Abstract: 100Ms of technical founders do not know how to build on Celo or create a scalable business. Most information for founders is in English, but for example only 0.9% of Chinese speak English. Infrastructure Ventures’ multi-language platform sources, trains and selectively invests in blockchain founders. We will start by providing a solution to address the Chinese language market.
Budget Request: $35,000 cUSD
Background:
The Chinese speaking population (PRC, Taiwan, diaspora) is consistently ranked as representing one of the best markets to build and then expand blockchain companies. For example, Chainalysis had the country in the top 20 of their Global Crypto Adoption Index. Also, in China 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.
However, in China-alone, only around 10-25 million people speak English and the country is ranked #82 out of 113 countries in English proficiency. English is commonly used in software engineering, and many Chinese engineers have a basic understanding of it. But, proficiency varies widely. Engineers working for multinational companies or who have studied in international programs tend to be more proficient in English. Meanwhile, those employed by domestic firms or educated in Chinese-language programs may have less exposure to English and may not be as comfortable using it. Overall, English skills in China’s software engineering sector are not uniform, and proficiency depends on individual background and work environment.
China is starting to develop its market in a positive direction for Celo. For example, Hong Kong, which wants to compete with Tether and create its own stablecoin, recently announced a new participant to its stablecoin regulatory sandbox in July. Furthermore, China has placed reducing the country’s carbon footprint as a strategic initiative and is also developing financing solutions across the Global South, which offers potential partnership with Celo’s ReFi ecosystem.
Despite this, there is little Chinese-language information for founders wanting to build on Celo. The challenge is how to help activate the Chinese speaking founder community across the world to build successful businesses on Celo.
Our Solution:
We intend to address two problems, how to:
- activate non-English Chinese speakers to build on Celo
- help these founders build companies that achieve product market fit.
We will tap into the existing Chinese Celo community as well as proactively target founders using our data platform, which identifies signals of ‘build intent’ from over 100M active developers worldwide. This patented technology was built over the last 2 years and is already deployed across a number of other L1/L2s.
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.
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 Celo
- For those that graduate from Course #1, we offer a one-week course to introduce the founders to the Celo 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 Celo and the ecosystem and then a test module that gets them to make a code commit on GitHub linked to Celo.
Our founder search and education programs are part of our Ecosystem Platform. This platform provides end-to-end management of a founder from tracking their first interaction, evaluating their fit as entrepreneurs, managing their training and learning progress, integrating with events, community chat and outbound community messaging. The platform also includes a portal where we can build a Celo community of Chinese language advisors and investors to help support the founders.
Success Metrics
The program metrics of success will be:
- Net Promoter Score from each founder completing the course
- Increase in the # of attributable Celo Code Commits on GitHub. This has the secondary benefit of increasing Celo’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.
- Number of founders that receive funding, which is an indication of 3rd party validation.
The larger impact for the Celo 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.
Our Experience
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 (NPS) 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%.
The team leading this have experience in managing large founder ecosystems:
- Francisco Riberio - Partner. Francisco was the founder of one of the largest Europe-based communities 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 a 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
Project Milestones
Milestone 1:
Celo platform launch
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Platform instance of our White Label product is created and branded for Celo.
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User credentials created for the Celo review team.
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New content created for the 1-week Celo launch program.
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Engagement with the existing Chinese speaking Celo community on recommended social media groups, influencers, events etc.
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All new content translated into Chinese.
Milestone 2:
Outbound messaging and approach
- Coordination with the Celo 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.’
Milestone 3:
First 5 program participants
- The program does not have cohorts, it is open enrollment.
- First 5 founders will provide an opportunity to get 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.
Milestone 4:
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.
Final Milestone:
Each subsequent month
- Our objective is to scale up the program once we find the right profile.
- After Milestone 4, 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.
Program Cost and Value for Money
Our budget request for this program is $35,000 CUSD for 10 months of support paid out over the milestones. This cost includes all programming, support and on-going translation.
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 Celo 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 an end-to-end platform for the founder sourcing, peer review as well as the curated programs on how to launch on Celo. 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 in their business after the founder has completed the training.
Therefore, we believe our platform approach represents the most cost competitive and scalable approach to address the opportunity of activating the Chinese founder community on Celo.