Infrastructure Ventures - Cardano Developer Acquisition Program

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

[GENERAL] Are you delivering this project as an individual or as an entity (whether formally incorporated or not)

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

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

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem (200-character limit including spaces)

We find global developers who show "builder intent". Our 8-week program for founders hones business skills & validates product-market fit early signals.

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

[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.”

We will need input from the Cardano ecosystem on what types of projects it is interested in onboarding. This can be done through a survey to the ecosystem.

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

[GENERAL] Please provide here more information on the open source status of your project outputs

We are happy to share the progress of these projects and results with the Cardano ecosystem.

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution

The challenge for the blockchain community at large is to attract more developers in a scalable, cost effective approach. Developers are crucial for a healthy ecosystem, particularly for the decentralized blockchain community, which relies upon developers to come together and build both the core infrastructure and the applications. 

According to Electric Capital, the current blockchain community of active developers is 21,000. In comparison, the Java and Python developer languages have 17M and 16M developers, respectively. Red Hat, a web2 open source software technology company, has 14,000 developers and 611,000 packages on Github. Yet, the market demand for blockchain is only partially tapped, with the current focus on finding developers in markets like the US, EU and UK. In the Global South, blockchain technologies are an opportunity for local developers to provide access to 85% of the world’s population with new products and build core infrastructure in industries from banking to agriculture. 

The blockchain community has tried different approaches to source developers. The most common are hackathons, developer conferences, outreach to coding platforms/ universities and grant programs, but they are all quite expensive. For example, the blockchain industry has announced over $5BN in grant programs over the last five years, which on a per active developer basis means an acquisition cost of $234K per new developer.

Attempts to address these challenges have focused on adding larger core protocol teams or building a network of representatives around the globe organizing local meetups. However, these approaches just do not scale if the industry needs to get to 100,000s of developers. 

The following quotes illustrate the cost and scaling challenges that came from a survey we did with leading Layer 1/2s: 

“Each hackathon attracts 20 teams and costs around $50K. We normally get 5-10 companies out of it and then 1-2 deploy on mainet, so it nets out at around $25K per project.” 

VP of Ecosystem Growth, Layer 1

“We have 5 people in developer relations with 1 person dedicated to building relationships with universities. She is based in Asia and has got 10 partnerships, which result in 1-2 new developers per quarter.” Head of Partnerships, Layer 1

“We created an influencer program, which was based on finding the top YouTube blockchain channel shows. We pay $5K per month on retainer and then a fee when they introduce us to a developer who signs up to a hackathon. We usually get about 2-5 new developers from this channel per hackathon.” Director of Marketing, Layer 2

2. Approach

Infrastructure addresses these challenges by using data to target and nurture developers that have the highest chance to become successful entrepreneurs.

a) Builder Intent

Infrastructure identifies developers with "intent signals," which is an audience targeting approach rooted in the broader field of consumer behavior and marketing research. With the proliferation of data, companies have tapped into insights on consumer behavior, search engine marketing, predictive analytics and neuromarketing. Infrastructure uses these methodologies that are broadly popular across online marketing to predict developer activity. 

Infrastructure has modeled over 90M developers worldwide to identify baseline behaviors. We then look for abnormalities in the data, which we have found are indicative that a developer is in the build cycle. The developer modeling is based on our access to public data sets and paid proprietary data (e.g. LinkedIn), which each generate unique signals that make up a complete picture. For example, when a developer might be starting to work on a side project, begin to research topics about building a company or downloading a white paper on a new technology. 

b) Engagement & Pairing

Infrastructure’s approach is to use profile data for each developer to create a personalized engagement track starting from the initial interaction. Decisions made by the developer as to what content they engage with, time on site and other metrics, feed into a constantly optimizing channel and content orchestration. 

We also constantly analyze the developer pool to see if there are individuals with similar interests that might benefit from introductions and potential team pairing. The pairing recommendation is based on matching signals of interest in topics and current development activity. This can help developers further think through an idea and potentially start a project together.  

c) Nurturing

Finding a natural way to engage with developers is one of the challenges. According to a survey by Hired, 88% of software developers use free web sites and blogs to learn new skills or educate themselves. Stackify ranked the top free sites with audiences over 1M+ where programmers found news and they were predominantly newsletters, blogs and podcasts. 

From our research, we find that developers do not dislike marketing as a practice; they actually dislike gimmicks, irrelevant messaging, and things that do not actually address their problems or their needs. Technology companies have tried engaging with this audience by running online ads to attract developers, but this approach is often ineffectual as click through rates on the ads are very low. 

A better approach, which has worked successfully in industries like FinTech, is to create engaging content that is drip-fed and use an editorial-driven approach to educate & inform developers. We found that developers talking to each other was the best approach to achieve credibility, for example through case studies. Also, technology comparison data that highlighted weaknesses (ie. not just strengths) were important to build trust. 

d) Market Insights

Through our library of industry research reports, we help developers understand the macro environment and build a product/market need hypothesis to start testing. 

As we start working with a developer, one of the most common needs is to determine the total addressable market (TAM) for their solution, the industry’s dynamics and business cycle timing. A large TAM is important so a business can grow into a market that is showing strong Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) and the size to attract external investors. Industry dynamics are important to understand what to build and how to create a GTM strategy, for example if there are regulatory changes imminent that could be used to help a business break into a market. Understanding a market’s macro conditions is often overlooked as a reason for a business to succeed. Notably, Idealab founder Bill Gross studied 200 companies and found that in 42% of the cases, timing proved to be what determined the companies’ failure or success.

e) Product Evaluation and Build Support

Infrastructure provides advice and build support to help a developer start creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). 

For developers that want to build a product using blockchain technology, the number of build options can be overwhelming. In addition to the typical considerations such as technology capabilities and grant programs, some of the equally important one’s like protocol roadmap, activity level of the community and example customer deployments get overlooked. Infrastructure addresses this by providing a neutral perspective offering the strengths/weaknesses of each protocol to help the developer make an informed decision. 

As an idea goes from concept to building the first product, some of the challenges involve the scope of a MVP. Many founders opt for a fully-built out product, when the key is to get to a sufficient level of capability to keep testing the product hypothesis with customers. Infrastructure has a team of product marketers, designers and engineers that can advise a startup on the MVP and start to think more strategically about a roadmap of product hypothesis testing and engineer resourcing. 

f) Voice of the Customer

According to a report by Deloitte, less than 10% of all blockchain startups succeed, and a blockchain project’s average life span is about one year. The reasons given for this high failure rate range from lack of investor or community support or team experience, but the one constant is a failure to find product market fit (PMF) before running out of capital. 

To address this, Infrastructure brings the ‘voice of the customer’ into each step of a startup’s growth from initial product development through to revenue scaling. We work with each company to identify their customer profile and then find a look-alike audience to survey them to understand their needs. The survey can be used to help guide topics that are critical to get right early, including the product design, UI/UX, sales strategy, marketing messaging and pricing. Infrastructure builds the survey logic, helps develop the questions, sources the audience, analyzes the results and creates a report with actionable recommendations. 

g) Path to Capital

First-time founders find the capital raising process daunting and most leave it too late. Trying to raise capital from an investor that you have not met before with >6 months runway is likely to result in a quick rejection or terms that are not attractive. Also, due to the proliferation of grant programs, many projects assume that they will be able to enjoy continual access to grants. This assumption is dangerous for the project and creates an unsustainable problem for the ecosystem grant program.

To address this, Infrastructure has the ‘path to capital’ program that helps founders get started on the external fund raising process. We help the founder understand the market conditions, which VCs are active, we test the outbound messaging and line up meetings. We encourage founders to start this process 8-12 months prior to needing funding, so that they can begin to build a relationship with their target investors and demonstrate performance over a period of time before they are asking for capital. 

3. Developer Journey 

Infrastructure brings all these approaches together in a single platform to help developers address some of their fundamental questions at each step of their journey from product ideation to scale.

Unlike other developer acquisition programs that bring individuals with an interest to participate or build in the community, Infrastructure brings a holistic approach finding developers/entrepreneurs that want to build new companies. By thinking about this as a journey, Infrastructure constantly optimizes the process using new types of data or better ways to engage with capital allocators. 

4. Case Studies

Case Study #1

IDPartner provides identity verification services that allows individuals to manage their digital identities through trusted intermediaries (e.g. banks, universities). The CEO was head of identity at Santander Bank and wanted to create a new company that worked across multiple banks offering identity services. 

Infrastructure Approach:

a) Infrastructure helped the founder determine the GTM strategy through access to market research data and potential customer surveys. This helped determine a B2B channel strategy and identification of key stakeholders in each customer that would need to be sold to. 

b) Infrastructure advised the founder on backend blockchain infrastructure. Reviewed protocols that could support secure identity information and fast queryting. Company chose Arweave for data storage. 

c) Infrastructure worked with the founder to create their funding strategy based on the current fund-raising conditions. Infrastructure identified a list of potential family offices and seed stage VCs, which was refined into A, B and C targets. 

Results: 

• IDPartners is now signer ID verification for two publicly-traded e-Signature providers and has POCs with two global banks
• After creating the game plan, the founder went on to close a round of $3.1M led by Abstract Ventures. 

Case Study #2

NEAR contracted with Infrastructure to help find source developers, scale them to achieve product market fit and then start the capital sourcing process. Rogues Studio is a web3 game studio redefining social gaming. The team had achieved traction with the number of downloads and active gamers and were interested in raising their pre-seed round.

The Rogues Studio team had received a few grants from NEAR but were mainly bootstrapping their company to date and needed to quickly create a process that would help them build a pipeline of interested investors.

Infrastructure Approach:

a) Infrastructure first worked with the Rogues Studios founder to gain an understanding of her fundraising goals and what timeframe she was targeting for the raise. We then identified what micro VCs were investing in the web3 and casual gaming industries and who those VCs had invested in recently. 

b) Infrastructure then created a sequence and messaging process that first connected the studio founder with the investees of the targeted investors and then nurtured the relationship. 

c) Once the investee scheduled a call to meet the Rogues Studio founder or provided a warm introduction, the founder of Rogues Studio would take over the relationship.

Results: 

• The process we created for Rogues Studios created a nurturing pipeline of 23 investees who were willing to help a fellow founder through their own fundraising efforts. 
• Within 3 weeks we had 8 investees who provided feedback on who to contact at the VC firm and how the firm preferred to be contacted. 
• The Rogues Studio founder was given 7 warm introductions in the space of 4 weeks.
• Rogues Studio was able to quickly create a pipeline of interested VCs from a cold start in 4 weeks and is now in discussions with multiple interested investors.

5. Experience in web3 and Infrastructure Ventures

Infrastructure is focused on addressing the challenges around sourcing and scaling developers to build tomorrow’s web3 world. 

The Infrastructure team has experience across consumer and business-facing business in web3 since 2019. Aaron Anderson, the CEO, is a sales and growth specialist with 13 years of experience in the digital marketing, fintech, and blockchain industries. Aaron led Arweave’s enterprise business development and community team, which resulted in an 110% increase in the number of active developers on the protocol using the data driven approach that is now productized as Infrastructure. Previously, Aaron was CEO of Alliant Sourcing, a sales and business development accelerator focusing on early-stage companies. 

Infrastructure Ventures is the venture capital arm and uses insights from the operational team to make investment decisions. By working closely with the founders and understanding market needs from our Voice of the Customer studies, the fund has an unique viewpoint on each team. The General Partner of the fund is Ian Foley, who has multiple years of experience as a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur with successful exits (3x M&A and 1x IPO) and was Chief Business Officer at Arweave and then more recently Chief Business Officer at BNB Chain.

Proposal for the Cardano Community

Infrastructure will find developers/builders and put them through a four-step program designed to increase launches on Cardano mainnet. 

The first step consists of identifying developers/builders that are consistent with Cardano's ideal developer/builder profile. 

To understand what types of projects the Cardano ecosystem is interested in envision the first step of this campaign as a survey to the wider ecosystem that will provide the information that we will need to gain and understanding of what general types of projects the ecosystem is intersted in onboarding.

Step two is to source builders across the world and determine if they fit the requested criteria from the Cardano ecosystem. 

Step three is the education and support program that lasts eight weeks. While in our program, the developer/builder will hone their idea, understand their market and customer needs clearly, and refine their product scope to the point where it is a project that Cardano would like to have as part of its ecosystem. The fourth and final step is guiding and supporting the project to launch on Cardano successfully.  

[IMPACT] Please define the positive impact your project will have on the wider Cardano community

This solution aims to provide end-to-end sourcing for the mainnet launch service, enabling Cardano to expand its ecosystem while reducing the cost of mainnet launches. We aim to launch three projects on Cardano mainnet from this channel. 

The goal of this proposal is to provide Cardano with an alternative developer sourcing channel that produces higher quality projects than typical hackathon outcomes. 

We believe that this approach de-risks the process of finding developer/builders. Cardano only pays for developers at the completion of milestones, which means you avoid upfront marketing costs (e.g. community events) and the need to actively manage new developer/builders through the protocol education process. Also, the final milestone requires that a project has a MVP, which is a stage significantly further than what companies have typically achieved after graduating from a hackathon. 

[CAPABILITY & FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability? How do you intend to validate if your approach is feasible?

Infrastructure Ventures has everything that is required to fulfill on its side.

As Cardano is decentralized, we will need support from the wider ecosystem in filling out a survey that will inform the types of projects that the ecosystem is interested in sourcing.

[PROJECT MILESTONES] What are the key milestones you need to achieve in order to complete your project successfully?

The first milestone will be completed when:

1) Ideal project survey is completed

2) Infrastructure has identified 20 builders who are showing signals of build intent.

The second milestone will be completed when:

1) Infrastructure has sourced 10 builders who are interested in building on Cardano that also fit the requested project criteria. 

The third milestone will be completed when:

1) 8 builders have successfully completed the Infrastructure Ventures 8 incubation program. 

The fourth milestone will be completed when:

1) 5 builders/projects successfully launch their projects on Cardano mainnet. 

[RESOURCES] Who is in the project team and what are their roles?

Aaron Anderson - Founder - https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-d-anderson/

Ian Foley - Co Founder - https://www.linkedin.com/in/foleyian/

Marina Antony - Director of Operations - https://www.linkedin.com/in/marina-antony-243746200/

Elena Mihajlovska - Account Manager - https://www.linkedin.com/in/elena-nicole-mihajlovska/

[BUDGET & COSTS] Please provide a cost breakdown of the proposed work and resources

The work involved will mainly be business development and account management for the first 3 milestones, then will shift to account management and project support during the final milestone.

Resources involved:

2 full time business development reps

1 full time business development rep

Infrastructure Ventures educational platform

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

The average cost of onboarding a new project that is beyond a simple POC can range from 15K at the lowest to staggering amounts per new project/developer. We are proposing providing the Cardano ecosystem with a cost-effective solution for onboarding 5 new projects at 8K each with is well below the average project acquisition costs across web 3 ecosystems.