“We didn't have any VC funding or anything like that from the beginning, so we bootstrapped and Gitcoin was just a natural source, a natural destination for us. -Lennard
For Lennard and Geoist, co-founders of IDriss, Gitcoin was a “natural destination.”
IDriss is one of Gitcoin’s most recent successful grantees and over the course of four Gitcoin Grants rounds, has amassed a total of $90,000 and 19700 donations.
For their very first round, in GR15, IDriss received 3453 donors, $8.5k in donations with $12.5k in matching donations, about $20K altogether. At the time, the co-founders had worked on the idea for about a year and wanted to participate in the round mostly as exploration. This first round enabled the project to make revenue and keep going as a completely bootstrapped OSS project.
“That impact was huge. We basically, thanks to Gitcoin, got to a point where we started making revenue and we never, never had to talk to VCs at all.” - Geoist
IDriss, now a full-fledged company, and also community (with over 100K followers on X), was bootstrapped, from the beginning with no VC funding. The mission? Building a suite of community-owned and operated tools that enable easier access to the benefits of crypto for regular people. In a nutshell, making web3 accessible to everyone.
The idea that hatched into IDriss started as a conversation in a coffee shop in Manhattan where Lennard and Geoist often co-worked together. With a shared interest in the crypto space and blockchain technology, the two would dive into topics such as how to create a token, or how to deploy smart contracts. The hassle of using wallet addresses in their traditional non-human-readable form, led to the initial motivation to come up with a system to simplify this process. The thought was to build something like Venmo for crypto to send newly deployed tokens.
The first iteration of IDriss, at the time, enabled you to connect your wallet address to Twitter names. This registry was the start of the suite of tools that has been developed since.
To date, IDriss is still the decentralized web3 address book (where users can link their Twitter names, emails, and phone numbers to public wallet addresses for easier and safer interactions) as well as a browser extension allowing users to connect their browser to the address book (which enhances the usability of popular websites, such as Twitter, Farcaster, major crypto exchanges, and blockchain explorers).
For Lennard and Geoist, the impact of IDriss is measured by the number of people who use the product whether it be the browser extension or the address book. Between the Beta Round and GG18 the address book registrations of IDriss grew to 35k registrations, which was a 135% increase. The browser extension users grew to 80k, which was around 700% growth.
The funding, over the rounds has enabled the two to hire developers and marketing contributors. Up until the rounds the two had completely headed the project themselves, taking care of coding, marketing, and everything in between.
Everything we got from Gitcoin we put into growing IDriss and that was paying off.” - Geoist
In the Alpha Round, IDriss attained around 3k donors, $7k in donations and about $8k in matching funds. Round over round the recognizability of IDriss was increasing tenfold. Geoist and Lennard started participating heavily in the initiatives during the rounds, for instance becoming very active in Twitter spaces. The rounds enabled both community growth and also for the co-founders to get to know the community better.
For GG18 Geoist and Lennard asked themselves, “What if you could donate to your favorite GG18 grants directly from Twitter?”
Since everyone is anyway sitting 24/7 on Twitter during Gitcoin rounds, Geoist and Lennard had the idea to integrate the Gitcoin contracts and enable people to donate from Twitter. The two looked at the indexer that was publicly available from Gitcoin, looked at the addresses that were receiving funds and the projects that did provide a Twitter name that was publicly available. 500+ projects were able to receive donations on Twitter.
This was also the time that the two became more active in Twitter spaces. Everytime a someone pitched their project in a Twitter space, they were able to simply click on the name and send them a donation. Grantees were funded through people donating right on the spot while listening to grantee’s pitch in Twitter spaces.
“It’s a way of having public goods funding happen in the stream of the public goods convo on Twitter.” - Kevin Owocki
After a conversation with the Gitcoin team, the initial version of the tool that lets you donate on top of Twitter to Gitcoin was launched late into GG18. Despite that, 377 unique donors made 1186 donations to 155 grantees.
“We wanted to give back to the community and basically make it easier for people to support their favorite public goods products. The permissionless nature of Gitcoin enabled us to build our own donation interface.” - Geoist
At ETH Denver this year, Geoist and Lennard built the first version of the cross-chain donation widget, and were already in touch with Gitcoin contributors about this to try to make it happen for GG20.
IDriss then partnered with Gitcoin for GG20. Lennard and Geoist worked directly with the Gitcoin team to ensure that donations through their platform were eligible for matching.
The partnership with Gitcoin in GG20 allowed IDriss to introduce cross-chain donations, enabling participation from new networks like Base and expanding the reach of public goods funding.There were 450 donations done via the browser extension with about 230 of them done in a cross-chain way.
“There's a lot of people who don't even know that other networks exist or they never used them because Base was their first point of contact with crypto. So for the first time ever, some of these communities were able to participate in Gitcoin.” - Lennard
Gitcoin's permissionless nature was key to the success of the partnership. The product’s ability to adapt and integrate new features, as demonstrated by IDriss, showcases its commitment to driving innovation and supporting early-stage startups.
As IDriss continues to grow and develop, its journey serves as a testament to the power of Gitcoin in shaping the future of OSS. Co-founders Lennard and Geoist leveraged Gitcoin as a vital resource to bootstrap their project without any venture capital. From their first round in GR15, where they received a total of $20K in donations and matching funds, Gitcoin's support enabled IDriss to generate revenue and grow independently.
