Project Budgets and Community Marketing of Their Achievements
This session brought together key Hive project teams @ecency, @peakd, @blocktrades, @asgarth, @jarvie, @good-karma, and @starkerz to discuss budgets, development efficiency, and a shared vision for marketing the progress being built across the ecosystem.
Budget & Cost Overview
PeakD
PeakD operates as a legal entity which had a team of 3 developers plus community contributors. @jarvie and @asgarth lead development presently. The team has already implemented a 22% cost reduction recently. Development accounts for approximately 85% of total costs, with infrastructure and other expenses making up the remaining 15%. Infrastructure costs have seen a modest increase of around 10%, though they remain broadly stable. European-based software developers offer more competitive rates compared to their US counterparts.
Ecency
Ecency maintains a team of 3 developers, with one developer and @good-karma, working on the mobile app, and one developer plus GK on the web application. All development is open source. Mobile development rates tend to be higher than web. The team is geographically distributed, ensuring near-continuous coverage.
Ecency's recent cost cut was 25% and after this, since the developers too such big rate cuts, the projects breakdown is 65% going to developers,
Both projects are committed to full transparency. A public spreadsheet detailing costs will be made available — see here for detailed Ececny budget: https://discord.com/channels/@me/790325868072796190/1481547966262022224
AI-Driven Development Productivity
A significant portion of the discussion focused on how AI tooling has transformed development workflows. Teams reported substantial productivity gains: PeakD estimated a 5–10x improvement in code writing speed, while Ecency reported gains exceeding 10x. AI has proven particularly valuable in planning and code generation phases.
At PeakD, Jarvie has begun "vibe coding" with AI assistance, dramatically increasing his personal output — estimated at more than 10x. For Sergio, the improvement sits in the 5–10x range. AI is increasingly becoming the primary method of development.
CI testing pipelines have also benefited. Ecency's website CI testing completes in approximately 10 minutes, and PeakD noted that AI has significantly improved their CI lead times. However, manual testing — particularly for Android device compatibility — remains the primary bottleneck. The group explored whether AI-driven test generation and device emulators could help address this challenge.
Ecency has also developed an SDK (published as an NPM package) to unify the data layer ahead of testing, which has accelerated the website's test cycle. There is potential for collaboration for other projects to work on and beenfit from these tesing capabilities.
Community Marketing Initiative
A central theme of the discussion was the essential need to better market what Hive's projects are building. The general plan is to make DHF funded and other Hive project git hub repositories more open and AI-accessible, enabling automated summarisation of development progress and the automated generation of social media content. This would allow the community to collectively amplify the value being delivered through its funding.
The meeting was partly a call to actrion for community members to get involved in this initaitve so that more can be made of the progress that projects are making with the funding being distributed.
It is critically important that Hive markets its achievements in order to more than justify community spending.
Historically, Hive has not excelled at this. By combining AI-assisted content generation with a coordinated, community-wide marketing effort, projects and their progress can gain far greater exposure — and it is easier today than ever before.
The hope is that the entire community can unite behind this joint initiative to make as much noise as possible and telegraph the progress of Hive's community-funded projects to the wider world. A real community push to use resources to focus on marketing was agreed as being essential moving forward to justify the spending from the DHF.
Retention & Onboarding
The group also discussed retention and a community-backed onboarding funnel. The proposed concept involves multiple, mostly existing onboarding routes that guide new users through structured tasks designed to teach them about Hive, culminating in blog posts — enabling newcomers to post and earn as they learn.
A dedicated "newbie" account would follow all new users entering through this funnel, creating a curated feed of newcomer content. The hope is that community whales would rally behind this initiative, easily discovering and supporting new users through this feed.
Looking Ahead
The session concluded with an extended discussion about what participants most want to see built on Hive — a conversation that underscored the energy and ambition driving the ecosystem forward.
▶️ 3Speak
Great meeting! I've been through the first half already and it seemed like a lot of good and actionable things can come out of this.
As mentioned by @starkerz I couldn't join due to the chosen timezone but I'll be releasing a post soon on these topics, along with some thoughts on what was discussed during the meeting.
I couldn't listen to all of it, as I have been busy with fixing stuff around the home. But I listened half-ish of it.
To me, this seems like a much more productive discussion than yelling at discord that we have to cut everything. Projects' budgets line-up with what I thought they were spending their payments on. Payroll is one of the hardest thing to cut when it is a small team.
Transparency is important, but we should also be vigilant against fake transparency reports. I don't think such reports would come from projects that were on call today. I think most projects that are funded through DHF are not as opaque as we make them out to be.
Marketing is one of those areas where we have been deficient, our return on what we have spent on marketing in my opinion have been abysmal. Spending money to chase partnerships that don't materialize seems like a waste to me. Someone said if we spent those money on listing Hive on exchanges, we would have gained more exposure, or at least more ramps to get into Hive. And I agree with that sentiment. There should be better ways for us to get a return on our marketing investments. I am not a marketing guy, but even I can see that.
I am not sure how the retention and onboarding part would pan out. It is too early to say anything without seeing it in action.
That is the type of meetings I like to hear (and hopefully participate in)
I just allocated 1 hour (on 2x lol), and I love the discussion and the vibes (pun intended) - wouldn't expect anything less from all participants as i know first hand their great contributions and positive motives towards Hive.
As a development contributor to Hive, whether via our Actifit team or Hdev team, the overall direction and discussion is great, especially in terms of collaboration and open source, which we've been promoting and supporting for years.
The focus on marketing is definitely a big key factor for the future of Hive, we've been putting a lot of effort from our end into marketing, and I'm glad to see the alignment there.
Looking forward to upcoming meetings with such a positive spirit, and even more collaborative agenda/effort across hive dev/dapps. Maybe make those as monthly meetings similar to Hive core dev meetings (or maybe a part/extension of it?)
Was also so nice hearing @asgarth 's and @good-karma 's voice for the first time (@starkerz and @blocktrades we're kinda used to your voices lol).
oh and @jarvie congrats upfront :)
Hi, I'm a regular Hive user and I don't have experience in DHF application development or most of the topics discussed here. But if there's one thing I know as a user of this blockchain, it's that I'm happy to see you all here talking about the future of Hive and how we can improve it, make it excellent, and make it accessible to everyone.
Talking about transparency is a good example of us being on the right track. It builds trust and is positive for everyone.
I'm very glad that the blockchain leaders aren't just focused on technical development, but are truly committed, and it gives us the necessary encouragement to keep creating and giving our best every day on Hive. Hive's development is absolutely necessary, especially with the use of AI and all the technology surrounding it, but marketing and user support are essential for user retention. We must ensure that users stay and join, and we'll achieve this by making the process as easy as possible for them.
Furthermore, it's necessary to ensure that no one feels ignored upon arrival. That first vote or supportive comment is what makes all the difference for a new user in a committed "Hiver," finding ways to make them fall in love with Hive, to attract them, to fill them with the passion of Hive.
Investing in marketing and user retention is a good growth strategy; it's a way to grow Hive and show interest in the existing community.
I'm very glad that solutions are being sought. I'm happy to know that there are projects underway and that Hive has a promising future; it gives me great confidence to know that there are people committed to making it a reality. I hope that the new projects to attract and integrate new users through good marketing are a complete success and that solutions can be found for any differences that may arise. Hive is great, it's beautiful, and it's worth being here. Thank you.
Not sure why this couldn't be done live in public, but that's not the primary concern... It's very easy to fall into the trap of being an OG, for having RIGHTS to spend HBD without proper accountability and transparency... DHF is a "community-owned fund," and everyone who gets funded from it should be very open and transparent toward the community, as WE have funded those projects! That's why it's hard to understand why someone can get upset if the community asks for accountability...
Anyways, laying off part of the team hurts, but we can't blame DHF for that, or the community... It's a fact that "general" productivity of developers went up significantly, and as someone said in the comments, it's completely different than it was 4-5 years ago... Today, one person with the help of an AI can do at least 5x more than it was able 5 years ago, and it was nice to hear developers who USE AI confirming these numbers...
IMO, cutting expenses can be one of the solutions for this problem... The other solution is to embrace AI in your development process and SHIP MORE! You don't have to lay off people; you can give them different tasks, create something new... Maybe something that is self-sustainable! That's definitely a more sustainable approach than the never-ending DHF funding...
It doesn't have to be 100% self-sustainable, but maybe less... IMO, that's the direction in which we should go... Many Hivians will be glad to vote for proposals which have a long-term vision, but with a solid business plan...
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Thanks for the meeting, I enjoyed listening to it. I am glad to see that this didn't go towards trying to reduce spending as much as possible, I know earlier numbers floated about reducing by 50 to 70% which would have no doubt heavily impacted our ability to compete with other chains when they go all out on AI to go faster rather than use it as a cost savings tool. I'm also glad to see a focus be put on marketing, this has always been our weakest point
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It was great discussion, thank you for everyone on call, hoping to see more transparency and communication between teams.
For reference to community spreadsheet can be accessed from shorter url: https://trust.ecency.com.
In video, we mentioned estimation for development was 80-85% but that was before cut on proposal, after the cut it dropped to ~65%, spreadsheet is updated accordingly. We will be maintaining and keep filling spreadsheet with missing items.
All code opensource on our github: https://github.com/ecency
Good to hear that we try to work towards open-source with or without limits but atleast a guarantee for future programmers to be able to continue if one of the current programmers / developers is no longer able to do his work .
I wouldn't mind doing some testing every now and then as long as it ain't on mobile , i really prefer to work on desktop .
replied to 28:48 on 3speak.tv
Hmm I like the idea of transparency reporting expenses like on ecency sheet, but it doesn't make much sense to write 3000 usd x monthly wage for developer, does that means 8 hour a day for a month? Or 8 hours a month? There's a big difference
These are rough limits, we told our devs when they started with us many years ago. Hours are tracked with clockify.me and payments go over or under depending on availability. There is no monthly fixed payment in our case, it is work/task based. After recent cuts into proposal those numbers have changed a lot and spreadsheet updated accordingly few minutes ago.
that's the proper way to handle it, pay on track based hours worked
now, not pointing towards you, but all dev projects on hive like also peakd and keychain, all work should be paid on hours worked and at the end of the month if the dhf paid more than what's been used, the extra should be burned...
First time since years that I see this coordinated approach accross Hive DApps to find a united way forward. Good signal.
I couldn't agree more. It is a very good signal indeed!
I think there is a lot of potential for increasing productivity by them having a more a more coordinated approach.
Great report, sir.
By the way, sir, please promote Hive with advertising features on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
That would be a very efficient marketing tool.
Hive is getting old, so we shouldn't just focus on development, but also improve marketing...
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STOPGreat to see @ecency and @peakd share their budget details upfront.