Increase Project's Investor Appeal

The Guild helps Catalyst projects level up their value prop, secret sauce, mission, values, GoToMarket plan, & other fundamentals

25+ years software development, Catalyst Community members, active collaboration in multiple cardano-centric communities. Key contributors in startup to multibillion dollar valuation, 12+ years business development experience.

[IMPACT]

web3:4Life Guild will help Catalyst projects become pitch ready for community advisors, IdeaFest, contributors, customers, and investors. Being funded in this challenge will allow us to co-develop organizational fundamentals without being a financial burden on their nascent organization. Working across multiple organizations will allow us to distill common threads and contribute to open research valuable to the community at-large for further developing the Cardano ecosystem.   

Artifacts we'll help co-create with Catalyst Projects:

• Foundational organizational elements: 
• Shared vision
• Values
• Principles
• Mission and Process
• A well defined revenue development plan
• Guy Kawasaki inspired 10 slide pitch deck

Ways of bringing about these products may include:

• Sourcing the collective intelligence of contributing members of the project
• Using framework based facilitation methods
• Market and sales validation support
• Developing capabilities to hear from ideal customers
• Identifying blue ocean opportunities 
• Uncovering distinct competencies/secret sauce
• Realizing the project’s unique potential sourced from the collective intelligence of both contributors and customers

We've been described as a praxis-based guild, strongly connecting togetherness into sense-making, meaning-making, and choice making.. Another way of seeing our work is divided amongst three categories:

• Framework facilitated processes
• Collective sense making
• Descriptive self awareness
• Values articulation
• Co-discovering potential
• Digital campfire sessions
• BEING together
• Gratitudes, celebrations/mournings, storytelling 
• Collective meaning making
• Pattern mapping 
• Organizational planning and path-finding
• TheoryU inspired Case ClinicsCollective choice making
• Strategic thinking sessions
• Rapid preference signaling sessions 
• Research
• Live human to human conversations
• Market validation
• Contribute to open research
• Business Development:
• GoToMarket strategy
• Outreach support
• Co-evolving business development processes

In our experience, among the most difficult and salient challenges facing web3 organizations today is creating coherent culture, agreeing on shared values, vision, & mission, orienting towards the greater potential of the project, and developing effective means of communicating these insights. Good contributors and investors know how important these elements are, and will most often avoid participating with organizations who skipped doing the necessary collective sense making, meaning making, and choice making required for long term success.

Our work will help clarify these foundational elements for Catalyst projects (funded or not) ensuring that critical north star-level agreements are in place. This leads to greater internal understanding of shared aims and a greater degree of external investability.

The most significant risk is low engagement. There is the potential to have low attendance for commons-tending sessions and low energy/enthusiasm from organizations. We will engage our existing network in the Cardano community (as well as other chains) to ensure that all sessions are well attended and all research and business development is impactful. 

Another risk is in delivering substantial value that cannot be measured effectively by the KPIs. To mitigate this risk we will track the proposal KPIs from the outset as well as provide an accounting of additional value delivered.  

In the worst possible scenario we would not engage with enough organizations to have effectively earned the grant amount within the time period specified in this proposal. In this case, we will extend work beyond the specified time and report to the Catalyst audit team.

[FEASIBILITY]

Upon funding, we’ll complete the following in each month:

• First 30 days - organizational matching, co-discovery/qualification calls, initial needs analysis, and co-developed engagement plan
• Milestone: Match with three or four organizations completing initial scoping 
• Next 30 days - engagement plan actions and organizational foundational documents
• Milestone: Deliver an internal facing org culture & strategy doc
• Last 90 days - Biz Dev plan developed and pitch decks drafted
• Milestone: Deliver three or four pitch decks

We’ll engage a variety of stakeholders up and down the organization to ensure maximum inclusivity. Our efforts will focus on creating artifacts and documents that serve as touchstones for culture internally and fundraising externally. 

Four Guild Members committing 10 Hours per week for 12 weeks including:

• GoToMarket Strategy, Campaign Development, and Outreach Support
• Market Validation and Open Research
• Framework based facilitation sessions
• Pattern mapping and strategy development
• Digital Campfire Sessions

4 x 4000 USD x 3 months = 48,000 USD

Total: $48,000

web3:4Life Guild conducted cross-chain market discovery calls with web3 organizations like:

• Secret Decks
• Gimbalabs
• Regen Foundation
• Token Engineering Commons
• Giveth

This research revealed that high value services the guild can provide include:

• Facilitation as a service
• Research as a service
• Cultural tending work

These services are especially needed when a new endeavor is underway be it a new project, product, working group, or organization. They’re critical for Catalyst proposals to increase their fundability both within and especially outside of Catalyst. 

Randall Harmon is an early explorer of UI and database technology while solving for small-business workflow and accounting applications; cryptography at PGP circa 1999, and distributed computing at Yahoo. He’s inspired to connect people in dynamic human process with value-aligned purposes, connecting and blurring the lines between the various roles people want to play in the many organizations of the future.

Chris Casillas is co-founder and executive director of Regenerating Sonora, a nonprofit focused on place based community development. Prior to this, he spent 12 years in SaaS and helped shape culture and business development processes as an early employee of a tech startup, turned billion dollar company. Christopher is a board member of The Center for Shamanic Education and Exchange and is a student and practitioner of various wisdom traditions.

Evan Carr is a practitioner and artist living in Michigan. He is the creator of sensemaking101.com, a spoken word artist, and a member of the web3:4Life guild. Previously he led Business Development at a software company named the “#1 World’s Fastest Growing Company” by Fortune in 2020. Evan earned a Bachelors of Interdisciplinary Studies and holds a Masters of Public Policy degree from UT Dallas. His continuing education includes classes and certifications from some of the top regenerative design, consulting, and human development schools as well as practice in many wisdom traditions.

[AUDITABILITY]

We will maintain a record of projects we work with, summaries of the cultural and execution elements identified together; traction and significant milestones found through the facilitation process. These will be provided to Catalyst QA / auditing teams as part of our ongoing reporting. The specific metrics we’ll track include:

• Number of co-discovery calls held
• Number of needs analysis assessments completed
• Number of engagement plans drafted
• Number of facilitation sessions held
• Number of go to market strategy sessions held
• Number of organizational documents co-developed
• Number of go to market plans co-developed
• Number of pitch decks co-created

This project will be successful when Catalyst projects we support are well positioned to receive additional funding and support because they will have:

• Clearly articulated values, principles, vision, and mission
• Informed by facilitated collective sense-making sessions
• Clearly articulated secret sauce and value add
• Informed by a co-creative market validation process
• Clearly articulated GoToMarket strategy 
• Informed by a co-creative business development validation process
• Coherent working groups
• Cohesive teaming around shared aims and goals

This is a new proposal.