As the founding design lead, I drove Kauri from concept to delivery. I was responsible for shaping the incentive model, contribution flows, and progressive decentralisation strategy that allowed the platform to scale beyond a traditional documentation site. Shipped MVP in 6 months, exceeding adoption goals by 40% and worked closely with 1 PM, 1 Tech Lead, 5 Developers and 1 Community Manager.

Impact

• 20k monthly active users.
• 2,000+ developers supported.
• 700+ technical articles published.
• Became a primary knowledge resource for Ethereum developers during the Web2 to Web3 transition.

Context: The Ethereum ecosystem was fragmented, and documentation was scattered across Medium, GitHub, and Reddit, often becoming obsolete weeks after publishing. This created a high barrier to entry for new developers, stifling the growth of the Ethereum network and ConsenSys’s core mission.

Problem: Developers were wasting hours verifying if code snippets were still valid. They had no single source of truth and no incentive to update broken tutorials for others.

I led the user research phase, conducting research with 100+ developers ranging from hackathon beginners to protocol architects. We identified a critical gap between the users’ expectations from Web2 and the friction required by Web3.

Key Insights

• Users trusted peers over official docs since official documenttion were too slow to update.
• Financial bounty rewards attracted spam.
• Users wanted the benefits of decentralisation (censorship resistance), but the speed of Web2.
• Curated collections were more valuable for users and allowed experts to curate valid tutorials into learning paths.

Rather than fully decentralising from day one, I proposed a strategy of progressive decentralisation, designing a system that starts with familiar Web2 interactions and gradually introduces Web3 mechanics as users gain confidence.

This led to three core design principles:

• Lower the barrier to contribution (write first, transact later).
• Make reputation visible before money.
• Separate reading, contributing, and governance into distinct layers.

I created a series of low to high-fidelity prototypes to explore how developers would discover, create, and maintain technical knowledge across different levels of experience.

• Contribution: From lightweight self-publishing to fulfilling structured requests.
• Identity & reputation: Making authorship, expertise, and contribution history explicit.
• Incentive mechanics: Testing when to surface bounties, recognition, and community signals.
• Web3 concepts: Delaying wallets and transactions until users clearly understood the value.

Result: We intentionally delayed mandatory wallet interactions until users demonstrated contribution intent, accepting lower on-chain purity in exchange for higher adoption.

Validation happened continuously in real-world environments. I tested prototypes and live builds with developers at Ethereum hackathons, meetups, and ecosystem events, observing how Kauri was used under genuine time and cognitive pressure.

Insights

• Developers were willing to contribute content without financial incentives when authorship and visibility were clear.
• Requiring wallet connections or on-chain transactions too early significantly reduced contribution rates, especially for newcomers.
• Contributors expected documentation workflows to feel as fast and forgiving as Web2 tools.
• Introducing local autosave and draft states increased completion and reduced anxiety around publishing.

These insights directly shaped the final product decisions, delaying mandatory blockchain interactions, prioritising reputation over rewards, and designing contribution flows that felt familiar before becoming decentralised.

Kauri became a critical bridge between passive knowledge and active contribution in the Ethereum ecosystem. It supported thousands of developers, centralised high-quality technical knowledge, and established sustainable incentives for community-driven documentation.

• Scaled adoption to 20k MAU, becoming a primary resource for upskilling Web2 developers into Web3.
• Adopted as the official knowledge base and project submission platform for ETH Denver 2019.
• 9 major projects (Aragon, uPort, MakerDAO) migrated documentation.
• Solved the outdated problem by incentivising the creation of 700+ high-quality technical guides, verified by the community.
• Featured by the Ethereum Foundation as a trusted technical resource.