Please describe your proposed solution.
We have many years of experience working with technology entrepreneurs who we have taken on the journey from startup through growth to large valuable businesses. However, many entrepreneurs need support in developing the business and leadership expertise around: managing the time, focus, knowledge, skills, experience, and discipline to be able to grow their team and company to achieve its potential.
Many developers are adept at putting in place the technical requirements for them to operate a company, through to charging for and costing their development capability. Turning their technical solution into a business needs dedicated long-term focus on areas such as:
· The product to be created
· The technology to be used to create the product
· Possibly a team to work on the development
· The funding for the project
· An understanding of who they will be pitching the product at
They need support to turn the potential of their emergent business into reality and this doesn’t happen overnight. It needs focus, attention, love and support.
Why our approach
We believe that existing growth models are short-term in perspective, and do not value the ‘impactful’ intent of the entrepreneur. This is compounded by the capitalist system’s focus on profit alone as a metric of success, over long-term collective asset and value building.
How will we add value
Our solution will add measurable value to the Companies owned by developers that use it.
The value add will come in the form of:
· More effective businesses as the entrepreneurial development teams are guided along the growth journey – more money
· A system for increasing company valuation based on product, market and channel strategies.
· A plan to grow their business as a successful product – knowing how markets, stakeholder, shareholders and investors operate
· Demonstrably valuable companies operating in the Cardano ecosystem – maximizing the ability of teams in Catalyst to become fast-growth businesses
This results in better positioning for Cardano to attract a the best calibre of developers, who can create better products and attract and engage better funding.
Describe the scalability of the solution
Our vision of scalability is to provide an environment where we are scaling appropraite businesses, fast and with focus.
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
Answer
Our proposal will directly contribute to the creation of a positive entrepreneurial developer experience as they are rewarded by not only building successful apps, but also successful businesses.
The following Q&A section addresses the relevant guiding questions in the Developers Ecosystem Campaign Brief.
What are the tools that we need to prioritize first?
These are the business, financial and organisational tools needed to grow their businesses successfully.
How do we attract developers from outside of our current community to participate in Catalyst?
This question is addressed through evidence of fast growth, high performing technology businesses being grown on the Cardano block chain from the catalyst developer community.
What do developers want, and how do they get it from the Cardano dev ecosystem?
Developers want to write code and create products.
To be able to do this sustainably, they need an effective operation that recognises its full value and enables more effective use of its assets on the scaling and growth journey.
What would make a developer motivated to grind through the docs and code no matter how hard it is to create an app?
By providing developers with a structured toolkit for taking their operation to the next level and supporting them on how to focus and use it. We support developers in keeping the pain of dealing with the increasingly complex business and organisational issues they face to a minimum. We help them to gain the business expertise they need that allows them to focus on the right balance of maker time versus manager time.
What are enterprise dev managers looking for in order to be able to build out enterprise projects – either internal or commercial?
We believe they’re looking for the ability to write great code and make their customers happy with the confidence that the business stuff is taken care of effectively and efficiently.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
Key Metrics to measure:
- Number of companies in the program
- Number of team members interested
- Number of companies ready with pitch decks
- Number of companies raising funds
We also aim that the process will impact the developer work to be aligned also around business objectives and not only tech roadmaps. We will evaluate the results by a feedback questionnaire at the end of the process.
The proposal will support a strong community of developers and proposers with project collaboration and information sharing and increase the number of open source projects that are getting funded from external funding (not Catalyst).
We will measure how many companies we supported, what was the knowledge level and interest to learn more and finally interest from investors following the pitch event.
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
All project deliverables will be available to the community through the milestone reporting. The workshop will be open and available for the community. They will also be recorded and the presentation of the workshops will be available for the community as well as the final pitch event.
Finally, the team is well known in the community and very accessible. Our goal is to provide ongoing business development services to contribute to the growth of the ecosystem.
Per request of the companies we are supporting, some information might stay private.