And so we just built a real quick escrow contract. Angel put the money in upfront, all of it upfront, but it didn't pay out to me until the product was done. And this happened to be right around Mountain DAO a year ago, and we did it just for us. And then a bunch of other founders were like, hey, this is super useful, you guys should make a product out of this. And here we are 13 months later.

Yeah, here we are. So essentially what Lancer is at its current state is a secure escrow that is created in seconds and for 16 cents. So we're built on the Solana blockchain right now, but the interesting thing about how we have built out our product and what we're going to be demoing today is that you don't need a Solana-based wallet and you don't even need crypto to use this product. We accept credit card and only require an email to sign up. So our whole kind of process of evolving the product has been really surrounding around making this useful for anyone, not even just Web3, but also, you know, going toe-to-toe with some of like the biggest industry leaders such as Upwork and Fiverr, and we think we can provide a faster and better experience because of the advantages of using the blockchain and trustless systems over, you know, paying a banking partner thousands of dollars to have a license and an escrow that they can still charge back on, right? And so that's what we've embarked on today and we're going to be showing this product demo and opening it up for anyone who has any questions, feedback. I think the biggest reason why we're excited to be presenting to the Developer DAO is because we are developer focused. We actually think that Upwork doesn't understand how to evaluate technical talent, and we really embrace on our platform understanding those like key data points, for example open source contributors are not only massively valuable to this entire ecosystem, but they are also more likely than not great developers because they do it for free, they do it for fun, and for others' enjoyment. So we have a lot of interesting things, features that are coming out, and we're in the process of prioritizing them, so we would love for anyone to give us feedback who is a developer or somebody who freelances frequently because it's important for us to know that experience, and they can give that to us right now while we're live or async after reviewing this video. So thank you guys so much, and we're going to jump into the demo.

Cool. All right, so I'm going to take the lead. I just want to make sure, is my screen being shared right now? Can people see what I'm doing? It is, now. Okay, cool, now I can see the reference. All right, so here I'm going to be playing the side of both client and the freelancer. So brown background J is client, purple background J is going to be the freelancer. So without further ado, I'm going to create a new quest. So here, give it one second, come on. Okay, so here you have a quest, as you can see we'll fill out the right side as we go. So I'm going to give it a price right now, I'm just going to keep it one dollar. And the industry, we'll do engineering because that's what most people here are. And we're just going to call this the demo for DD, and say make a cool little demo. So I'll fill out this information and then from here I can add some relevant links, everyone loves ChatGPT. And then we can say, hmm, what do we want? Want some React, and I can create a new tag or I can use... I guess we actually don't have TypeScript, I haven't cleared a lot of these, but I can add some tags, those are what we want. This is something just for me because this is a real demo instead of test. Make it public. Oh yes, I do want to make it public. And then I can also upload some reference files, so let's upload some cool photos here. And we can say implement this, add this image to our landing page please. And then I can save these changes, go to preview and you can see there's some... this is what the quest will show up like and here are some references along it. And so here, what I'm actually doing is creating a test, or creating the quest, signing a transaction, creating the escrow on-chain, but you never have to see any of that. And then here actually, since this is the custodial version, the non-Web2 version, or the Web2 version, I actually pay with a credit card here. So I guess you all have my CVV now, but I'll go in, I'll make this purchase. And once it finalizes, you'll see it'll bring us to the quest here. And now if I go to the freelancer side, I will go to the quest page and I will see... oh one second I need to... or maybe I've made it private accidentally. I can just go in, grab this quest, share it to the freelancer, and then now boom, they can see the other side. And so I can go in and I will apply to this quest. And then if I go back to client side, I will see this new submission here, which I can approve or deny. Before I do that, I'm going to go in real quick, take a look at this person's account, and then see maybe not a bunch of stuff is filled in, but they've created some quests in the past. But let me say hey, what experience do you have in web dev? And then now if I go back here, boom, I have this and I can say a lot. And obviously it'd probably be more complex than that, but I will just go back, pretend that is a sufficient conversation. And then once this goes, I can accept and again, this is a transaction actually going through that you don't need to sign, so making it just faster and just a less scary user experience for Web2 people and honestly Web3 people that just are sick of having to sign transactions. And then here right now you will submit as a freelancer. This is something where building out a lot more, we're actually going to dive into some mocks after this demo. But finally, last step here is on the client side, I will go in and I can approve, deny, or request changes. Think pull requests, that's kind of exactly what inspired this flow. For now, I will approve this submission. This will actually pay out the bounty. I will open this solscan, but we'll go back to it in a second because it takes a little bit to refresh. But now if I actually go to my account on either of these pages, you can see I have a new badge for creating and then also completing this quest. There it is. And so those are right now it's just like confirmation hey these things have been completed, but we will be doing more fun things in the future with those badges. But that's pretty much the end-to-end flow real quick. And if I go here, you'll see that as of a minute ago, this money was sent to the freelancer. So very fast payments and you can cash out to your bank account, I'm just not going to do that because I don't want to show you guys all my bank account information. Yes sir. But that does work. So that's state of being right now.

Something I want to jump into...

Real quick is where we are going with this. So we have a full redesign in the pipeline and two things that we really want to talk about are the... actually are they in this Figma now that I realize? So one thing is in the flow itself when you saw that I just clicked that submit button, we really want to level that up. So we're adding support here for basically actually writing an update. And this update can be a file upload, a loom link, just a bunch of links say to a PR and a Vercel deploy, and then add instructions here. And then on the client side, they can go in and they'll see the update here and then they can either request changes with some feedback or they can approve it. And then when they approve it, this actually links to the other side that we're developing right now, but I think it's uh not fully in here yet because it's still in design. But before you start work and when you apply, you're going to fill out a full quote that's going to have milestones, and within a milestone you'll have features that are going to be like the item name, the description, how many hours it's probably going to take and what the cost is. And then when you create an update, you'll link it to one or many of these features, and when the client approves your update, it'll actually pay out those features. So say you're doing a $3,000 contract that's broken into five different pieces of work, each of them at $600 I think that's the math. And then you go in and you make an update and it hits you say hey this addresses the first two things and then starts on the third. And then the client goes through and is like yep this looks great, let me approve this, and then when you approve that, boom, pays out $1,200 right there. So you're basically being paid as you're doing work. So that's kind of the state of things right now and where we're going, and we'd love to just open the floor to any questions, comments, etc.

Yes, and then a couple other things that we have in the pipeline as well that I think might be relevant for the Developer DAO community is that we're working on having the ability to accept mainnet ETH as a payment method. So if you have ETH, USDC, then we want to make sure that you don't have to go through Coinbase for like seven days to swap it and change it, but you can do it natively on our website. So that's something that we look very forward to. And I guess another one would be like badges and certifications. So kind of coming back to what I was talking about with the data points that signify someone is a good developer or not, we want to reward hackathon winners with badges. Doesn't matter, it's not our hackathon, we think that's an important data point to give the world, and right now that it's pretty fragmented whether or not, you know, like your reputation comes with you. And so if there are any ideas or requests for certain hackathons or open source contributors awards and recognition is kind of the theme and we're really looking towards what do we want to display and will be valuable for a developer to, you know, flex and showcase to the world that they really know what they're doing. Yeah, other than that we'd love to open it up for any questions, comments, feature requests, etc.

Yeah, definitely gang. If you have your any questions, please post them in the comments here in YouTube and I will ask on your behalf. And I guess in the meantime while we wait for for folks to digest all this content, I guess do you have any plans to let the person pay, or get paid, with regular fiat as an option as well? Or is the idea that at least at this point in time you've just focusing on crypto native payments?

Yeah, well so the interesting thing is that our system uses USDC as its kind of like intermediary. The main thing when it comes to like having fiat is on the withdrawal, right? It doesn't necessarily matter what your balance is stored in on the platform, as soon as you need to actually cash out into your bank account, if you're a US-based freelancer, you will be able to do so. So that cash out button would initiate an off-ramp sequence for you to deposit it into your bank account. And that's important, I think it's very important for us as well today. So we got one question in, asks if it is 10% fees. We're very happy to say that it's actually like overall it is 10% fees, but we have the client and the freelancer split it halfways. So the client deposits their full contract value plus 5%, and then the freelancer only gets charged 5% on their end when they withdraw and like cash out. So we, in the experience of freelancers, we are the cheapest platform out there.

Yeah, so in the example that you said with 1K, you'd be taking home 950 not 900. And this is basically in direct opposition to what Upwork, Fiverr, etc. do where it is just like the that is exactly the pricing structure that they have on Upwork and we just don't think that's fair because like one of the main ethos we have is that clients and freelancers should be treated equally instead of clients being first-class citizens and freelancers being second-class citizens, which is how it's done on Toptal, Upwork, all of those.

Or Talent Burst. Yes. Well done, well done. Thank you. And I guess how did you both kind of arrive on this theme of like medieval Lancers and quests? Is there any like inspiration behind that?

Yeah, so we've always liked just RPGs and things like that, that's something I wanted to jump in as well. If you see right now there's this experience points, I can talk about those later. But the actual the name Lancer was something that my sister actually made when I explained the product to her. She's non-technical, non-crypto, she's just like why don't you just do Lancer because it's the second half of freelancer? I was like that's great and then since then we've always loved the idea of let's gamify this and make this fun. Like let's add experience points, let's add badges like Pokemon, you collect eight different ones of them and then maybe your your fees go down from 5% to 4%, or you get to show up at the top of someone's listings like that have criteria that match you. And so like really turning it into a game because like work can be fun.

Yeah, and I think it really comes down to just objectivity at the end of the day. I think that because we didn't necessarily want to build this company, we've been able to approach it from such a different perspective. We kind of fell into this product when, you know, we created an MVP and everybody told us like to keep building it and that they wanted to use it themselves. We just kind of like reasoned from first principles that the true way to build the best freelance platform would be to have the best talent. And if if you're familiar with like the recruiting and the talent side of things, the best talent is not looking for a bunch of opportunities, they have more opportunities than they know what to do with. And so if we were to focus on creating the platform that gave them the most delightful experience, and if we could increase their productivity, their income ceiling, their security and peace of mind, then they would come to us. And if we have the best talent, then we have the best experience on the platform because that's what clients want at the end of the day.

Yeah, 100%. I mean it's at the end of the day it comes down to the the talent that's getting the work done. Like anybody can go pick up a task and and get hired for it, but the quality of work is not necessarily going to be there. But if the talent is there, um and you have enticing pricing structures, that's when people are going to come come out. There is a question here from Cyfer, how do you handle dev disputes for non-payouts of contract completed work?

Yeah, so that's actually another thing that is in this flow here is we are adding the ability to have disputes. Sorry as I struggle around this, but I'll just explain it to you. So when you create your quote, um it's going to be like these line items with payout numbers etc, and once you and the client agree on that quote, it's going to put a PDF on chain that's like this is the breakdown of the scope of work. And then if there is any dispute, uh that pulls us in as an admin and allows us to basically you can think of the escrow as a multisig, and before a dispute you have two out of two signatures to move money in some fashion. But if you open a dispute, now you need two out of three signatures and we'll come in and we will go down the original scope of work PDF and look at what is delivered and line by line be like this was completed, this gets paid out. This was not completed, this gets returned to the client. This was partially completed, we'll do 50-50 each way and go line by line and just be like this is the work that you agreed on. You're not paying someone because of scope creep, well that's not what you agreed on. You pay them for what they did, or on the flip side if you're a client and someone's trying to take your money because they locked you into this contract then we can pay that money back. So really having that protection for both sides that's agreed on before work is even started.

Yep, and this is also an area in which we want to decentralize. So for example, something that we learned really early on is that super senior engineers, they don't really spend a lot of their time like writing code themselves, but what they can do is review code extremely quickly and efficiently. And so creating this system where, you know, we can identify based on the tags or the labels associated to the work, we go hey, you know, this development contract around a back end involving postgres SQL, we need somebody to come in and help determine the quality of this work. So then now we can even issue like a badge to a senior backend engineer that qualifies them to handle disputes as well, and then they're able to get a, you know, piece of the contract slash some extra rewards for reviewing that contract and helping us, um you know, come to the best decision about the quality of this work.

It kind of sounds like there's it's like a third kind of user profile there where you have like a code reviewer that basically gets paid on a whim which is a an interesting... yeah that's an interesting concept because the code review process does take a decent amount of time depending on the features so... um theoretically you could have that kind of maybe a third marketplace there just for that. Yeah exactly, and also because we foresee based on who our current clients are in future is that there will be a lot of non-technical clients hiring technical people. And you can send like I can make a Vercel link and send it to someone and give a demo that makes it look like an entire product is working, and if I'm not technical, I don't look at the code, then I can sign off on that and then see oh after I've spent my money I am just getting something that's fully hard coded and I just got rugged, and we want to prevent that as well which is where like we want to add like when you're going in and making these quests have like oh do you want to pay for like a third party audit by the postgres guild or the typescript savants guild? Something like that, you know make whatever your name for your guild is there and then kind of have again these decentralized guilds that like you send badges out to each other and like earn your respect, earn your reputation by going through and helping deliver on these projects that you've audited that are like these are high quality.

Yeah, exactly. And also because we foresee based on who our current clients are and future is that there will be a lot of non-technical clients hiring technical people. And you can send like, I can make a Vercel link and send it to someone and give a demo that makes it look like an entire product is working, and if I'm not technical, I don't look at the code, then I can sign off on that and then see oh after I've spent my money I am just getting something that's fully hard coded and I just got rugged. And we want to prevent that as well which is where like we want to add like when you're going in and making these quests have like oh do you want to pay for like a third party audit by the postgres guild or the typescript savants guild? Something like that, you know make whatever your name for your guild is there and then kind of have again these decentralized guilds that like you send badges out to each other and like earn your respect, earn your reputation by going through and helping deliver on these projects that you've audited that are like these are high quality.

Last thing I want to do real quick, for anyone who's watching this and might be intrigued, is technical developer. Shout out to Matt. Um we're currently accepting applications, so if anybody wants to start using the platform we're currently in the public beta, and the process of which you can gain full access to Lancer is by completing your profile. And as soon as you complete your profile that essentially sends us this notification to review, and then like you're able to look at all of the open job listings that we have on the platform. And another thing that it gives you access to is right now because this profile doesn't have a completed and approved profile, you will actually gain access to a referral code. And so if we can show them the referral code, big thing that we realized is like we want great talent to find other people that have great skills as well. And so you can't have a referral code until you've been approved.

Boom, there you go. So that's yeah going through if you fill out your bio, fill out your portfolio and your links, that will signify to us to review your profile and then if you get accepted you'll get this little link down here which is your referral code. If you refer anybody, client or developer, or even both, the 5% fees that are taken on each side, 1% so not 1% of the 5% but we will take instead 4%, you get 1%. So if you refer a client and a developer that work together, you get 2% of that contract. And that's forever. So if they do $100,000 on the platform in the next year, boom, you just made $2,000 for just sending them a link.

But here's the thing, the interesting thing is like this isn't something that's new, right? The cool thing about our referral system is it will pay out instantly to your account. So you don't have to wait net 30, net 60 for two dollars or whatever it may be. Um you get paid out completely instantly and another thing is um we are keeping track of who you invite. Like we understand kind of like the the social graph of where our referrals come from and if, you know, we find anybody like kind spamming or trying to like just spray and pray with these links and not really curating the talent, then you know, you might end up losing the commissions and stuff like that because that's something where it's very it could be gamed and we if we're designing a game we can't help people cheat, right? So that's something we always keep in mind. We may be gaining the referral commission invite codes to like three, like a maximum of three, and then you have to like earn more share codes. Um so if you're here and you're listening to this, you have alpha. If you complete your profile and you get going you could have a really good head start on getting the commissions. So something to something to think about.

You heard it here on DevNTell first, there you go. And let's go, that's right. And uh yeah, unfortunately we're coming close to time here. Uh but just um last kind of thing, if people are indeed interested in signing up they can just go to app.lancer.so...

Or pro.lancer.so if they're Solana users, it's whether you want custodial or non-custodial.

Excellent. Yeah. Um if you have never used Solana and you don't hate it you can download your own wallet and try it out, but if you don't really care about that and you really more so just want to wait until um you know we accept like the ETH side of things and you don't want to go through the hassle of downloading a wallet or having any crypto, you can go to app.lancer.so. Excellent, looking very promising guys and yeah, wishing both you the best of luck. This looks like it's it's got legs, it's got legs. So we're going to we're going to get some of the best talent from Developer DAO possibly checking it out today and you heard you heard it here first, got some alpha as well, so definitely check out Lancer today or over the weekend or whenever you have the time.

Thank you. Last thing I want to end with is we have some EVM smart contract like jobs on the platform right now, so if anybody is looking to help out. We've also been a part of like the Orange DAO fellowship, so fun fact we're the only Solana-based team in that entire fellowship, so we have a lot of demand for EVM and you know layer two-based developers. So please reach out, this is not a Solana-specific product, this is just a product that utilizes Solana. Um and let's go, love the multichain future. Thank you for having me and I hope everybody has a great day.

Awesome. And before before everybody leaves, I do want to share the QR code. Sorry for covering you up there Jack. Uh the QR code for people to scan to claim their NFT for being an attendee today on DevNTell. So what you'll want to do is grab your regular QR code scanner, scan this code, and then fill out that form for participating in DevNTell today, and then you'll be air-dropped a NFT over the next couple of days. Jack and Quetzal, I do have a separate form for you but you are free to fill this one out too if you if you want. And everybody will have a hour and a half to fill out this form before it becomes locked. And with that, just want to wish everybody a very happy Friday, happy weekend. Thank you again Quetzal and Jack for coming on, really appreciate you guys taking the time and yeah, we'll catch everybody here next week. Cheers. Thank you. Peace.