Activate non-English speakers to build on Cardano

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Francisco Ribeiro

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

Entity (Incorporated)

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

10

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

No

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

Our multi-language platform sources, trains and invests in blockchain founders. We will train Chinese language founders to launch on Cardano, achieve product market fit and then selectively invest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftCVUxtgk6o

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

No

[METADATA] Horizons

Incubator

[SOLUTION] Please describe your proposed solution

We are addressing two problems, how to:

1. activate non-English speakers to build on Cardano
2. help these founders build companies that achieve product market fit. 

The Chinese speaking population (PRC, Taiwan, diaspora) is consistently ranked as representing one of the best markets to build and then expand blockchain companies. There currently exists a Cardano Information Hub in China, we will add to this by providing our founder journey program. This program teaches founders how to reach product market fit and build on Cardano. We will tap into the existing Chinese Cardano community as well as proactively target founders using our data platform, which identifies signals of 'build intent' from over 100M active developers worldwide.

Our programming is written by founders for founders. The online education program teaches aspiring entrepreneurs the Silicon Valley mindset of 'customer centricity.' Many technical entrepreneurs are often 'hammers looking for nails,' which often results in them running out of capital before they achieve product market fit. The online content is based on Ian Foley’s playbook from successfully launching & selling four startups in Silicon Valley and his work at Stanford Research Institute, the applied research organization at Stanford University, where he identified entrepreneurial talent and spun-out companies (e.g. Siri, which was acquired by Apple for $200M). 

Course #1: Product Market Fit

• The four week course starts with learning about customer centricity, includes a peer-based learning section where founders need to build out their entrepreneurial idea and then ends with them working out the customer profile for the product.
• The peer review component has the founder upload their business plan, which is then reviewed by a panel of other founders to provide feedback on the market need, business approach, product value proposition and how the idea fits into the competitive environment.
• Founders complete a series of quizzes and recall questions to ensure they have learned the material.

Course #2: How to Launch on Cardano

• For those that graduate from this course, we offer a one-week course to introduce the founders to the Cardano ecosystem. This starts with introducing them to social media communities (e.g. Discord, Telegram), events that they can attend and how to find people in the community building similar projects.
• Founders complete a series of quizzes about Cardano and the ecosystem and then a test module that gets them to make a code commit on GitHub linked to Cardano.

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

The value to the Cardano community will be to help activate the Chinese speaking founder community across the world. In China alone, there is a rich history of IT companies that are incorporated offshore, continue with a presence in China, and pursue international markets. For example, some of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, including Binance, Crypto.com, OKX, and Huobi, had their start in China.

The progam metrics of success will be:

1. Net Promoter Score from each founder completing the course
2. Increase in the # of attributable Cardano Code Commits on GitHub. This has the secondary benefit of increasing Cardano's developer ecosystem numbers on Electric Capital's developer report, which is one of the criteria used by the market to evaluate an ecosystem's health.
3. Number of founders that receive funding, which is an indication of 3rd party validation.

The larger impact for the Cardano community is that the founders that graduate from the program will be building new projects that help expand the Chinese consumer and business markets, which is still in its blockchain/crypto infancy.

[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?

We have successfully deployed our platform across multiple L1/L2s. The origin of the technology was from our work at Arweave and Binance. Both protocol's faced the challenge of how to scale up the number of web3 founders to build on their chains and then graduate to institutional funding.

Since then, we have had 350 founders go through our program from multiple L1/L2s, including NEAR, ICP, Arweave, Aave, Kadena. 93% of founders from these programs have gone onto successfully launch and get customers and 42% have received funding.

We measure our ongoing performance based on quarterly Net Promoter Score reviews across all founders going through our program. The top quartile NPS for the technology industry is 64%, and our last NPS score was 88%. 

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

Cardano platform launch

• Platform instance of our White Label product is created and branded for Cardano.
• User credentials created for the Milestone review team.

Cardano content created

• New content created for the 1-week Cardano launch program.
• Engagement with the existing Chinese speaking Cardano community on recommended social media groups, influencers, events etc.
• All new content translated into Chinese.

Outbound messaging and approach

• Coordination with the Cardano community on recommendations for applicants into the program.
• Creation of messaging and targeting profile for Infrastructure's platform that proactively finds founder's with 'build intent.'

First 5 program participants

• The program does not have cohorts, it is open enrollment.
• First 5 founders will be an opportunity to obtain feedback on the program from the NPS score and how many founders graduated at each step of the program.
• This data will be available through the platform that milestone reviewers will have access.

Next 10 program participants

• At the end of the next 10 participants the program will have increased the graduation rate through each step of the program by improving the targeting quality of the founders entering the program.
• This data will be available through the platform that milestone reviewers will have access.

Each subsequent month

• Our objective is to scale up the program once we find the right profile.
• After Milestone 5, the milestones are based on the number of founders that go through the program and graduate at a consistent unit cost.
• Data on the number of founders that graduate and achieving the performance metrics is available in the platform for the milestone reviewers.

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

• Francisco Riberio - Partner. Francisco was founder of one of the largest Europe-based community for technical blockchain founders that now has 4,000 members. Francisco is a startup turnaround expert, with success helping companies create their digital businesses and raise capital. 

• Ian Foley - Partner. Ian was former Chief Business Officer at both Arweave and Binance. Ian spent 25 years in Silicon Valley as serial entrepreneur with multiple exits (3x M&A, 1x IPO).

• Fatih Seref - Account Manager. Fatih has experience in account support for enterprise customers, having worked for Uphold and Arweave.

• Translator - We have a team of freelance translators that we use to keep the content updates constantly translated

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

Our business model is SaaS based. For this program with Cardano our cost will be $34,000 for 10 months of support. This cost includes all programming, support and on-going translation.

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

The program is designed to be scalable, so we expect between 60-120 founders to go through the program. Our focus is on the quality of the founders, so we will keep tweaking our proactive sourcing of new founder's and working with the local Cardano community to get the right profile.

We intend to get the unit cost per new founder down to around $400. There is no direct comparison to our programs that include the teaching module and peer review as well as a curated program on how to launch on Cardano. However, there are freelancers with prior startup experience that charge an hourly rate of $100-$200 and there are online courses like Udemy that charge ~$100 for the Product Market Fit course alone. However, most of these options are not in Chinese and none include proactively finding founders nor potentially investing them after they have completed the training.

Therefore, we believe our approach represents the most cost competitive and scalable approach to address the opportunity of activating the Chinese founder community on Cardano.