2. Do: Get clear on your audience(s)
Peer reviewers are top analysts in the community who review and score your work. In an analytical challenge, your data output is competing with other analysts for a reward. As important as other audiences are, realistically as a bounty hunter you create competitive data outputs with the goal to outrank other submissions. Competing keeps all analysts on our toes and motivates us to craft the best work we can!
Don’t make the mistake of only targeting this first group, though. As much as the goal of peer review is to reflect what a “strong” dashboard means in the real world, the criteria and trends in peer review will change over time. Plus, review can be subjective. Over-focusing on the above group can stall your long-term progress as an analyst. Standing out with clear, powerful data visualization, storytelling, and presentation, instead of following current peer review trends, can instead propel you and your data career forward.
It is equally important for your growth as an analyst to make dashboards that do well with other audiences too. Your ticket to a broader audience is blockchain analytics Twitter. Your personal goals with analytics challenges may vary: Maybe you want to keep earning tokens as a bounty hunter, or to keep it freelance and start doing client projects (word is that’s where more $$$ is), or maybe your goal is to find a job in blockchain data. In all of these cases, have your work be Twitter-ready for the benefit of audiences that include:
- The curious: A general audience member who will follow you on Twitter and amplify your posts because your work is attention-grabbing, the tool you built looks helpful, and/or your insights are casually interesting for them to learn.
- The users of your outputs: Someone who stays up to date on your work because it helps them in theirs. This may be someone using a dashboard you made and shared because it helps them monitor specific metrics, or a professional in web3 in the niche that your analytical articles cover.
- The opportunity providers: Some audience members will see your published work as evidence of your skills and a starting point to collaborate with them further. They may be looking for an analyst for a freelance project or a more permanent position, and your public profile is your portfolio, showcasing not only how well you can do analytics but also your data communication skills.
These groups can overlap. A Twitter follower may also be a peer reviewer, to whom the public interest in your dashboard submission serves as additional evidence of your work’s professionalism. A user of one tool may become interested in working with you on more projects. Creating data outputs that help and impress more than one of these groups, without putting out work that’s “for everyone and no one”, is one of the great but elusive skills in community blockchain analytics.
The cool thing is that by being part of the blockchain data analytics community, you are part of defining these best practices in this niche that is very young. Your best dashboards can show other analysts what it means to optimize for peer review AND make something useful for web3 practitioners AND and also be interesting on Twitter at the same time. So far, one defining characteristic of top dashboards across the space is that they have a specific goal and users in mind, and do an effective job at clearly communicating and delivering for them – and that in turn has a positive overflow effect by leading to a higher score and to public interest on Twitter.
We look forward to seeing you grow at making clear, purposeful, effective work that achieves this elusive combination of specific direction and broad interest.