A blockchain is a distributed database that can decentralize the storage and transfer of valuable information. How it achieves that, what you can store within it, and what you can build on top of such a database is out of scope for this article. What I want to talk about here is relationships, the connective tissue of society, business, and commerce. Technology companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, Amazon, and others make money because they have strong relationships with their partners and customers, and those relationships create ongoing business opportunity, lead to top-line revenue, and bolster bottom-line growth.
Consider Apple. Apple has a $900B market cap today, but that success is pretty recent [1]. From 1996 to 2006, Apple’s market cap stayed under $50B. In the last nine years, from 2009 forward, its market cap has not dipped below $100B [2]. What happened? The iPhone happened. Specifically, software on the iPhone happened. It wasn’t hardware that made Apple this behemoth. It was the application layer that made the App Store possible and made the iPhone a must-have. The iPhone is just a really well-built interface for software built to work with traditional databases, and people are willing to a lot of pay money for that interface. Sixty percent of Apple’s revenue comes from the iPhone [3], but critically, what makes that interface so valuable to people is the software they can run on it. How and where you store and access the data that makes apps on an iPhone possible is also not in scope for this article, but Apple’s 10X growth in the last 10 years definitely has been about data, databases, and software. And relationships.
An Analogy on the Hidden Value of Relationships
The mission-critical nature of relationships from the earliest days of a business can’t be overstated. Here’s something every startup founder knows. You’ve built something cool and useful. What’s the easiest way to secure more money from investors? The easiest way to raise more money is to show that you have paying customers. Why? Three reasons:
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Money demonstrates market confidence
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Customers voice belief in your solution with their money
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The second easiest way to attract additional customers is to show them what you’ve done for other, similar clients — and the absolute lowest-cost way to get new paying customers is through referrals from your existing (happy) ones
Therefore, if you can demonstrate to an investor that you have relationships with paying customers who are happy, you communicate that you’ve a) found evidence of confidence in your solution out in the market, b) landed a product-market fit that you’re ready to go expand, and c) begun to develop an implicit pipeline of relationships that will lower both the time-to-acquisition and cost-of-acquisition of additional new customers. This isn’t surprising, but it is worth stating clearly: building strong relationships within your market, industry, and customer base de-risks further investments by potential investors and sets up your business’s long-term success trajectory in all sorts of ways.
Why Building Is not Enough: the Switching Cost Must be Overcome
It’s been said that founders are optimists; innovators have to be. But it’s easy to overestimate market demand for a solution and underestimate how long it will take to generate that solution’s supply. It’s more prudent to be cautiously pessimistic and then work like crazy to prove yourself wrong — both on the building side and on the selling side. But if you believe in the technology you’re building, there’s also something else to know going in. What does long-term success be it in hardware or software or a platform or protocol have to do with relationships? Everything. Because even if you’ve built something wonderful, you need to find people willing to buy it or use it. And they’re already buying or using something else. There’s inertia there. There’s a switching cost to customers, and you need to overcome that. To break inertia, you need relationships.
Building something incredible is not enough to attract and retain customers. We’ve seen this before. Blockchain companies and platforms have the advantage of being third-generation builders in the software era. The first wave of software was unleashed in the 1980s [5]. We’ve witnessed the second wave in the last 25 years with the modern internet and then cloud-based software-as-a-service. We’re entering the third wave now. Each wave has taken a lot of work. But there’s more to it. People never come just because you’ve built something, they come because they like or trust you or what you’ve built for them and it’s created value. Even when they do come, they only stay (and spend) if they like or trust what they find and it creates ongoing value for them. Cool gets you in the door, valuable keeps you there.
In business-to-business (B2B) environments, the switching costs are even bigger, because the political and financial cost of replacing existing systems and solutions is very high and always personal — people are sticking their necks out to vouch for a big organizational change, and that disruption involves tons of social and economic capital, which partially explains why enterprise sales cycles can last for a year or more. The more expensive the change, the more you need deep relationships, and relationships take “time and money” to build, something Apple understood well during the run-up to opening its first in-person Apple Store in 2001 (long before the iPhone or the app store):
“Jobs believed the Apple retail program needed to fundamentally change the relationship to the customer, and provide more control over the presentation of Apple products and the Apple brand message…On May 15, 2001, Jobs hosted a press event at Apple’s first store…more than 7,700 people visited Apple’s first two stores in the opening weekend, spending a total of US $599,000….Sales continued to grow, reaching $1 billion a quarter by 2006. Then-CEO Steve Jobs said that ‘People haven’t been willing to invest this much time and money or engineering in a store before’”. [4]
By the time the iPhone came along in 2007, Apple had already invested six years of in-person, business-to-consumer relationship-building. This made the difficulty and cost of selling the iPhone hardware much lower. Apple had already overcome the switching cost. Then, by 2009, when the iPhone’s application layer really caught fire, boom, millions of people already had or wanted Apple’s interface to that fresh new world of data, databases, and software for their phones. The result has been that in the nine-year lifespan of Bitcoin, Apple has added $800B to its own market cap. It’s a masterclass in long-term relationship-building to fuel market dominance. (Importantly, Apple has also had longstanding B2B relationships in place with many organizations as well as standards bodies like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), through which it can share its worldview and generate back-end support for its initiatives).
So blockchain developers and companies need to build, yes, but not just great blockchains and decentralized applications on top of them. We need to build great relationships too, now and early. The distributed databases and decentralized application layer being built today are going to generate tremendous value for people, society, businesses, and the economy, but that will be a front-end outcome of back-end relationship foundations. More startups and enterprises building or selling blockchain solutions and services should invest time and money in pure relationship-building upfront. The ones that do will capture the hearts, minds, and wallets of customers worldwide in the years ahead.
Without further ado, here’s how you bootstrap a blockchain relationship ecosystem. I’ll start with what companies should keep in mind and then move into practical advice for individual contributors joining blockchain teams.
How to Bootstrap a Relationship Ecosystem as a Company
For the reasons described above, and with blockchain being such a bleeding-edge space, many distributed protocols, platforms, and applications are going to face an uphill battle for adoption even as transaction speeds increase, useful decentralized apps are built, and UX/UI improves. You could solve all the technical limitations that exist today, and you would still be competing for attention and adoption with time-tested, existing, centralized solutions. It could be amazing, free, and easy to use, and you’d still have to pry people and companies away from their existing relationships, and that’s not easy or quick. You need to find people who are good at building relationships and you need to pay them and pay them well. Although one-to-many relationship-building in marketing and lead generation & demand generation through advertising are important, I want to stress that here I’m talking about relationships of the person-to-person, one-on-one kind. These are the relationships that create the toughest-to-break, self-reinforcing glue new companies need and legacy companies spend so much to keep.
Before I give my suggestions for companies, I want to add another point, about timing. In the web 2.0 world of modern productized technology, sell-after-you-build makes sense. But in the web 3.0 world of horizontal technologies such as distributed platforms and decentralized applications, that won’t necessarily make sense. If you wait until after you’ve built your technology to build your relationships, or if you collapse your relationship-building efforts solely into traditional sales or engineering functions, you’ll be running against the wind. If you think your technology will solve real problems and will work, and as long as you’re honest about development challenges and release timelines, invest payroll dollars in a relationship-building team as a parallel process to your development team. This will increase your odds of finding paying customers or prized validators and partners soon after you’re ready to accept them.
Putting Together Your Relationship Team
Blockchain technologies will create new business models, new ways of solving problems — and new classes of companies, jobs, and job descriptions. Resist the urge to replicate too much legacy from web 2.0 hiring playbooks. To bootstrap your ecosystem, you have to find new ways of doing things. For example, you may need a dedicated relationship team. On this team, you might consider the following roles:
- Head of Offline Community
- Head of Online Community
- Relationship Development Manager
- Technology Evangelist
Let’s define each:
A Head of Offline Community builds one-to-one relationships offline. These employees seek out stakeholders, potential partners, potential miners or validators for your networks, people in adjacent sectors, developers, and so on, based on the solution focus of your organization. They might source these relationships at local events, at regional conferences, within industry trade organizations, in your business community, or through pre-existing relationships. The key is real, face-to-face, offline interactions that will later aid adoption of your developed solution.
A Head of Online Community builds analog one-to-one relationships online. These employees seek out online members of communities who are invested in the success of your project. It may or may not be the same person building out your Slack, Discord, Reddit, and other online channels, but the important thing is that this person spends a significant portion of their time making one-on-one connections through phone conversations, business Skype calls, live webinars, group calls, and other activities with individual members of your online audience to better understand your platform’s reach and strengthen the global connective tissue that unifies your base. It’s digital work with an analog, personal touch. This employee may also work with your Community Manager. The CM may do some of these activities but in a fast-growing organization will likely already be very busy managing online social channels, writing content, doing public relations and marketing communications, and performing other online-heavy work. So I want to underline the importance of analog relationship-building in these digital spaces for the Head of Online Community role.
A Relationship Development Manager creates an “I-shaped” (as opposed to T-shaped) relationship development plan and then executes it within a particular vertical industry. If, for example, you’re targeting life sciences with an emphasis on pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, you might have one Relationship Development Manager focused on each. These employees learn the problem sets of decision-makers in those industries and build real-world credibility and relationships with influencers at major companies within that industry, identifying where your solution might best fit once it’s ready. If you’re building a governing body, such as the Sovrin Foundation or Hedera Hashgraph Council, and you’ll need depth of representation from particular sectors, having a single person focused on relationship development in that sector might make sense too.
A Technology Evangelist is a relationship expert-generalist who takes a “T-shaped” (as opposed to I-shaped) approach, both offline and online. This is the employee you send out to terraform a market. They create credibility through personal conversation and thought leadership. They amass the large and diverse professional networks platforms need to succeed. They broaden the reach of your value proposition. One variant is the educator-spokesperson, and another is the strategic alliance manager. The added benefit of having this role type is that a successful Technology Evangelist makes it easier not only for the other individuals listed above to carry out their work but also for future pre-sales and sales staff to succeed. If you’re building use case-agnostic, general-use infrastructure, such as a protocol for decentralized self-sovereign identity, this might be one of your first relationship-building team hires. Given the wide-ranging nature of their work and their horizontal view of the market, they may also be suited to managing the entire Relationship Team. This person will help you build a deep bench of relationships in a variety of segments: standards bodies, working groups, enterprises, customers, potential partners, developers, fellow startups, advisors, and more. It is critical that all of these roles, but especially the Technology Evangelist, be filled with passionate and effective “volume relationship-builders”.
A Few More Tips for Organizations
Blockchain solution providers should post and fill these relationship-building roles as early as is feasible and establish KPIs for net new relationships, even ones that generate no revenue or partnerships in the first six to twelve months of work. As your business strategy crystallizes and your initial prototypes near production-readiness, you’ll be in a better position to obtain the introductions, conversations, referrals, and sales you need to drive partner adoption, developer adoption, and new business. Remember that the point here is to create a “people network effect”, not necessarily to drive sales directly, so don’t set KPIs or expectations these roles are not intended to meet. Evangelists and pre-sales relationship-builders generate a soft landing for your sales and business development teams and a future path to revenue streams. They help you overcome the switching costs.
An important note is that you need to hire for curiosity and for a demonstrated desire or ability to develop a deep technical understanding of a subject. Don’t go chasing purple squirrels here. Don’t get pedantic about sales experience or development experience; these are not pure sales or developer jobs. These relationship roles require social and technical credibility, but they do not require coding experience so long as you hire curious self-starters willing to internalize the technological foundations of your protocol, platform, or application and able to explain them to many. It takes a certain kind of person to do that. Find them. Pay them. Below you’ll see why.
How to Create a Relationship Network Effect as an Individual Contributor
So you’ve landed one of the jobs above. Congratulations! Your work is the flick-of-the-domino that’s going to impact the company’s future immeasurably. With blockchain technology platforms, it isn’t yet completely clear where the line between being first-to-market and being first-to-scale will be, but being first-to-relationships will factor heavily in either direction. Take pride in the importance of that work. To succeed, you’re going to need to jumpstart your own blockchain-focused professional network.
Initial Bootstrapping: Key Ingredients
The good news is that to bootstrap your initial professional network from scratch in your new role, here’s all you need to do:
- Be curious and embrace being new
- Ask for help
- Get to know others
- Don’t make asks for you, make asks for them
The bad news is that the work of lighting the first wick demands a skill set that cannot be taught. To do the following well and at scale, you need all of the following: strong discipline and organization with respect to scheduling meetings, high interpersonal empathy and situational fluency, and a masterful command over conversational dynamics (i.e., be particularly good at listening, asking questions, and carrying conversations). Otherwise, you will not be able to create and sustain a schedule of 50–100 conversations per month as part of your initial network-building during your first 90 days. This is the volume of conversation necessary in the first three months to set an initial foundation for your blockchain network. Keep in mind that in addition to building out your network, you’ll also be ramping up with your new team and be learning about the technical foundations of what they’re building, which is a lot to juggle. It’s not for everyone.
Bootstrapping Example A: You’re New to an Industry Group
Let’s say you just joined a company who is part of a blockchain committee, working group, or standards body relevant to them or your industry. It could be the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, Decentralized Identity Foundation, Blockchain in Transport Alliance, The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger, or something else. The first thing I do when I’m in that situation is introduce myself to everyone in that group via email and/or on LinkedIn. I express excitement for being new and curiosity about what they’ve learned. I ask them for coffee or a call to share lessons they’ve learned and advice they can impart to me as a newcomer. You can’t just do this with one or two people, you have to reach out to dozens of people in that organization. I did that when I joined the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) two jobs ago and the W3C earlier this year while at lifeID. Being the new kid on the block is advantageous because everyone has a unique perspective to share, and most people want to help you.
Once you obtain the call, it’s really important to focus on them and follow through on your initial ask: get advice. On those calls, have no hidden agenda. This is very important. (Never bait-and-switch people; it’s unprofessional and you’ll burn your bridges.) The purpose of those calls and conversations is to learn from them and to hear their story. I always start conversations by asking how people ended up in their careers, because I find it very grounding and I’m fascinated by other peoples’ universes. I also nearly always end first conversations by asking how I can be valuable to their mission in the near-term, because this often helps me understand what they value or what problems they have. Rarely do I ask for something early on in a business relationship (other than for recommendations for mentors), because the point was to form the initial relationship, not to make additional asks.
Ironically, people will organically start to want to help you anyway. They’ll send leads your way, introduce you to others in their networks, and extend invitations for you to share your knowledge with others in their organization or elsewhere. Some of them will request follow-up calls for one, two, or three months out, and those second catch-up calls are always fun because you’re able to demonstrate progress and give updates on your team’s roadmap and technology as well as hear how their work is coming along. You create memories as those follow-up calls add up.
Seek as many voices as possible, including the administrative staff that runs the standards body. You’ll kickstart an awesome, global professional network specific to your new line of work. You’ll learn the ropes in the industry body or group you’ve joined. You’ll gain new mentors and be invited to events and conferences. You’ll become top-of-mind for new committees and task forces. And you’ll create a v1.0 network of experts to reach out to when you need specialized advice, knowledge, or access in the future. Consider reaching out to related industry groups, too, not just the ones you’ve joined, because you’re going to (and should) find wisdom in multiple spaces — and your goal is to fill your calendar with 50–100 conversations per month during those key bootstrapping months.
By the way, remember what I said above about the importance of curiosity, empathy, and conversational dynamics? Authentic, genuine conversation grounded in getting to know the other person and not based in trying to espouse your view cannot happen at volume unless you’re in love with getting to know people. People can tell if you’re indeed interested in their stories and their work or not, so be mindful of this subtlety: although this is volume relationship-building, it’s not a numbers game. (In Part 2, I’ll focus on ways to generate genuine ongoing connection and value for the professionals you build these initial relationships with).
This is just one bootstrapping path, but I can’t recommend enough that blockchain companies and their new relationship team hires join standards bodies, working groups, task forces, and trade associations (see my note about Apple’s early groundwork above). The folks who lead these organizations tend to be some of the best mentors and door-openers you’ll find. They will also point you to who else you should build relationships with, which brings me to my second example.
Bootstrapping Example B: You’re New to an Entire Industry
The approach above is portable. Picking an example at random, let’s say I was hired tomorrow by a blockchain development company building a distributed database or decentralized application for the healthcare sector. Previously, I’ve grown an online blockchain Slack group into the hundreds, and I’ve generated 100+ conversations within a few months as part of my previous work at a blockchain startup, so I would probably borrow from both experiences, creating an online space of value to others as well as seeking a high volume of interaction offline. In this fictional new job, I would set a goal of at least 75 in-person and phone/Zoom/Skype conversations within 45 days, or 150–200 within 90. To accomplish that, I’d go about it in the following way (assuming a Technology Evangelist, Relationship Development Manager, or Head of Offline Community role):
- Deloitte has a paper called “Blockchain: an enabler for life sciences and health care” (read it)
- The five authors work at Deloitte and Amazon Web Services (connect on LinkedIn)
- The paper mentions that “Existing provider networks and health information exchanges tend to suffer from a lack of coordination and transparency into all patient activities and measurable outcomes. As a result, providers typically have a fragmented view of the patient and struggle to articulate their value-based care worth to payers.” [6]
- This is my first clue: it suggests that healthcare providers and health information exchanges are two ecosystem participants who may derive value from exploring blockchain-based innovations. I would narrow my relationship search to those two areas. (This reminds me of a research paper I read on the Exonum blockchain for use in patient-centric health data exchange, Converging blockchain and next-generation artificial intelligence technologies to decentralize and accelerate biomedical research and healthcare)
- To find providers and exchanges engaged in these explorations, I would Google “blockchain in healthcare”. It yields an item of note: IBM did a survey of 200 healthcare executives last year, and I would try to find the list of companies represented
- I also find that the Distributed Health Conference in Nashville listed 90 speakers and 40 sponsors supporting or connected to blockchain and healthcare. Many of the speakers list their names, job titles, and LinkedIn profiles, so I would make these connections
- A quick scan shows other healthcare conferences: Blockchain Health Summit Trade Show, Blockchain in Healthcare East, and Chain Reaction: Blockchain Healthcare Summit next summer in New York. I would make a list of all healthcare-related conferences I can find
- I visit the links above. Via the Speakers sections, I notice the range of professionals at hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and healthcare solution providers that are interested in the intersection of healthcare and blockchains or distributed ledgers:
Blockchain & Innovation Lead. Chief Digital Officer. Chief Health Information Officer. Chief Innovation Officer of Medicine. Chief Strategy Officer. COO. CTO. Director of Healthcare Privacy & Security. Executive Director. General Manager of Digital Accelerator. Head of New Clinical Paradigm. Integration Manager. Provider Solutions. Research CIO. Scientific Project Manager. Solution Architect. VP Clinical Strategy. VP Product. VP Technology. That’s a lot to work with. These are the key players and people you need to be talking to.
There’s a lot of value in that list, so I want to point out a few things. First, even one conversation with each of those professionals would transfer high-value knowledge and domain expertise to you, the newcomer. You would get 20 perspectives on the challenges and benefits of changing the way healthcare is done, both for patients and for healthcare providers and healthcare information exchanges. What’s the language and lingo of the space? What are the problem sets and problem patterns they face? How are their organizations structured? How did healthcare and their professions evolve when software technologies spread throughout their industry? What are the existing solutions to problems, and which new ones are they most excited about, including blockchain-based ones proof-of-concepts? There’s so much to learn, and these are the people to learn it from.
Second, you now have insight into the sorts of life sciences professionals who are driving innovation and leading initiatives around blockchain education, R&D, and proof of concepts within their organizations or are actively building solutions themselves. So I would introduce myself to them via email and via LinkedIn expressing that I’m new to the healthcare technology space and recently joined a team building a healthcare solution, but that as a newcomer I’d love to learn from their experiences and insights. I would also ask for suggestions on which trade associations or working groups there are for blockchain in healthcare. This would allow you to apply Bootstrapping Example A in parallel.
Third, many organizations are not sponsoring healthcare technology conferences but are likely exploring new solutions. So I would use the job titles above to find and connect with similarly-titled professionals at healthcare providers and information exchanges (and select payers too) throughout the world, even if they’re not currently exploring blockchain. They’ll have valuable advice and perspectives to add to your knowledge map and should be part of your budding relationship ecosystem.
Fourth, this search has surfaced 100+ individuals and 100+ organizations exploring blockchain in healthcare. There are likely to be several hundred more dispersed throughout the world in various offline channels. I would consider starting a national or global online community (e.g., Slack group) for these professionals to interact with each other within the context of this particular industry. I want to be clear that bootstrapping online communities is a monster of its own, a side project that requires incredible focus and the detonation of considerable passion and personal energy in a short amount of time. This is because in an online space, network effects and perceived value are dependent in part on the velocity of usage: people want to be where people want to be. How to bootstrap an online space is not in scope for this piece, but if done well, it creates a valuable and self-sustaining community that supplements important offline relationship creation for you and others.
Fifth, and speaking of online spaces, LinkedIn is my go-to professional community for me to share my journey. Having an online space to share your insights, opinions, and learnings is key to continuously attracting the ideas and relationships you need, and LinkedIn is my main staging area for that. It keeps the interaction circle going. In this example of bootstrapping a blockchain healthcare network, what would happen is that as my offline activity takes place, I would be connecting with those individuals on the platform as well. I would continue to use LinkedIn as I already do, regularly posting content to share my learnings and points of view on blockchain. This would attract and engage healthcare professionals and blockchain-based healthcare solution providers. Some of them would be new, and I’d reach out to them requesting conversations to swap opinions and impressions. This would increase the size of my learning pipeline and further diversify my bootstrapping phase.
The net result of the work described above would be that forty-five days later, I’d have the beginnings of a professional network specific to blockchain in healthcare. I will have successfully bootstrapped my own relationship network. Notice that this approach is not context-dependent. I picked healthcare as a random example, but it doesn’t matter what type of solution I’d be building relationships for or what industry they’d be going after. The approach is transferable.
It’s also worth stating that I always try to get to know my market competitors when I join a new company. This serves two purposes: one, it conveys my blue-ocean mentality when it comes to professional spaces, and two, it helps me build relationships with those best equipped to teach me the value propositions of their platforms and how they’re different, which helps me craft my own differentiation message and speak confidently about those differences when asked (you will be asked). Plus, and especially with blockchain, your competitors are likely to be part of the same conferences, standards bodies, working groups, and community, so it’s useful to be on a first-name basis with your peers. Blockchain is too new to pass up the opportunity to collaborate besides.
So that’s the first part of how you bootstrap your blockchain network in a new industry.
Conclusion
Distributed databases that decentralize how and where data is stored and enable the creation of new applications and business models to overlay onto today’s economy are coming. When is an open question. If seems to be less so. But which databases, blockchains, and applications will be successful is going to be as much about building great technology as it will be about building great relationships with consumers, businesses, and partners. Innovators should heed the call to begin building those relationships now, because the future of data, databases, and software will include blockchains and the road to their adoption will be paved with good relationships.
This is the work of bootstrapping a blockchain relationship ecosystem. In months one through three, you’ll go from unknown to recognized within your professional niche. You’ll build name recognition for your team’s technology and company brand. You’ll create an awesome starting point for the hard work ahead in building deep relationships. In the next Part, I’ll discuss what happens after, in months four through twelve, when you’ll also begin to participate and contribute to your professional space as a guest speaker at universities, a panelist at local and regional conferences, a webinar guest for enterprise task forces and working groups, and more. You’ll need to develop confidence and content so that you can both derive value from and deliver value to the wonderful relationship ecosystem you’ll have bootstrapped for yourself, for your team, and for blockchain.
Happy bootstrapping!
Alex Ortiz is a blockchain technology evangelist based in Seattle. He previously worked as the Chief Blockchain Evangelist of an awesome blockchain startup, leading global partnership development efforts for its blockchain-based self-sovereign identity protocol lifeID. He enjoys writing and thinking about distributed and decentralized systems, blockchains, and more. Visit and connect with him on LinkedIn.
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[1] http://fortune.com/2017/09/11/apple-trillion-dollar-company-2/
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-apples-market-cap-during-steve-jobs-tenure-2011-8
[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-revenue-of-apple/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Store#Origins
[5] https://www.techlearning.com/resources/in-the-1980s-it-was-all-about-the-software
[6] https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/about-deloitte/us-allian-blockchain.pdf