A year ago I conducted a workshop on designing GTM strategy for an Outlier Ventures cohort of founders. To my surprise founders there had a very basic understanding how to do business development in Web3. For example I got a question: SHOULD I PUT MY FIRST OUTREACH MESSAGE IN CAPS LOCK TO CATCH ATTENTION?
This workshop is slightly different, as I want to make it as conversational as possible.
To lay out the foundation of a conversation here are a few principles up for discussion:
1. Business development is about value creation for all parties involved.
2. Having a rolodex of contacts is powerful, but even more powerful to have an intro either from a big authority in the field of interest or a close friend of person you are reaching out to.
3. Don’t expect people to do business with you only because they like you or you coming from a friend or a big authority. Whatever you are offering should make a business sense to them.
Controversial practices in the space that need to be spoken about at well: ghosting, spamming, blind pitching.
About me: around 10 years in business development and partnerships, account management for companies like Deutsche Bank, Visa, and 0x (dex aggregator with >100bn$ in trading volume), Bebop (Wintermute-incubated company). Worked with all kinds of companies, from devs building in the garage to Coinbase, Robinhood, Facebook, Lido, Metamask, etc. I also cofounded a community BD in Web3 with more than 3.5k business developers in the space.
