PGP Proposal: TalentLayer ~ Add Messaging to Interoperable Labor Marketplace Tooling

🌱 Push Grants Program (PGP) Proposals
1

Push Grant Program Application

1 - Name: TalentLayer

2 - Email: kirsten@talentlayer.org

3 - About You:

We’re 6 core team members full-time and 8 active open-source contributors (10 of us are devs). We know gig marketplaces - all team members have spent years freelancing/hiring freelancers - we have felt the problem we’re solving first-hand.

Kirsten, Executive Lead 8 yrs in marketplace and infra startups, 4 years in blockchain governance and infra, self-taught dev, led major international IEEE open-source research initiatives
:e-mail: kirsten@talentlayer. org
:bird: @kirstenrpomales
:purple_circle: kpl#3114

Romain, Technical Lead: 6 years as CTO of Europe’s biggest sports data infra, 4 years as anon solidity dev, multiple web 2 marketplace and plugin startups
:e-mail: romain@talentlayer. org
:bird: @romain_tl
:purple_circle: Romain#5882

4 - Project TL:DR
Today’s labor markets are siloed. This causes problems for users who can’t access liquidity for jobs/workers and issues for platforms that struggle with the chicken-and-egg problem. TalentLayer’s protocol provides tools for creating interoperable work marketplaces; including escrow, jobs and proposals, identity, and cross-platform messaging.

5 - Proposal Category
Tooling

6 - Project Overview

The Problem
Today’s labor market is siloed. Platforms like Upwork, Uber, and Thumbtack struggle with the chicken and egg problem. Users are forced to use many platforms because they can’t find enough work or people to hire on just one. These silos have led to…

  • Low liquidity in the labor market. Silos fragment the job market and make it harder for users to find the best-fit match.
  • Segregated user reputation. Hirers and workers never know the full story of their counterparty. This hurts searchability.
  • Centralization of power in platforms. Users’ reputations are owned by the platform. Users can lose everything by being de-platformed.

What is TalentLayer?
Talentlayer is a composable infrastructure for open labor markets.

  • Interoperable backend components for labor marketplace platforms
  • Pooled liquidity for jobs and users (allows user and work sharing across platforms)
  • A new economic model for marketplaces based on fee splitting

How does it work?

  • Configurable smart contracts that handle Escrow, Dispute Resolution, Jobs and Proposals, and Identity/Reviews and integrations such as cross-platform messaging
  • An SDK that allows easy integration
  • Pooled liquidity is facilitated via platforms writing and querying searches from the protocol level: e.g. Hirer on Toptal searches “engineer” - sees worker profiles that originated from Upwork/other markets. That hirer can fulfill a complete work engagement with these users that use other platforms.

Where are we now?
TalentLayer is live today. We have 6 marketplaces committed to deploy with our tools in 2023, one marketplace live on testnet, and two launching in Q1 2023.

We have all core components built except messaging right now.

Why Push Protocol?
TalentLayer needs to provide our marketplace builders with tools to allow hirers and workers from different platforms to message with one another. Push Protocol enables this by providing wallet-to-wallet communication in an elegant way. We have two platforms that need to go live on Polygon in Q1 2023 and we will provide them with a plugin tool for work messaging that leverages Push Protocol. In addition to messaging, Push also allows us to easily display messages that originate from any platform on the platform an individual user is operating on. These are essential UX needs that we’re excited to fulfill with Push.

Our proposal is to enable marketplaces building on TalentLayer to be able to have cross-platform messaging - allowing hirers from one platform to interface with users on another platform and vice-versa. This will be done by building and documenting the TalentLayer Work Platform Messaging Plugin - another open-source tool in our toolkit!

We will be able to engineer and document this messaging integration by end of January in alignment with our project milestones - see below for specific steps to each milestone. We will have our senior engineer Quentin managing most of the integration with support from our technical lead Romain and other team members working on Documentation. Kirsten will work on the publicity of the integration before and after release and help the marketplace building on TalentLayer implement the new tool. 100% of this grant will go to paying TalentLayer’s open-source contributors.

7 - Value Proposition to Push Protocol
Since TalentLayer is developer tooling, by supporting our engineering, you support many builders who are using our tools now and who will use our tools in the future.

With building our native messaging plugin with Push Protocol, the two marketplaces launching on TalentLayer Polygon in Q1 2023 will by association be also integrating Push Protocol.

This is just the beginning! We have two additional marketplaces planning to launch on Polygon in late 2023 - as TalentLayer grows, more and more platforms will be leveraging Push through our toolkit.

8 - Funding Requested
40,500 PUSH

9 - Milestones

Milestone A: Develop TalentLayer Work Platform Messaging Plugin
Timeline: January Week 1 and 2, 2023
Objective: Engineer the backend and fork-able frontend code for our messaging plugin.
Amount: 20,250 PUSH
Steps:

  • Make an integration with Push messaging. Add configurations and features that are required for work marketplaces, like displaying only messages that are work-related.
  • Notifications integration; enable push notifications for messages that come in and for updates that happen relating to job posts.
  • Make fork-able code snippets - integrate these into our existing fork-able demo DAPP

Milestone B: Develop Documentation & Integration Guides for TalentLayer Work Platform Messaging Plugin
Timeline: January Week 2 and 3, 2023
Objective: Document our new messaging plugin. Make it easy enough for a marketplace building on us to set up in under an hour.
Amount: 20,250 PUSH
Steps:

  • Write docs for the messaging plugin with the example code embedded
  • Make a “how-to” guide for integrating messaging with details on different configurations you can do

Ongoing: Engineering Support for Marketplaces Building on TalentLayer
Timeline: Ongoing
Objective: Provide technical support on the messaging plugin, helping marketplaces building on TalentLayer integrate it seamlessly into their platforms.

10 - Wallet Address
eth:0x81B3E58186E40c3143eEdE1eac88eedfC7cFeb5F

11 - Relevant Links & Attachments
Documentation: https:// docs. talentlayer. org
Website: https:// talentlayer. org
Twitter: https:// twitter. com/TalentLayer
Github: https:// github. com/TalentLayer/

12 - Referral
Richa Joshi

3 Likes
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hi @hellokpl
Thank you very much for submitting your proposal.

There is a new process which starts here: Push Grants Program

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The new process is simpler and faster, however is great that you shared your proposal here for discussion.

Would be great if you could expand more in the value proposition for Push. The value proposition as you put it right now is 100% related to technical implementation, and while it is great to know that your platform will use Push as the communication layer it is also critical to define how more users will be exposed to this communication.

Hence the importance of including supporting facts for your case:

  • Do you have active users? How many?
  • Attach a number of users goal to each of your milestones
  • Clearly list your Push use cases in a more granular fashion; i.e.
    • Notification when A hirer is interested in my profile and wants to connect
    • Open chat between hirer and worker
    • Notification when I was accepted

For Push the value proposition is stronger if put in terms of Users X Communication, as it makes it easier to track and measure the impact of the investment Push is making in a grantee.

Hope this makes sense.
Looking forward to hearing more about this cool platform you are building.
Also, please plan on joining us next week for Office hours in case you want to demo your project to the Push Community and do Q&A.

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Certainly! We’ll prepare deeper details and post them ASAP. Cheers!

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Talent Layers stays shipping, love to see it!

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Thank you again for your questions. Here is additional information.

:star: Do you have active users? How many?

  • TalentLayer’s clients are teams building work platforms - we have 6 marketplaces to commit to deploy on us in 2023 (our alpha only launched a few weeks ago)

  • 1 marketplace is live on Avalanche testnet with 10 or so registered end users (they are in pre-registration only now)

  • 2 marketplaces are in development now, with the frontends nearing completion and testnet development either already in progress or in the next 2 weeks - they are growing waitlists now and have access to onboard communities in the Lens ecosystem FAST

  • One of our marketplace builders is a network of job boards that has about 50K active hirers and workers (they are still developing their TalentLayer-based platform, and intend to onboard their existing users when live).

:star: Attach a number of users goal to each of your milestones.

From Push’s perspective, it makes most sense to look at “end users” so these would be the users of the clients building platforms on TalentLayer. In 2023 we aim to have 20 marketplaces live with an average of 1000-10,000 users per marketplace. This would result in between 20,000 and 200,000 end users. Both of our milestones are designed to support platform builders and therefore are hard to directly tie to user growth. As messaging is essential for the operations of these platforms, we expect that most all will integrate our messaging solutions.

:star: Clearly list your Push use cases in a more granular fashion:

Push Chat

  • I need to hire a freelancer; I create a service offer on TalentLayer and want potential interested freelancers to be able to contact me if they want to discuss the offer, using a decentralized messaging app.

  • I am a freelancer, I submitted a proposal to a potential employer and want him to be able to contact me using a decentralized freelancing app, if he wants to discuss my proposal.

Push Notifications

  • As an employer / freelancer, I want to be notified if someone tries to contact me regarding one of my service / proposals offers (or any person who was in contact with me previously using TalentLayer).

  • As a freelancer, I want to be notified if a payment is made after a job has been completed

  • As a freelancer, I want to be notified if my proposal has been accepted

  • As a hirer, I want to be notified of new proposals

  • As a hirer, I want to be notified of when a job has been market complete by a freelancer

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Huge potential in this integration with Push, excited to work on it!

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Just read through their docs, https://docs.talentlayer.org/. Looks like a great integration with massive potential for the future. Keen to contribute.

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I am thrilled about the push integration, it’s clearly the missing piece of our Dapp

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It’s just like the last infinity stone against de-siloing. Let the forces join!

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Thanks for the support bro. LFG!!!

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Awesome feature ^^ LFG !

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@MrJaf

Here we’re providing further details that are more metric focused, as requested.

Milestone 1
Impact on user adoption:
This milestone integrates Push into TalentLayer’s stack of dev tools via the TalentLayer Messaging Plugin. This integration makes it possible for users on different platforms to transact in an interoperable way!

Numeric estimate:
This milestone allows the marketplaces building today on TalentLayer Polygon to leverage messaging. DeLance and WorkPod are going live end of February - DeLance, a creative and developer marketplace, has a partnership with the largest Lens community LMCC (~250 members) to post their community’s jobs on their platform. WorkPod, a smart contract auditor marketplace, has started to have convos with dozens of auditors and firms looking to hire. We estimate that between these two platforms they’d have at least 50 active (transacting) users by end of March 2023. All of these users will require messaging!

Summary: 2 platforms and ~50 end users (using messaging) by end of March.

Milestone 2:
Impact on user adoption:
Documentation is essential for platforms who are not directly connected to the TalentLayer team to leverage our tech. If the plugin is not documented, the only way to easily integrate is through talking 1x1 with our team which is not scalable as we must speak with many marketplaces on this.

Numeric estimate:
We estimate that we’ll be able to get commitments from another 3+ marketplaces to build on TalentLayer Polygon in the next 3 months, with each marketplace bringing between 50 and 100 users. This would result in between 150 and 300 additional users leveraging the TalentLayer Messaging Plugin (and therefore Push) by end of Q2 after the platforms deploy.

We’ve already connected with 2 new leads for integrating TalentLayer through Push Protocol’s Twitter Spaces and publicity that you’ve already done. This has been so so valuable for us.

Summary: 5 platforms and ~200-350 end users (using messaging) by end of June.

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New milestones agreed to!

Milestone 1: Push Integration - $5K

  • Integrate Push into our SDK

  • First platforms in Closed Beta have users messaging

  • First platforms in Closed Beta have notifications being sent

~ 900 messages total

~ 900 notifications total

Milestone 2: Push Integration Usage - $5K

  • Get at lease 3 additional marketplaces “second batch” building on TalentLayer from the Push network

  • First platforms in Open Beta have users messaging

  • First platforms in Open Beta have notifications being sent

  • Second batch of platforms in Closed Beta have users messaging

  • Second batch of Closed Beta have notifications being sent

~ 12,900 messages total

~ 6,900 notifications total