Open Ecosystem BD Working Group

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Hello Polkadot!

Announcing the first meeting of the Open Ecosystem BD Working Group, Tuesday the 23rd of July at 9:30AM EST / 9:30PM HK. The goals of the group are to:

  • Promote Polkadot to the outside world, mainly focusing on enterprise, institutional and government adoption
  • Build relationships among all the decentralized teams and individuals who are doing BD under the umbrella of Polkadot. ESPECIALLY including parachain teams!
  • Surface BD issues and needs that are not being handled
  • Advocate for the needs of business developers in the ecosystem
  • Create and steward a BD strategy and plan for Polkadot
  • Work towards operational and execution BD capability in a decentralized manner

Traditionally BD has been overlooked by the greater ecosystem, as the focus of Polkadot has been largely on the building out the technical aspects of the network. Well, after the decentralization, it’s up to all of us to come together to make sure it happens stronger than before.

We have an 8+ billion market cap coupled with a great decentralized network with economic security, governance and more, which should be a great fit for enterprises and governments. Not to mention an incredible roadmap through 2.0 and JAM. The missing piece is… adoption!

Polkadot deserves attention and adoption from serious entities so let’s invest our time and resources into accelerating Polkadot’s footprint! Individuals and teams need to step up and work together to make it happen.

Interested? Please submit your contact info here: https://link.multisig.wtf/onboard

Please reach out with any questions - @replghost on Telegram / Discord

P.s. Thanks to PolkadotAgent who catalyzed this all at Decoded 2024!

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Nice. One thing I’d like is a clear place to send people looking for some sort of business partnership or contact. As a mod on the Discord server, I see that a lot, and it would make life a lot easier if I could give a simple answer, like “email this address” or “message this account”.

(Obviously many people asking for that in the server are grifters, but some of them aren’t, and it would be better for people with actual BD expertise to filter them than for me & the other community moderators to do so.)

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This is awesome @replghost!

In case anyone missed it, there is a active Polkadot BD Bounty #39

https://www.dotbd.io/

which is live and eager to have applications from BD people – submit your BD initiative, join the Telegram group and/or follow @DOTBD_Bounty here.

BD Curators meet every other week.

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Thanks Mr. Cole - I think one of the first things we’ll do is figure out what’s missing from the ecosystem, and that’s likely one of the top things. I imagine anyone who is a HA should be a good entry point (at the very least) and hopefully we can collect/present the contacts in a better way. I have seen some other DF proposals to handle this kind of inbound, and I bet Distractive is working it into the website. Hopefully over the next 1-2 months it will be taken care of well, but I’m definitely keeping my eye on it.

And thanks, Sourabh - at the first meeting we will have some time for the BD bounty to introduce the program. Would love to catalyze use of it.

To all of the others, I have invited everyone who has registered to the meeting. Please reach out if I have overlooked anyone.

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This would be great, as Polkadot as a whole is so big and fragmented through many chains. This could lead to more partnerships and bring projects, chains and Polkadot together. I knew that BTC has a group of BD’s on Telegram where people can connect and explore partnerships, hope Polkadot has one too!

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Update from the first call of the @Polkadot Open Ecosystem BD Working Group on July 23, 2024. (Don’t worry if you missed it, it’s scheduled monthly).

Happy to report that there were 25 people + 4 AI notetakers that attended from across the ecosystem, including parachain founders, Head Ambassadors, ecosystem agents, BDs, Parity peeps and more!

Summary

First, we introduced some of the goals of the initiative. This is a bottom-up group that is coming together to see if we can forge a strong decentralized BD organization that addresses challenges at four levels:

  1. Community - We need to get to know each other, form links, support each other and break down the natural silos that form. There’s a lot of collective intelligence and experience that we can lean on if we can make the right connections between people.

  2. Political - Polkadot BD operates in the umbrella of the ecosystem and is a part of OpenGov. Traditionally the network has been more technically-focused, so it is rather new for “BD” to have a voice, but it’s quite important that we not only represent the voices of potential customers but also participate in internal dialogue.

  3. Strategic - We need to contribute to and fit into the larger ecosystem strategy that is being developed now. And as with any other activity, we have limited time and resources, so we need to figure out the best return that we can get as an ecosystem on BD activities.

  4. Operational - And finally we need to actually get things done and see not only in our individual teams but also as Polkadot. We should prove out that we can accomplish great things together as a decentralized BD organization.

We had quick intros from each person, followed by Ingo and Cris presenting the new Polkadot BD bounty, which can reward anyone for bringing new adoption to Polkadot (dotbd.io)

Finally, we ended with a discussion around “What is missing from Polkadot BD today?” - Here is a summary of some of the great points brought up in the discussion.

  • Fragmentation and lack of knowledge about the different parts of the ecosystem by BD agents; lack of a knowledge hub

  • We should try to import the great hunters from web2 and pair them with technical account managers familiar with Polkadot in order to more effectively get enterprise wins

  • We should have a way to share best practices

  • We need to understand who the specialists in each area are, in order to understand where to pass domain-specific leads

  • We need an ecosystem map that shows what is going on and who is doing what. Perhaps marketing can be integrated, and we will have a better idea of where to send leads.

  • We need to showcase success stories, and we already have a lot of great ones (Origin Trail DKGs, supply chain, Mandala, Apillon, etc.)

  • We need the right amount of coordination to counterbalance the decentralization of teams, so that we don’t replicate work and can be efficient on the whole.

  • We need to think strategically as it may be better to prioritize some opportunities and deprioritize others.

  • We are missing tools and guidelines, e.g. “ammo” in order to pitch to companies. For instance, targeted pitchdecks, narratives, USPs.

What’s Next?

What a great starting conversation!

We need to continue to see if we can come together as a decentralized organization and accomplish something meaningful over the next year.

Near term, the priority is to surface a list of shortcomings or challenges with BD today, then prioritize them and move towards solutions.

Thank you all who attended today!