As the VP of Business Development and Partnerships at ChromaWay, I probably receive at least 3-4 unique inquiries a week via email and LinkedIn from systems development organizations around the world inquiring on whether we are looking for help. It’s typically as simple as this:
Hi Todd, this is [name] from [country]. We connected with you last year.
Are you planning on hiring developers from September?
Happy to send CVs with rates.
Regards, [Name]
Besides unnecessarily filling-up my inboxes (and wasting your time), this outreach approach taken by development firms indicates, I believe, a more fundamental misunderstanding of the blockchain market for developers at this time. Since ChromaWay (and I am sure other blockchain projects) could be interested in partnering with these firms, I thought I might take a few minutes to provide four short recommendations for a successful message.
“I have an idea for how the blockchain can solve the problem with ______. How can we partner together?”
By beginning your message with an idea and an offer you are, at the very least, conveying you have put some thought into a business, technical, or social problem that blockchain may be able to help solve. Remember, blockchain technology is not enterprise software (despite what IBM commercials say) akin to SAP or SalesForce implementations. Blockchain system includes distributed applications, smart contracts, new programming languages (we developed RELL), cryptography, and consensus algorithms. When you send a message that says, “I can help.” My response is, “Help with what?”
Stockholm Green Digital Finance became familiar with our blockchain efforts with the Swedish Land Registry. They asked ChromaWay to partner with them to develop the Green Assets Wallet, which uses our Chromia platform to secure green impact claims onto an immutable blockchain ledger.
At least as important as the technology is your efforts to identify use cases in supply chain, financial services, and government that we can partner together on. If it’s in your country or region it will make even more sense as you know the legal, business, and technical practices. You will be growing a new market in tech and ChromaWay will benefit from growing its network footprint in different markets.
“We reviewed your technical documentation and the project you did with ____, we believe it’s a good fit for this type of project.”
I wonder if development-oriented companies reach out to Google without having an understanding of search or AWS with some insight into cloud services. ChromaWay doesn’t claim to be either of these companies, but potential technical partners can better position themselves by conveying some insight into our company. We are a general blockchain infrastructure company, but we do a lot of work in real estate. Does your company have any experience in this area? Our blockchain is rooted in relational databases, do your technical developers have experience in SQL?
One of our South American partners, Jalasoft, was selected to support our efforts with the Inter-American Development Bank on the LAC PropertyChain project. To prepare for the project, they took it upon themselves to do a thorough review of our Chromia documentation and built an impressive prototype using our development language Rell.
“We are really interested in blockchain development. We have already built a small prototype on the _____ blockchain, but we want to go further.”
We don’t care which blockchain you have already worked on, but we are interested in companies that have already made, at the least, a modest investment into entering into the field. Potential partners should feel strongly that blockchain-based distributed technologies are a part of the future of computing and have demonstrated a serious level of commitment and interest. Our partner in Taiwan, Snowbridge, started by developing a blockchain training platform based on our enterprise solution, Postchain. They expanded to other solutions, like the YES ID for mobile identity.
“We think our ____ solution would be a perfect offering with your blockchain solution in the ____ market”
ChromaWay provides blockchain solutions for many segments including real estate, government, supply chain, financial services, and gaming. We provide the backend “distributed ledger” and primitives like a single sign-on wallet and block explorer, but we depend on partners to build dapps (distributed apps) that interact with our blockchain. For example, one of our European partners, 4ire Labs, acquired an innovative machine learning (ML) company called Datrics. Datrics happens to leverage PostgresSQL to drive it's ML models which is highly compatible with our Chromia relational blockchain. They are already working with several crypto exchanges and we are discussing opportunities to collaborate in our Defi offering such as Hedget.
We recognize that for many small and medium size developer-oriented enterprises, up-front investment of time and resources is a challenge. The blockchain market, despite impressive growth, is new and not easily navigable. Blockchain is not something you can simply dip your toe in, but the rewards include challenging, very interesting, and high profit margin work. We are excited to work with enthusiastic partners with the technical skills, market knowledge, and demonstrated passion for decentralized solutions. For organizations with these qualities, please reach out to us!
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