How to Launch Your Blockchain Startup (Without Writing a Single Line of Code)
3 tips to get your big idea off the ground and into production.
Calling all nights and weekends BUIDLers!
This week, ConsenSys Labs, Gitcoin, and Microsoft announced the launch of the Ethereal Virtual Hackathon, an endeavor focused on upending the orthodoxies of finance and banking — and hackathons in general — while launching the future star developers and entrepreneurs of the blockchain industry.
By far one of the hardest parts of participating in a hackathon is honing in on a good idea, and getting traction — fast. At ConsenSys Labs, I spend a good amount of time with our entrepreneurs helping them think through strategies to validate and scale their Blockchain businesses.
I believe that entrepreneurship is all about engineering solutions that create signals to find Problems and Customers. Find an interesting problem. Find a customer. Then build your product. In the game of entrepreneurship, sequence matters.
Find an interesting problem. Find a customer. Then build your product. In the game of entrepreneurship, sequence matters.
Here are 3 ways to get signals…
The SaaP-Wrap Strategy: Service as a Product, that you wrap in a product post-launch
Okay, so let’s talk about a couple of light-weight “products” you can build fast and cheap. The SaaP-Wrap strategy is starting by finding customers and building your business as a service. I know, “service” is a dirty word in tech, but let me explain.
Most of us in tech love building products and start there. I LOVE building non-scalable services, then wrapping a product around it. It’s the fastest way to build a company, and your customers pay for product development.
In addition, service-oriented businesses tend to have higher AOV than product SaaS businesses, and as you productize elements of the business, your margins go up. In this instance, you end up with the best of both worlds — High MRR/AOV, and High Margins. A wonderful combination. For a refresher on the alphabet soup of Unit Metrics for your startup, check out this handy guide.
“But how do I do that?”
Here are some lightweight products you can use to sell your primary value-proposition to your customers
- Static wireframes
- Dynamic wireframes
- Spoof demo video
- Landing Page with email opt-in for “Early Access” (I’ll talk more about this, in a second)
Then… Make an Irresistible Offer. Find 10 people who have signed up for your product and ask them, “If I do X for you in the next 30 days, would that be worth $Z? If I don’t, just so you know, you won’t pay me a dime”.
You’ve de-risked your offer, in the eyes of your customer, and now you work on delivering that service to them. Unlike building vaporware, you’re getting real customers to pay you for your time/service, to fulfill a need.
While one of you delivers the product via blood, sweat, and tears, the other team members are documenting the process. Once the service is delivered, successfully, you refine the process and begin to productize the most cumbersome but easiest part to automate, via tech.
Voila! You officially have a business. Congratulations!
The CaaP Strategy: Content as a Product
Literally, the lightest-weight product is creating content that tells a story and drives users to your landing/opt-in page. You can use “virality” and email opt-ins as indicators of customer interest. Plus, building a CRM for your startup out of the gate, will become one of your secret weapons as you grow and scale your company. What I love about this strategy is, you can literally “spin up” several products in a weekend, and if you’re savvy in paid media, you can run several campaigns driving to a landing page and use CTR% and “Early Product” email opt-ins, to tell you which product to build.
You can easily build your product landing pages and email opt-ins with a service like Unbounce or Ship. And if paid media isn’t something you’re savvy in, you can easily outsource it to someone on Fiverr and cap your test budget at something reasonable, like $500 per campaign. You can even outsource the design components of your ads to someone on a platform like Bounties Network.
This is also a great way to practice a meta-skill every successful entrepreneur you know of, has mastered: The art of storytelling. It’s the secret to getting people (i.e. customers, vendors, advisors, team members. etc) to come along and help you build this thing. Business is a team sport. This is one of the meta-skills you’ll need to play the sport, and win.
The Super Advisor Strategy: Find Someone Who Helps You Tap a Market/Community/Customer base
Let’s say you think you’ve identified a market and an idea for that market. Find a well connected SME (Subject Matter Expert) in that market and pitch them on what you’re building. You can pull together wireframes and a 12 slide presentation. If you need help on specific tactics and strategies to cold-outreach to people you want to tap to be an advisor, check out the video interview my colleague Katie Johnson did with Jae Sung Soled at Facebook on Cold Calling for Introverts:
Now, here’s the key: Offer to make them an advisor to your business, with advisory shares. If they say yes, you have an early signal that this is the right solution for this product. This strategy works particularly well if you’re building a B2B or Enterprise business. Super Advisors typically are compensated a good piece of equity in your future company. A Super Advisor is different than just an Advisor. A Super Advisor is someone who:
- Can quickly help you nail down Product/Market/Fit for a given industry as they’re an SME (Subject Matter Expert)
- Can help you nail down your story/pitch (remember that invaluable meta-skill) for a given industry or market. They know the insider language that particular industry uses.
- Can/should be able to literally walk you into your first customers. Especially if your business is in the Enterprise/B2B space
- Can help layout your product roadmap which is walking you down the path for a future acquisition/exit. They know exactly which companies would acquire you and what that product needs to deliver, for your future company to be acquired.
By helping builders hone in on their entrepreneurial instincts, and engineer solutions that find signals in the market, we believe we can unleash a whole new category of entrepreneurs to build exciting and valuable companies in the Ethereum blockchain space.
The Ethereal Virtual Hackathon has already kicked off, but it’s not too late to get started. It runs from April 15th to April 30th, just ahead of the Ethereal Summit on May 10–11. Hackathon winners will be invited to join us in New York to present their winning work live in front of 600+ guests interested in building the future of the internet. You can learn more about how we’re rethinking Hackathons and sign up here.
We’re excited to see what this cohort of entrepreneurs comes up with at our current DeFi Hackathon, with the best products receiving prizes up to 72 ETH in bounty prizes that show clear signals of both product and market signal potential. Main track winners will receive free tickets to Ethereal NY to present their project live on stage.
And if you haven’t gotten your ticket yet, come celebrate decentralization with us at Ethereal Summit! The future of finance, music, art, and tech will all mesh together from May 10–11. We can’t wait to see you there!
Disclaimer: The views expressed by the author above do not necessarily represent the views of Consensys AG. ConsenSys is a decentralized community with ConsenSys Media being a platform for members to freely express their diverse ideas and perspectives. To learn more about ConsenSys and Ethereum, please visit our website.
