September was the fastest pace month to date as we continue to grow our following, team, existing initiatives, and trial new concepts and ideas.
The overall trend for the month of September and going into October is a rapid and accelerating top of the funnel growth as well as an increase in the number of inbound requests, and ongoing work on our long-term programs.
Community Growth 
We use our Social Media channels as funnels for growth - to reach new members, engage existing ones, and actively explore collaborations with other players in the ecosystem.
- Twitter - 601 followers (+165)
- Youtube - 36 Subscribers (+6)
- Medium - 7 followers
- Community Hub - 60 members (increase ~45%)
We are excited to see consistent growth, specially on Twitter, as we believe these represents a captive audience that we can tap for all future initiatives we roll out in the future.
Calendly Like Candy 
We’ve been having an increasing amount of introductory calls with many members of the ecosystem ranging from someone with an idea wanting to distill their concepts or wanting some help on getting started all the way to projects with a product that is ready to launch looking for some feedback. In general, my approach has been to have an open door policy, send Calendly links to most people who reach out and get conversations started.
Of particular interest to us is the thread we started around on-boarding more designers and product managers to the ecosystem. This initiative led to almost ten calls w designers from outside of Near, and two new recruits to the Silicon Team. We are still actively exploring this area directly with the NEAR Core team.
Product Demo
September was a quiet month for Product Demos. Although we did received several requests that are already being worked on and scheduled for October such as:
- AstroDAO
- Metapool + Ref Finance (New stNEAR/NEAR pool)
- Cheddar Finance**
Design Workshops + User Testing
We are very excited about the prospects of our Design Workshops and User Testing Units, both of which have received a lot of interest. Due highly individualised nature of this programs, these initiatives have evolved as an ongoing working relationship with several projects in the lead up to specific pieces of work. Some of the projects we are working closely with:
- Metapool
- Ref Finance
- AstroDAO - user testing + focus group underway.
- MooPay - user testing underway.
- Near Misfits - go-to-market strategy in the lead up to their launch at NEAR CON at the end of the month
WUI Podcast
The Wild User Interviews Podcast has also enjoyed some early success which be believe has had a large impact in the continued growth of the ecosystem. We are extremely grateful for the high calibre of guests that have agreed to come on and help kickstart this project. Over September we released, recorded, and scheduled:
- Ep. 003 - ‘Hackathon-in-a-box’, Community as Product with @shreyas
- Ep. 004 - “We don’t need to ask permission to solve people’s problems” w Ryan Finlay
- Ep. 005 - Early Consensys to Near Core, Web 3.0 Product Design w. @corwinharrell
- Ep. 006 - Growth w. @Ozymandius
Recorded, To be released soon:
- Ep. 007 - Ethan Chiasson (Stage.gg, Pulse)
- Ep. 008 - @Chloe (Createbase, MarmaJ)
- Ep. 009 - @cryptocredit (Marketing DAO Council Member)
- Ep. 010 - @coyotefugly + Sue (Swine Guild)
You can follow/subscribe on your favourite platform to always be notified of the latest releases! Thanks to the magic of our hosting platform (transistor.fm), the WUI Podcast is available literally everywhere:
October 
- All hands on deck - NEAR CON Lisbon. We are working closely with ecosystem partners to ensure that the Conference is a wild success.
- Ecosystem Onboarding. We are starting to work closely with the NEAR Community team to create a special onboarding experience - from zero to aha! This is a multi-stakeholder, complex project and we are thrilled and honoured to be invited to participate.
- Document + Reproduce. We continue experimenting and refining our workshop offerings. A focus for October is to document as much as possible to make it easier for new Silicon members to be onboarded and help us increase capacity to keep up w. demand.
- More podcast interviews!
- Cheeky mystery projects
Funding 
Silicon Craftsmen is part of the first cohort of Warpspeed Guilds and will be requesting funding accordingly (Tier 4, 2500 NEAR for September 2021)