How I Turned 2 Sleepless Nights & 12 Monster Energy Drinks into $2,000 Prize at EthIndia Hackathon

What inspired us to build SimpleAsWater?

Making Web 3.0 SimpleAsWater

So, What makes building Dapps/Projects hard?

1. Shifting to web3 from web2 is hard as it involves a totally different approach of how to build applications.
2. It is really hard to find the RIGHT RESOURCES at the RIGHT TIME. Often, the amount of resources is either overwhelming and scattered, or really scarce and under-maintained, which leads you to resources that aren’t useful to you, hence wasting a ton of time. This makes the learning curve much steeper than it actually is.
3. As this space(web 3.0) is a bit new, so there are frequent changes and abundancy of broken tools. They work one day and break another day. Often the knowledge of making them work is tribal(closed within the small community) and hidden in some deep issue discussions.
4. A lot of times, people tend to compromise to make things just work as they have to learn a lot more if they want to make the Dapp better(reluctance due to the steep learning curve). 
   A good example of this is building a tic-tac-toe Dapp. Most of the people will just build all the Dapp on-chain(meaning all the compute and memory is harvested from the decentralized ledger). This bloats the system and is highly inefficient. For eg, we can make these Dapps better by shifting some of the logic off-chain, and using IPFS for static storage, etc. But as learning is a big threshold in Web 3.0, PEOPLE TEND TO KILL THEIR CREATIVITY.
5. The individual projects(usually new projects) don’t have much incentive to support this cross-project(using different projects within the same dapp) community.
6. Thus, individuals have to flock into each project’s closed community to get parts of the answers to build parts of their dapps. And, even if there are a number of individuals who are trying to build similar cross-project dapps, it’s really hard to discover each other.
7. New projects(less mature) also have a hard time to keep their documentation up-to-date. This is mostly due to the following reasons:
1. As the projects codebase change frequently, it’s harder for them to keep the docs updated.
2. Usually, these projects tend to have a small core team, they cannot afford to spend more time on documentation.
3. Also as the new projects don’t have any or a good amount of regular open-source contributors, they can’t even outsource the documentation work to anyone interested. Here being a regular contributor is really important as the docs are expected to contain each and every detail of the project, that only a regular contributor can have(in such a frequently changing codebase).
8. It’s hard to discover these new projects if they have a really specific use-case. The use-case that they are targeting maybe a huge pain-point for the community. But in this vast web, sometimes it’s hard for them to get discovered by the potential users.
9. In the case of mature projects, they have figured out the problems that we listed above(for less mature projects). But as these big projects have a lot of tools built, like maybe a really cool widget. In case of our hackathon, Kyber network had a widget that can be plugged into your project to swap more than 80 pairs of currencies. Some people built their own widget that did the same thing because they weren’t able to find using a Google Search. THIS LEADS TO REINVENTING THE WHEEL…and it happens a lot.
10. And a lot of other problems…
    

What are the main CAUSES of these PAIN POINTS?

1. Lack of a self-supportive cross-project community.
2. Lack of a community-sourced knowledge graph.

How can we solve this?

1. Building
2. Collaborating
3. Learning, and
4. Discovering 

What will the ecosystem become if this works out?

1. As we are making it easy to build dapps, this will increase the number of dapps and dapp builders.
2. Collaborators will be able to find RIGHT RESOURCES at the RIGHT TIME.
3. More projects will survive, grow and get discovered.
4. More discovery, lesser REINVENTING the WHEEL.
5. It will make individual projects even stronger as now they are a part of a much bigger community.
6. THIS IS BEST BENEFIT OF ALL: As we unlock this new highly connected community, we will start to see a new breed of dapps, and a much richer variety of dapps.
   

How can you help us?

1. As a Collaborator(anyone interested in Web 3.0)
You can start by telling us about your experience with Web 3.0, HERE :)
2. As a Project(any Web 3.0 supportive project)
You can join us here, and we will add you as a BETA partner, HERE :)
Thanks to ETHIndia, ETHGlobal Team, ETHGlobal & Devfolio for such an amazing hackathon. 

• Understanding IPFS in Depth(1/6): A Beginner to Advanced Guide
• ConsensusPedia: An Encyclopedia of 30+ Consensus Algorithms
• Getting Deep Into Ethereum: How Data Is Stored In Ethereum?
• ContractPedia: An Encyclopedia of 40+ Smart Contract Platforms
• A Beginner’s Ultimate Guide To DAGs