Bespoke mentoring support programme for engaged Dev teams with a product, who are ready to secure the resources to 10x their business growth

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

harry hellyer

[GENERAL] Email address of main applicant

harry@harryhellyer.com

Additional applicants

Yoram Ben-Zvi

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

6

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language.

No

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

No

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.” .

no

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

Yes

[GENERAL] If NO, please describe which outputs are not going to be open source. If YES, please write “Project will be fully open source.”

Project will be open sourced.

[METADATA] Category of proposal

Incubation

[METADATA] SDG rating

9 - Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation

17 - Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development

[IMPACT] 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. 

[IMPACT] 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.

[IMPACT] 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.

[IMPACT] 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.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability?

Team activity within the community

Our team has been actively involved within the Catalyst community for around 2 years now, and we have worked on multiple projects and successful community initiatives with several partners - and programme clients including: C4C, LittleFish, BridgeBuilders, WADA, SWARM, Treasury Guild, Sanada, Fluid 7, CNC and the Catalyst Coordinator team.

Fund 7 and Fund 8 results

Our completed fund 7 and fund 8 programmes - both funded and Pro Bono, have proven to be highly successful. Our three closed-out programmes: Innovation Accelerator and 2 iterations of the SPO incubator, received highly positive reviews, with all 20 reviewers stating that they would recommend the programme to other community members.

Video Reviews

One Up One Down - AI-based decentralised mentoring platform

https://youtu.be/ap5TuGd3lr0

Dzhuliana & Natalie

Loxe Inc - Decentralised dispute resolution platform developers

https://youtu.be/HEn8xkTtJaM

Victor & Mathius

SWARM - Organisational structure experts for decentralised impact innovation hubs

"Very valuable program for projects to have strong fundamentals and a strategy to help SingularityNET community". 

https://youtu.be/EUUHLSJgIWo

Tevo

Also, the collaboration with the experienced Andamio team itself, and the fact that Andamio is already functional and powering the Plutus PBL course at Gimbalabs, gives high confidence for the success of the project as we will be incrementally evolving with Andamio, not writing it from scratch.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What are the main goals for the project and how will you validate if your approach is feasible?

Main Goals:

• Knowledge sharing with the community 
• Projects building on Cardano to prepare quality pitch decks for funding 
• Connect to VC and investors
• Raise funds

The approach is very feasible as the team and partner have a strong experience and the proposal provides a practical approach for support and knowledge sharing. Things the project team is already doing.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed breakdown of your project’s milestones and each of the main tasks or activities to reach the milestone plus the expected timeline for the delivery.

One of the key challenges for young startups is focus, especially for tech team led startups. A common feeling among tech developers is that they can develop anything that is needed using a technology that they are familiar with. However, this might not be the best strategy for the company and focus will be essential to guarantee alignment and efficiency around customers, product, go to market, business model, and finance.

Supporting early stage focused startups will directly impact their results and progress. Our approach is to have a series of direct sessions between the companies and experienced mentors with experience in supporting early stage startups. However, we intend to apply two different methods: process driven consulting and an entrepreneurial approach.

We tested the approach over the past with ‘One Up One Down’ (a business with a project funded in Fund 8), the outcomes being the decision to investigate the support of more companies using the approach, and the creation of a formal replicable model.

The key milestones of this proposal:

Startup selection and onboarding process: Weeks 1-4

• Based on our analysis, we already have a list of companies that are active on Catalyst, presented in this Miro boardboard: 
• Analyse the onboarding forms of fund 8 which includes questions about project status and needs (which is also part of the team contribution to the onboarding process) 
• Contact the startups with an intro call and onboard them to the initiative

Run “One on One” sessions - weeks 5 - 10

• 6 x weekly 90 min sessions
• With 2 mentors and senior members of the company
• The initial 2-3 sessions will focus on value and focus examining questions such as - what is it we want to do? who is our customer? what is our product offering?
• * This will include completion of our basic full value audit tool - which will be referenced again at the end of the programme.
• The next sessions will focus on strategy: product, go to market, business models, investors
• The last session will focus on putting together 12 month milestones based on key areas such as product, marketing, finance, team

* We will consider inviting some experts to various sessions e.g. when discussing marketing or technology

* Companies will be given prepared exercises to complete in between sessions

 

Analysis of the process and reporting - weeks 11-14

• Feedback from the companies - did we help them get to the next level?
• Feedback from the proposal team regarding the efficacy of the process 
• Prepare reports and use cases of the process (information will be shared with agreement of the participants)
• Development of the model into a product for ongoing support of entrepreneurs 

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please describe the deliverables, outputs and intended outcomes of each milestone.

The key milestones of this proposal:

Startup selection and onboarding process: Weeks 1-4

• Based on our analysis, we already have a list of companies that are active on Catalyst, presented in this Miro boardboard:
• Analyse the onboarding forms of fund 8 which includes questions about project status and needs (which is also part of the team contribution to the onboarding process) 
• Contact the startups with an intro call and onboard them to the initiative

Run “One on One” sessions - weeks 5 - 10

• 6 x weekly 90 min sessions
• With 2 mentors and senior members of the company
• The initial 2-3 sessions will focus on value and focus examining questions such as - what is it we want to do? who is our customer? what is our product offering?
• * This will include completion of our basic full value audit tool - which will be referenced again at the end of the programme.
• The next sessions will focus on strategy: product, go to market, business models, investors
• The last session will focus on putting together 12 month milestones based on key areas such as product, marketing, finance, team

* We will consider inviting some experts to various sessions e.g. when discussing marketing or technology

* Companies will be given prepared exercises to complete in between sessions

 

Analysis of the process and reporting - weeks 11-14

• Feedback from the companies - did we help them get to the next level?
• Feedback from the proposal team regarding the efficacy of the process 
• Prepare reports and use cases of the process (information will be shared with agreement of the participants)
• Development of the model into a product for ongoing support of entrepreneurs 

[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

Answer

This type of “one on one” consulting, or in our case “two on two” is labour intensive and expensive. We have used a consulting rate that will make the budget palatable for Catalyst and the community while also providing reasonable compensations based on over 50 years of collective experience. 

After reviewing the performance of the project, and with feedback from the participants, we will review the programme as ongoing product. By selecting five companies we expect to have sufficient feedback on the process while keeping the budget reasonable. 

• Initial research and identifying 5 companies = 6000 ADA
• An intro session + 5 sessions per company = 7200 x 5 companies = 36000 ADA 
• Summary, survey, reports and analysis = 6000 ADA 

Total budget 48000

[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

The ecosystem support companies with 10s millions of ADA, but some companies need personal one on one mentorship to go to the next level. Overall with a small budget we believe we can support companies that got funded on catalyst and make the community support/investment in them even more scalable.

[IMPORTANT NOTE] The Applicant agreed to Fund10 rules and also that data in the Submission Form and other data provided by the project team during the course of the project will be publicly available.

I Accept