Groundbreaking news: another bull market might be starting.
Also groundbreaking: most of you reading this are not founders, not devs, and not about to become either in the next 6 months. Relax. There's still a seat at the table — it just requires talking to people instead of shipping code, which, let's be honest, is the easier skill for most of us.
If you're a mod, a content creator, an "influencer" (still a word we all pretend not to cringe at), here's the menu.
Option 1: The safe, boring, actually-fine option. Take a fixed fee. ~$100/project/month, stack a few projects, land around $500/month. More if your following is actually big. Reliable. Forgettable. Still hard to do these days... Basically a part-time job that happens to involve Discord emojis.
Option 2: The unhinged, higher-variance option. Join a team early — as a mod, even — and get paid when the project raises or makes revenue. Slower start. Way bigger ceiling. Last cycle, the people who did this made around $40k and more over 12-18 months per project, and most of them picked up a fixed fee halfway through anyway. So really it's not "Option 1 vs Option 2," it's "Option 2, eventually with Option 1 attached." Very sneaky. I respect it.
The bear market, for the record, was long in the way that only bear markets can be — grim, endless, spiritually corrosive. And in it, a very funny thing happened: a pile of genuinely good projects sat there starving for capital, absolutely swimming in "we need ambassadors and mods but have $40 in the treasury." That gap is still open. Walk into it.
Here's the actual move, and it's shockingly simple: go read the last Colosseum hackathon submissions. All of them. Find the good founders. Then — and this is the part people skip because it feels vaguely humiliating — just message them. Colosseum publishes their contacts, so there's no detective work required, only the willingness to send a cold DM like a normal person.
Ask how they're doing. Ask if they're still building (a surprising number still are, which tells you everything). Ask how you can help.
Do NOT ask for money. Not yet, not vaguely, not "hey so hypothetically." The instant a founder smells "I will do 20% of an effort and then invoice you," the conversation is dead, and it deserved to die. This is a long game dressed up as small talk.
So: act like a VC. Except instead of a term sheet, you're investing evenings. Hop into their Discord, their Telegram, actually talk to people, actually help onboard users, actually keep them around — which, unfashionable opinion, is a real skill and most projects are terrible at it. Post about them. Bring a friend or two. Introduce them to other founders who might be useful, and vice versa — turns out early-stage builders love being connected to other early-stage builders, who knew.
Do this consistently and eventually — not immediately, eventually — a conversation about equity or an airdrop plus a fixed rate shows up on its own. You won't even have to force it, which is the whole point.
Funny enough, this is the exact playbook web2 developers used to break into web3: work for free first, get good, get known, get hired. Same trick, different spreadsheet.
Anyway. Go read some hackathon submissions. Send an awkward first DM. See you in 12 months, presumably slightly richer and definitely more tired.