Hey Guys,

So before I gist you about how I Raised $500 for a Blockchain Development course for my Community Blockchain OAU.

First, meet me,

Hi, my name is Blessing Emah, thanks for being interested in my story.

I am a Community Gal - your Go-to Person for all things Community Building & Strategy. I am an extrovert, I love all things networking, meeting people, organising meetups and all those good things that Communities offer, I got you covered.

I am also a Product Manager. Currently, I am enrolled in Utiva Product School and I am working on my startup idea.

Now you may be wondering how and why did I shift from Product Management to Blockchain Development?

Well, that is another story;

Last year, I attended a session by PMAfrica on "Passing Google Interview". I discovered that Google likes to hire Technical Product Managers i.e Product Managers who were once Software Developers. I knew it was not a must to be technical in order to be a Product Manager but this event showed me how being technical is an advantage to a Pm so I decided to pick up Coding.

The decision was made, now the next dilemma was

What kind of Developer do I want to be

For those who don't know, being a Developer is not a straight path. There are different kinds - Fullstack, Web, DevOps, ML Engineer, AI Developers and more so this is a tough decision. You have to know the kind you want to be and then learn the programming languages for that path.

Then it dawned on me

why not become a Blockchain Developer

I have been in the Blockchain space for the past 3 years and on my Product Management career roadmap, I planned to build products in the blockchain space so why not become a Blockchain Developer which would help me become a Blockchain Product Manager.

Another decision settled.

Now before all these Blockchain Development decisions, I had co-founded a community with my colleagues Michael Jerry and Nonse Odion called Blockchain OAU. We are focused on educating students on Blockchain Technology generally not just the trading aspect, it's potentials in the African space.

You can check us out here

So the decision to become a Blockchain Developer motivated me to create Build Blockchain Devs, a sub-community dedicated to building African Blockchain Developers.

I put out a call for folks who are interested in Blockchain Development in the community. We got some replies - serious ones and those who just joined to see what's happening there.🙃🙃

Blockchain OAU organised a session on Being a Blockchain Engineer where we had guest speakers like Oluchi Enebeli popularly known as koderHolic and Mayowa Tudonu.

It was a really insightful experience.

Now to kick off, we partnered up with Web3bridge, an organisation that trains people in Web3(Blockchain Development).

Blockchain OAU members applied and our coding journey began. As a newbie to Coding, I enrolled for their introductory class to coding where we were taught HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I didn't know jack, everything looked and sounded like gibberish 😂😂😂😂

Thank God for YouTube and crash courses,🤓over time, it started to make sense. So my 2020( Oct-Dec) I focused on HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

As a curious person, I have been down the route of learning everywhere and it has its disadvantages such as imposter syndrome - when you are not sure of what you are learning and also the scam of always learning and not practising.🙈🙈

I didn't want this for the community so we had to get a mentor or a course to follow and hallelujah we found Julien, an Expert Blockchain Developer. He runs a YouTube channel Eat the Blocks where he teaches Blockchain Development. We later found Dapp University These two channels became our home for learning but it wasn't enough.

Glory be to God, Julien had several courses where he taught people. The total fee of his course was like $1500 ☹️(where would we get this money from)☹️ Unknown to us, an opportunity was lurking around, 😄 he was running a Promotional deal during November to get all his courses for $500.🥳🥳🥳

Quickly, I reached out to him on Twitter and sent an email telling him all about Blockchain OAU and what we are doing in Build Blockchain Devs. I told him of our interest in taking his courses and how we want to raise the $500 but time wasn't on our side. He was impressed and offered to support us by letting us have it at $500 whenever we were ready.🤩🤩I was ecstatic, everything was falling into place.

Now the next thing was how to raise $500(250k)😳

To kick off, I created a BC which I shared with the community and also entered into everyone's DM. I got some pledges, some couldn't afford to pay, some just read and some left me on read 😭😭

Their loss 😏 because this allowed me to sieve out the serious ones. I sent out a form and only those who filled it were moved to our main group. This way out of 60 people in the group, we let go of about 25 unserious folks.😁😁

Our members fulfilled their pledges and for some, I did annoying follow-ups. My brother calls this "Professional Begging"😂😂 Our amazing members also reposted the opportunity on their status and we got people involved who donated to the course.

We raised 135k through the community members, this happened for 2 months (Dec- Jan) but then we hit a standstill.

We had to restrategize so we reached out to people in the African Crypto space who donated to our cause like Mr Tony of Cryptotvplus, Destinysaid of OKex, Oluwashina Peters of CLabs, Barineka, Samuel, an awesome Blockchain Developer and also our lovely Community members who made this happen.

The proposed deadline was on Jan 20 and I am happy to announce that after 2 months of fundraising, we did it. On Jan 23( my birthday) we got the course🥳🥳🥳🥳🥳.

You may be wondering why go through all the stress for one course. No, it's not just 1 course it's a 6-1 course covering these topics;

• Web Development

• Blockchain Development

• Building of 30Dapps -Advanced Solidity

• Flashloans

• Defi Development Mastery

This course is structured in such a way that it takes you from being a newbie to a Blockchain Developer in months. Just Pure Gold🤩

Our Vision for Buildup Blockchain Devs is to grow 52 Developers in 2021 -I am happy to say we are on our way.😁

This experience has taught me a lot of things like

1 Just Start

You may not know how you will accomplish the goal but then by taking the first step, the universe steps in and things align. If I hadn't sent that mail to Julien, I don't know what I would be doing now so just start.

2 Keeping a vision alive despite the odds.

When you have a goal, it's important to focus on it and keep going till you achieve it. When things are not working as you hoped, restrategize just don't give up.

3 I got to see the Power of Community at work.

On my own, I couldn't have gotten the course but with a community of a Shared Vision, we did this. A community doesn't have to be 100 people, with 10 or 20 active people, you can achieve a lot.

4 Hard love😂😂😂

Now that we have gotten the course, we didn't get to pack it in our list of courses. The plan is to help members grow by giving assignments and reminding them to do it with some persuasive tactics😂😂.

5 The Gift of Friendship

When we came together, we were mostly strangers but through fundraising together, I can say that I have made new friends (the funny thing is most of us haven't met physically)😄We came together because we are interested in becoming Blockchain Developers.

6 Understanding

Everyone in the community understands why they are there so we are open to helping each other grow and also we all understand that we are following a path. This prevents things like spamming and over-sharing courses. Everyone understands that we are avoiding the hole of learning without practice.

I am grateful for this whole experience. It has taught me a lot about structuring and having timelines.

With timelines, we are more accountable. For structure, this has allowed me to create a Growth Structure that fosters individual growth.

For those curious, here is how we do it; We use WhatsApp for communication and Google Classroom to share assignments and resources. We also have teachers who grade members' work. The goal is that by June, most of us will become Intermediate Blockchain Developers and we will begin another journey together.

This is my major achievement for January and I am really happy that I did this.

I am grateful that I get to be a part of their story.😁😁When they think back to how their Blockchain Development journey began, the community comes to mind. I am so happy that I am impacting lives.😊

I look forward to what the year has for us at Blockchain OAU and I am looking forward to more impacts this 2021.

Thanks for reading my story to the end🙂