How to build Web3 Startups in 2023 - Juan Benet

[Applause] [Music] uh so what I want to talk about today is um a few things that are different in 2023 and try to give you as many tips as I can in how to get your projects from where where you are now all the way into um being startup ready and what's extremely useful or what a lot of people end up asking me a lot about is how to go from early ideas and early product development all the way into something that is uh worthy of being being able to be a startup there's a lot of stuff in there and that's what I want to focus on today I want to break that entire kind of set of problems down for you and go talking through stage by stage what do you what you should be doing and thinking about in each one of those stages but let me know if you can hear me well or I'm speaking too fast uh raise your hand if you can hear fine cool great uh so first and foremost it's worth acknowledging that in 2023 things are way different than they were in uh 2021 and 2020. uh macro and crypto winter have hit pretty hard it's going to be way harder to raise funding and it's going to be way harder to earn Revenue that means that um it's going to be much more competitive and it's going to be much more difficult to get users to really stick with your products so um definitely harder however one key thing here thinking like entrepreneurs how do you turn this into an advantage for you well you're in India right the cost of living here is way lower this can be a super Advantage relative to the rest of the world so this might be an amazing time for Indian startups where um you can you can take the same amount of money and make it go way further than in many other companies so this could be an extremely useful thing for you um if you know how to like play your cards right now what what else is different um there's a bunch of different parts in the web free space that are crowded or not crowded uh when you uh think about the entirety of the space and think of all the different applications and networks and so on that have been built uh certainly making UL ones that's a super crowded space that's not to say you shouldn't make a newer one but there has to be a very compelling reason uh for why you your network should be an L1 the space of scalability l2s which was very new two three years ago is now also quite crowded so unless your uh system kind of sheet scalability Way Beyond what everybody else is trying it's also a pretty crowded space to go into uh even zero knowledge l2s are pretty crowded so again unless you you can have an extremely successful Advantage relative to everything else this is uh quite crowded space developer tools are also a quite crowded space I see a lot of people building different kinds of developer tools and that could be really useful however just know that many other people are also trying to build developer tools and so unless your tools interface and and compose really well with others you're going to hit like a pretty crowded space now what's not crowded uh Cloud infrastructure so anything dealing with massive scale computation massive scale um uh infrastructure for different kinds of products so uh one strategy is like open up the AWS console look at the products that are listed there figure out what's different about that product and look in the web free space does a product exist yet uh if not that's it that's a good potential uh product to try uh it's also not crowded to try use case specific infrastructure so for example if you're building infrastructure for say video use cases or infrastructure for audio use cases and things like that those those startups are being built now and so you can think of those as uh not a very crowded space um and of course consumer products so think of uh all the kinds of things like social networks or games or um uh e-commerce and so on all of the kind of things that we use day to day in web 2 application land that have no analog in web3 all of that stuff is not crowded at all however it's also pretty hard to build consumer products in web3 still so this is going to be um so definitely it's a good time for it but it might be hard uh to build this sort of stuff so I want to go through um all the different stages of building a startup and I'm going to break down a set of different features and what you should be thinking along the way the reason I kind of wanted to structure it in terms of stages is because a lot of people that I've been talking to over the last week um have described that they don't they would love to turn their products into startup but they don't know how they don't know the Playbook they don't know the structure uh well first and foremost there's no straight up Playbook so the the first thing that you should know about uh turning your new products and forging your own path is that as an entrepreneur as a founder and so on you're going to have to create space for yourself you're going to have to figure out a lot of things on your own and often they will you won't find a Playbook written or a structure written and so on so the kind of loose structure that I'm going to give you today is very malleable and flexible startups vary a lot um and you're going to have to forge your own path but hopefully this this broad Strokes um set of stages can help you um reason about the different parts and can connect you to a number of other resources that could be helpful in those places uh so let's start with stage number one first off you should start by learning a lot about the world uh good news you've already been doing that for many many decades at this point uh so that's uh you're well on your way to uh success here and what you want to be doing is learning a ton of Concepts both um deep domains like either deeply technical domains or design or product building or or even kind of the humanities like different kinds of art or psychology and so on all of those different areas can give you a lot of super valuable Knowledge and Skills to be able to think about um a product or solving some problem that people have you also want to be learning a lot of knowledge that you won't find in universities knowledge that is not commonly taught in a bunch of schools and classes by the way that's kind of terrifying uh in the future we'll have drones flying everywhere um the and so you want to learn a lot of Concepts that are um not well described in in universities and classes and so on but are well described on the internet so you know one of the first things that you're going to have to do as a startup Builder is to become what I like to call a super learner not only are you a learner but you you have to get really fast at learning and you have to get really good at finding how to learn something so if you want to learn how to do product development um you need to be able to kind of explore the internet find what resources resources are out there find good explanations learn from that try prede structure your own learning and so on becoming a Super learner is like this amazing kind of like um super advantage in the world if you can kind of uh if you're not kind of held back from learning any random field um you can dive into all kinds of domains uh very quickly and figure out what's going on how to use them and so on um and you'll be in a pretty good spot when it comes to Startup building or product building or Technology Building and so on you'll find that most of what you do is not well defined by other people and so you'll have to learn an enormous amount um from various different corners of the of the internet and of the world and so on so investing deeply in just learning and your own learning rate and just connecting a lot of knowledge is a great place to start again good news you've been doing that for decades so great uh good job um but you'll just be doing a lot more of it so a lot of students tend to think like great you know you go through classes in school you finish school and then kind of like you're learning sort of stops and that you start working that couldn't be further from the truth like you're always going to be learning uh your entire life is going to be learning which is great um but if you the the sooner you you get to be extremely good at learning the better off you'll be in any domain that you that you try to tackle and this is where kind of you can lean on a lot of online learning materials so when you think about how to build products how to build minimum viable products we'll get into that in a moment how to find product Market fit um how to build a specific technology how to use the technology all of those materials are online and often and you can find those learn from those and so on now great so that's kind of like the first stage uh learn a lot about the world the second stage is to experiment with a lot of ideas so you want to be in a in a deep experimental um space where you can try a lot of different concepts for potential products in a very low stakes way you want to be able to kind of like free your mind from other constraints focus on building a thing try it out see how it works learn by doing learn by building that um see whether it has legs and if and if not going to move on to something else and you want this to be kind of like as fast as you possibly can you want a very fast feedback iteration Loop here where you want enough time to build something compelling but not so long that it will hold you back from building other stuff so think of think of kind of um if you're interested in eventually building a product and a startup or something like that uh think of this particular phase and an extremely precious moment where you're going to get to try to build a lot of things for a period of time and through trying to build things you can learn a lot about various different domains um you can learn a lot a lot about product development you can learn a lot about specific Technologies about the problems you're trying to solve about specific markets about specific domains and so on and you can use there are many kinds of programs in the world that can help you in this experimentation phase of course first and foremost you can do this experiment experimentation on your own you can think about different ideas you can sketch them out you can kind of like try designing them you can try building them you can try publishing them on GitHub and so on and you know tons of people in the world do that and and that's great that kind of experimentation is really useful but for many of us what is really helpful is to create an environment that is both really fun and time-bounded and gives us a deadline to kind of have to make something enter hackathons right so hackathons is an amazing environment to experiment with ideas this is a great place where you can kind of again learn a lot about technologies that you might be curious about learn a lot about um and consider ideas that maybe you thought were too far away or too impossible but like the hackathon environment just frees your mind to be able to try those out um this is an extremely good hackathons are in extremely great places to do that kind of experimentation um another thing that's really useful are things like requests for startups where a lot of other groups that have thought about new business models uh that are kind of adjacent or new or or about to be important uh can describe potential business ideas and oftentimes you can find one of those there and be like oh wow that's like super compelling I want to go do that um or other times you'll find that an idea that you had already considered um is interesting to some group to fund and then that can like help you help connect your interest to potential funding down down the road now let's dive into hackathons for a moment why are hackathons so good it's like this really amazing uh experimental Loop you can you know you come up with ideas you design and build an idea end to end you have to like you know complete the thing you have to like touch every single little part of the um of the product that you're gonna build uh you have to like make it work um and you have to do it in a deadline uh you have to finish the product uh ship it demo it to people um and that demo of that presentation is it's also extremely good to help teach you about uh how to build products and how to build tools for the world because you have to convey the thing that you built not in terms of you know what's what's cool to you and so on but how might other people think about using this why it solves a problem for people why it's interesting um why it's you know technically interesting or why it's um why it's a good product um and so on so those demos and presentations are a huge part of the of the value of hackathons like actually boiling down your piece of technology into a coherent presentation on a good way of like describing the thing is a super useful way to kind of give you kind of like the testing ground of what the real world is going to be uh because at the end of the day even if you build an amazing product but nobody um knows how to use it or nobody hears about it then it doesn't matter right so these think of this presentation area as like a really good um test case and then of course you're going to get a ton of feedback so by building the thing uh you're going to get a lot of feedback first of all off from yourself you yourself are going to be giving yourself constant feedback on the idea then other people your show the idea to are going to give you feedback um the uh the entire structure of a hackathon has a judging component which is gonna is designed to give you a bunch of feedback um you'll then you know present the thing to other people and so on you'll get a lot of feedback from that and so the entire structure of a hackathon gives you this really nice well self-contained pipeline to be able to kind of come up with product ideas design the thing end to end um and then end up with a complete product or you know roughly complete complete for demo demo worthy forces you to present it and then you get a lot of feedback now along the way you're going to learn a ton you're going to learn a ton about potential problems you're going to learn about Technologies or approaches you're going to learn how to experiment you're going to learn how various different Technologies work you're going to develop your skills and push your knowledge massively and you're going to be able to discover all kinds of things things that are potentially really interesting and in that environment you might find really interesting things that down the road you'll explore further right so in this hackathon today you're getting exposed to all kinds of new and interesting ideas that you might then you know even if you don't experiment with them now you might experiment with them at the next hackathon or the one after that and so on so really kind of open your mind and be ready to learn a lot about various different things uh one other critical component of hackathons is that you get to meet a lot of amazing people you get to team up and work together on things you get to kind of test working together Under Pressure which is always really good to find great teammates you learn a lot and grow together you form more relationships across the room you get to know many other people from around the world and then you get to grow your network that way so again hackathon is just in the connectivity of people alone are it's a super super valuable thing which is kind of why you know I always think like hackathons are the best kind of like test lab for um doing kind of Technology Building and product development and and really learning and growing as a person um you know there's a ton of hackathons um there's uh I turn from uh of course Global has built an enormous amount of hackathons there's a set of hackathons in the python Community you can um you can find and then in terms of requests for startups this is where um I think this is less common in the web 3 world but we're trying to kind of push this uh to help support uh the ecosystem and help support our ecosystems um writing out very concrete descriptions of potential um uh things to start or do different types of startups can be a really useful way of conveying potential business models out there so um at some point you know as you as you go along and you're looking for ideas to experiment with go read these kind of requests for startups or go read the you know we we have um generated uh over the years with global we've generated uh lists upon lists upon lists of lots of really cool hack ideas so just go explore those um read those you know well ahead of the next hackathon and you might find like super interesting and cool cool ideas uh lurking in there that you might want to build great so um you know after you experiment with a lot of ideas uh eventually through a hackathon you might find one idea that you get super excited about and you might want to follow or pursue in some way uh so now of course this won't happen this is very unlikely to happen in your first hackathon this usually is you know your third or fourth or fifth potentially your tenth or 20th hackathon so you know again each one of these stages has like this Loop piece because you want to kind of stay in that stage and experiment a lot for a while um before you kind of find like the really key valuable thing for um uh to kind of move on to the to progress to the next stage so now in validation like suppose that you um through hackathons or other kinds of experimentation you found a really cool idea that you think uh has potential that you got some feedback on a lot of people like are really excited by it they say hey like that could really work as a thing um you want to try and develop it uh great so now you get into kind of validation of that um of that idea now what what a hackathons don't do is they don't kind of uh teach you to think about the product itself from a how is this product viable in the world um hackathons are really good for kind of exploring a potential thing and and and describing it to the World um but they don't kind of like force you to kind of design a product with a with a direct end user component and so on that's more like you know product design school or um business mind competitions and those kinds of things so now to go from really awesome hack to um products and and business or startup you have to cross that that barrier you have to figure out whether you're what the the product really has to be to solve a great problem um and so that means like uh figuring out things about the market figuring out things about the potential users figuring out um what a problem um really uh is bringing figuring out what other products exist out there that this is going to um correspond to or or interact with um what competition is out there and so on and this entire kind of like validation phase is well before you kind of like have concrete product that you can then go stop actually start a company and start raising money for and so on so this kind of validation phase is a little bit tricky because there isn't a good structure for it um in the world that there isn't a set of programs like hackathons that gives you this um and so this this scenario where um really it's kind of like your interest and your idea that's going to push you through um to get from here to the startup mode now by these stages usually people um either are doing it themselves or in very small teams so again usually hackathons are somewhere between one and you know four people sometimes you get some larger groups um but in general it tends to be like pretty small teams through this entire validation phase you'll be in the same boat it'll be a pretty small team but now you you'll you'll have to be doing a lot more kind of research of the market space research of the product and so on and out of that you want what you want to do is you want to distill down a set of minimum requirements for the product um so what I like to call a minimum product instead of a minimum viable product so you want to get to like the very Bare Bones like even before properly figuring out what is going to make it viable um just figure out figure out the set of requirements and try to get like your early hacks or prototypes to get closer to that mvp so it's kind of like somewhere in between a prototype and an MVP um now the good news here is that there are some resources and support and and structure for this uh this is when where um it's very difficult to now be in this stage once once you have an idea and you want to pursue it it's very difficult to do this while um you have other jobs or while you're studying as a student and so on you can definitely do it um and many people do but it's definitely harder if you can't um focus on it full time uh this is where hackathon prices are really helpful because if you win a hackathon price uh that can maybe give you enough funding to be able to um to go and validate your your product uh or this is where uh things called like next step grants are really useful where you can get a little Grant so it's not yet investment funding or anything like that but you can get a small Grant to be able to validate whether or not this is a good product or a good idea and so on and and so they think of the scale of funding being kind of on the order of like you know in like one one two uh to ten thousand dollars or something like that one to twenty thousand dollars so assuming that you kind of like have found something that you want to validate that you validated um and you can get closer to a product you can then jump into um uh the next stage actually before that I'm gonna show some examples so uh in this validation phase extremely useful to get product feedback so think of um using your prototypes and your hacks and so on and showing them to a lot of people especially the target users that you're going for and gather a lot of feedback Analyze That feedback get a sense of um do kind of like customer potential customer interviews um get the insights of whether or not this is going to be a useful thing for them and you know when I describe product feedback and customer feedback and so on it sounds like very corporate speak but you know this really just means in some cases like look at your thing take your hack post it on Twitter and ask people what what they think or reach out to specific people who you think may have really good feedback for this um so whatever it may be in your Market in your community and whoever you're going to be um making the whoever you're going to make this product for um but get in touch with us folks and gather feedback from them to figure out whether or not uh the product is going to work and crucially whether or not it's like a a um what direction they would say what kind of features they would want what kind of um price points they might care about uh what what potential business models make sense so this is where um Everybody gives us an amazing set of tools and and structures to create new business models this is where you want to be able to kind of validate those things or be like is this this is good enough to be like a protocol structure with protocol token or is this um could this be like a smart contract with some kind of Revenue flows in there or is this a traditional product where you actually you know have a standard piece of software that either is has asked thing or some other kind of structure where you sell the software and so all during this whole validation phase you can kind of figure out like the the corners of and the constraints for what your product kind of has to evolve into and you know there's a ton of like stuff written down in the web for this like this is not um usually that well taught in universities there are some universities that do this well uh but there are a ton of classes and materials out there in the world that you can access on how to do this validation so um just look on um search online for for kind of product validation and you'll find tons of materials and like video classes and um and books and blog posts and so on written about this uh and then in terms of microgrants there's a lot of groups that are that are doing these kinds of things but uh you can think about like these um Next Step micro grants um as a really useful tool to then go from like your hackathon project into um you know testing whether or not this is going to be a viable um viable startup uh great so so supposing that you've validated a thing now you're you're okay great like you know that you have a product um in in your hands you think it's going to be an interesting idea um you think it's going to be compelling um now you want to go and like fully build it and launch it to the world as a product um and you want to kind of like start the startup whatever that might be whether that's a company or a crypto Network or a Dao or a you know or a non-profit or uh whatever it is that you're gonna whatever your startup is going to be um you want to kind of like create some structure around the project to be able to start reasoning about you know getting raising funding paying contributors um signing contracts and so on so this is kind of like usually a pretty difficult uh leap that people have to make of going from great I have a project I have a great idea now how do I go from that great idea to like an actual company and usually this is kind of it used to be really like um mystified and thankfully over the last 10 15 years has gotten a lot demystified there's a lot of you know good guys and good products out there so things like you know stripe Atlas and so on make this easier but this is also where um accelerators fit in and become extremely useful they can sort of teach you and hand hold you through a lot of those processes um and they can be extremely useful sounding boards and connect you to a lot of mentors um in in various communities that have precisely like the right um skill sets and knowledge or know the market that you're going into and so this is this is the right stage of like great so you had a product idea now you get you're turning it into a business of some sort or or a or a um and here business doesn't have to mean again a corporation or a traditional business you can think of a protocol like um ethereum or Falcon and so on as a business too in a sense um in that it is a service that is providing some economic value to the world and it has some cash flow going through it and so that in a sense is a business you can think of it that way as well so now at that point you know accelerator programs are precisely like what you what you want to um lean into is one of the the better structured areas so before a lot of these other areas may or may not have programs um here accelerators where you have a pretty well structured thing um and it's the last really well structured thing after that it's kind of um investment uh from investors or or other kinds of funders Grant funders and so on and that doesn't have very good structures um so again like this is kind of a uh you know it's a ton of like this usually is like a leap from nice interesting ideas and product development into piles of paperwork having to set up bank accounts having to set up accounting getting to know how to work with lawyers and usually this is kind of like a big leap where a lot of like would-be Founders have to you know figure out how to how to do all the stuff from scratch with like knowing knowing nothing this is again where being a super learner is really helpful because a lot of the stuff is well described online um but this is where where uh you know you're a lot of kind of teams end up hitting roadblocks here if they don't have a good structure for for learning through this um and throughout this piece so that's kind of like the the kind of structure around the the team like the structure of the corporation or the crypto Network or the Dow or whatever you're gonna you're gonna do um separate from that in the product side you want to advance your like minimum products into getting to building an MVP that you can launch um and launching it here uh usually of course means launching it out to the world to get a lot of feedback from your users but in some cases some startups are like um uh doing all of this in completely in self mode so you know famously um uh Apple kind of like didn't do a lot of kind of direct launching with with it doesn't do a lot of direct launching of MVPs they kind of like deliver a finished product of course they're a massive company but you know a startups like figma also grew this way where they were kind of developing um fully in private and but their version of MVP was a product for themselves so they were their own customers and they worked with with a few people um to develop something like really good now that is way it's way harder to develop in in secret and in in develop in a smaller um Circle and so on you don't get a lot of feedback from the rest of the world so usually when you if you if your product is kind of crypto native or web free oriented and so on you want to lean into deploying it out into the world and launching it publicly and usually you can get to a pretty good state with your product launch it out into the world and start getting a lot of feedback uh the kind of image in the bottom left is really useful usually when teams start building a product they kind of draw these like extremely detailed um Concepts and and plans for what the whole thing is going to be and they just sort of like start building and they sign themselves up for years and years of building before the product is done and that's totally the wrong way to do it um it's kind of like what feels more correct to do because you kind of want to build the super high quality finished product but that's not really what a minimum viable product is in order to kind of test what the thing is gonna it's gonna work well and give yourself feedback you want to have enough of each part to make the product kind of start so think of kind of having enough functionality enough reliability enough user experience components enough good design just to get the bear thing working um and so this kind of you know do I sometimes think about it kind of like a spiral as well you kind of like going every direction just a little bit um just to get to sort of to the next stage and then you can go deeper into each one of these areas um and this you know once you go into once you have a product you can launch it out into the world and that's when you can kind of start marketing it out there and start trying to get adopt adoption uh reach out to various users and and kind of get um people trying it out and using it and so on um go back to accelerators uh you know huge plug here for attacking on and long hash Gabriel from tacion is here uh you should talk to him uh about the program and so on and kind of how um how it works I don't know if folks from logcash are here maybe yes maybe not um and you know there's a lot of other other accelerators in the in the web free space as well uh and in the broader World these are extremely useful programs that really make it dramatically easier for for people to start companies uh great so suppose that you kind of go through an accelerator program you kind of build the structure of the startup you start hiring people you start being able to you have a bank account or a a wallet for your Dow and you start getting adoption and you kind of get the first legs of the product working and you kind of have some some um early early users and so on now what you you need to do next is get traction like get your product to have very strong traction with your Market of users this is what what is going to be kind of like the The Gauntlet before kind of getting to kind of growth and scalability is to get enough of the product right that you can start getting some strong growth uh signal from your user base where suddenly you hit you you solve enough of the product uh problems and you solve enough of the key components that a set of users are starting to use it and the product starts growing through either word of mouth or any marketing that you're doing and so on but you're starting to retain users meaning users want to use this thing and want to keep using it they're not just kind of like checking it out and disappearing um so in this area that's where like um all of the product metrics like really really matter um I didn't go into this earlier you you want to even in the in the start of the startup phase that's when you want to do all the kinds of instrumentation in the product to start getting signals on how people are using it um what are the kinds of things they want to do with it what what um what what things are working what is your actual retention and all of those signals that's where um you're going to use those metrics and qualitative feedback that you get from potential users or customers and so on um to give you a set of directions of what you need to do so this is an area that is usually extremely difficult for uh for lots of startups and many many startups die here because they might have had like an initial good idea uh they might have been able to kind of raise a little bit of funding or get to an accelerator stage um but you know the product doesn't quite have Market fit and it doesn't it can't quite get traction and so this is where you know a super strong emphasis on metrics like being really really rigorous and careful about um every single kind of interaction that users have with with the product and what that's doing for um uh for the potential of the of the thing um what what your actual retention is um and so on like you want to get those kind of uh small structures for the product working extremely well you're going to kind of increase retention as much as you can you want to get um perfect your find the right way to market the product and so on and usually you can do this with a pretty small team so teams of these devices are usually kind of in the five to ten scale and so on now this area this is where you go from kind of accelerator programs that are more structured into the fully unstructured land of like startups um and this is where say angel investors and so on fit in in some cases like some kinds of VC funds fit in here but it's primarily kind of Angel Investors so the first kind of um you know super angels and so on uh in this area this is where um yeah again like product yeah going to product feedback this is an example of like the product a more extensive version of the product uh feedback loop where you want to start instrumenting the data analyze interacting the product analyzing the data turning that into plans for features turning that into implementations and so on and in this area it's extremely difficult to prioritize um because you you're going to be thinking of just hundreds of thousands of potential features hundreds of thousands of potential things that you might do and this is where you really want to use the signal from the metrics to narrow down your priorities and know what's going to be most important for you to do your time is going to be precious because your team is not going to be very big your funding is not going to be very big and so every day is going to count so don't think of it as like oh great we'll build this thing and maybe in a month we'll um figure out what the market says no no like you want to get feedback right away ideally like day over day or week over week this is an area where that is super critical for startups to be able to kind of get enough traction to kind of for the plane to lift off in a sense uh there's famously this kind of like startup curve which is you know there's some amount of initial excitement when you know especially through accelerators or launches and so on and usually products launch there's an initial kind of wave of of Attraction and so on and then they kind of go into this uh trough of sorrow where um the novelty has worn off and uh it's there but like many people don't use it and so on and you're still kind of chipping away and plugging away at the features trying to figure out the structure of the product trying to figure out how to how to shape it and so on and then eventually you start getting some like signals from the market and from the users that it's kind of working and all of your work starts adding up like your dozens of features that you add your dozens of like design hours and product iteration and so on starts paying off and you start seeing the metrics do better and better and better and the really amazing thing about kind of growth rates is they compound really quickly so once you have some structures working they they scale suddenly you can hit a scalability structure that can that can get your product into a great growth trajectory and then from there you can get to you know things like Revenue growth for for uh companies or you know in certain developer tools or crypto protocols just kind of adoption and usage and and so on uh in terms of support uh the kinds of things that you'll find here is like different kinds of uh VC funding and Angel funding and so on that's kind of for for startup uh for kind of for-profit startups or companies and so on now uh when you're building public goods uh the equivalent structure here is to look for what we call like Network capital or um you know uh or nonprofit Capital where impact capital and things like that where there are groups that might want to fund your work anyway because it creates a really valuable stuff for the community they care about now Network capital is much harder to work with because it's it's not very well structured yet and it doesn't usually connect to a revenue pathway which is why you know the in the last 200 years we've seen tremendous success with BC in developing software and we haven't seen an equivalent to success in the grand world now it doesn't mean you can't lean into this it can be very very useful but don't expect it to work at scale sort of expected to work in smaller scales you know in the kind of hundreds of thousands of dollars scale maybe small millions of dollars but it's very rare or difficult to develop a large-scale project um and get to kind of like 10 of millions of dollars of funding or something like that um and then in terms of support and helpful like the pl Network can sort of connect you to lots of investors and and various groups a lot of of our communities and so on are super welcome into these groups um and that's you this is where you'll have to start learning how to um raise funding how to work with investors and all that kind of stuff and here investors is not just kind of for-profit investors that you you can apply the same kind of thinking to um to Grant making organizations uh one I'll plug here A A system that a program that we're developing in the python Community called um Phil VC which is a demo day structure for the Falcon Community um that brings a ton of investors into a a place and we run a demo day with a whole set of startups in the in the uh PL Network and and so on great so now after you get traction now you want to get into growing the business so suppose that you have some you reached a certain level of scale you've gotten your product to be have good product Market fit you have like strong signals of growth um this is where now everything just gets harder uh it doesn't actually get easier it gets harder maybe it gets easier from a perspective of like you now know you have a direction of where to go but now this is where things get way more difficult in terms of like you know the stakes are way higher that you suddenly start getting thousands to Tenth of lessons to hundreds of thousands of users lots of people really care about your product you're getting tons of feedback you have to learn how to prioritize that feedback this is where you start seeing kind of outages in your products and that starts really mattering um so this kind of and here that's where you really need um to to deeply invest in in forming a really great larger team you usually uh companies or startups grow from you know small five to ten person teams to you know 10 to 30 uh people and that you know becomes kind of like seed rounds and Seed Investments and this is usually where VC comes in so we does not come in in the earlier stages this is finally where like traditional Venture capitalists come in like what and this is it was very surprising to a lot of people that are new um to building startups usually you think of venture capital that's kind of being involved very early and kind of like the idea stage and and sometimes that happens but for the most part that's not um that's not how it works usually VC gets involved once there's a very strong idea very strong product very strong product Market fit there's a very um good shape to the problem um and then you sort of get started oh and this is where um the we've been building kind of like this broader investor Network to to help support a lot of the startups in the in the community now I want to talk about advantages for Indian startups um so in this uh crypto winter world you have a way lower cost of living so this is like a huge Advantage lean into it like um you many of you might be tempted to like leave India and go to like more expensive places because you feel like there's a stronger Network there don't do that like India has like an amazing good um uh Tech uh Network and so on and right now especially in this moment in time um uh especially when the rest of the world uh has this macro winter uh being here it might be extremely extremely helpful for you and you'll be able to recruit um people in these areas and so on uh also Indians are super deeply technical uh you have uh some of the most brilliant engineers and developers in the world here like in in high quantities and this is a super advantage to almost any other uh country in the world now you have less of a a like the startup ecosystem is pretty large but there's less of a web for ecosystem that's why we're here we're kind of growing it um but here are some advantages now I want to pull the room I I didn't put too many things here because I wanted to hear from you what you think are some advantages for uh the Indian ecosystem so uh I want to like ask for a few ideas from the audience like raise your hands if you have like ideas of like what are the advantages for Indian startups um that you want to kind of call out for this group like raise your hand if you can think of a few or one and I'm gonna stay silent to make it awkward until I get uh one or two yeah can you yell louder yeah huge population so India is very large um which means that usually there's a lot of different kinds of problems that people might run into and that means better and more interesting markets and it also means that there are like Niche markets that you might be able to to serve really well that are tragically underserved in some way what are their advantages yep yeah so um lots of people joining the internet and so that means lots of people whose problems we haven't heard about uh before who might need all kinds of products in Tech um this also means you could work on infrastructure for connecting all of these people right so think of all of the areas in the uh in India that are not well connected you could help connect those uh through through crypto Power Systems think of helium um as an example of a kind of network that you could deploy here or you could build a new network in India all right what other I'll here three more back there one more time feedback diversity feedback and diversity feedback diversity couldn't hear it sorry feedback feedback diversity diversity great yeah okay yeah I got it yep uh exactly right so you have um and a super rich culture super uh diverse culture with lots of different ideas lots of different perspectives lots of different different um areas of interest and that's a super amazing strength for the Indian Community uh two more uh growing economy yep growing economy a growing economy that's right uh you have a super fast growing economy that means many new sectors and industries are getting um uh also wired up with software and so on and this is an area where like it's highly Dynamic and changing um now of course like that comes with a lot of competition um but it also comes with a lot of opportunities so absolutely right uh last one extremely low cost internet very low cost 4G HTML low cost 5G low cost broadband yep um that was kind of like part of what I wanted to include at the top uh but yeah you're totally right like it's worth emphasizing again like there is such a huge Advantage for Indian startups like you have no idea like when you compare a startup here to San Francisco you have like you know a five to ten to twenty x advantage on them so like really lean into it like it's super awesome um since this was a repeat I'll hear one more yep stable politics yeah um yeah so you are not an environment that is like ravaged by War right like that's super useful when you're trying to focus and build a product so uh absolutely right um great with that note like let's uh maybe move on for a moment now I want to kind of like tell you a bit about kind of like the power and utility of networks and building Network and how networks can help you uh build a tech and for doing that I wanted to introduce you to three really awesome people in that are in the audience um that are started in each Global hackathons uh so I want to first start um with a YouTube uh sushmit who from the Huddle team who started in hack FS uh two years ago and where exactly where you are today like just hacking away in your products um and then went on to kind of like build a super compelling products they got about early validation they joined an accelerator um and then they went on to um build a startup and build a team and build a product and so on so can I get a YouTube Schmidt up here for like a couple of minutes to say hi uh awesome can can you very briefly like in say in one minute each kind of tell a little bit about your story especially when you were you know what brought you to the hackathon and how you went from the hackathon to building a product uh starting with users hi hey everyone great to see you all so the Journey of uh myself going into a hackathon start off so I'm electrical engineered by my education graduate in 2016. did a lot of work product and growth in a lot of b2c based startups in Indian based communities very web to based and in 2019 and I started seeing a lot of hackathons which are happening by each global and that's where I saw that in hack Fest 2020 that a lot of people were building a lot of stuffs and that's where I and so Smith came together where like everybody's talking about decentralization that's 3.0 but all their meetings are happening over centralized video conferencing platforms and that's where we came together and built rl01 as the infrastructure yeah yep yep uh so actually uh what the Yuan was excited now it was one of the global hackathon that we actually came to in life around so it was on the 20th there that we got the idea actually and it was in the 10 days we did the hack out there and uh the 28th day it was like that we wanted to have this child in many imagination right because if you have knowledge then your idea gets biases so what you need is that you need to solve ideas without knowledge biases and that is something I think you can get a much better idea uh so we we got this okay it's in front of us we can like make a much better version of zoom out there a decent live version of zoom and when we started working on that we realized there is much more better problem to solve the RTC stack like that is something that actually missing out there and something that we that needs to be get built so that it enabled larger stuff so yeah that's the journey uh hackathons are like hyper competitive uh thing if you survive this competition you can survive the external competition and then you go to accelerators right so in accelerator what happens is that uh the product in hackathon is something that you want to build but in accelerator it is the product that the world wants right so you need this energy between two and yeah and then it's like you go to outside world and get like the feedback loop and iteration that would always be there that's like Evergreen and just does if it's a 30-day hackathon it really helps you because there are a lot of officers happening you get a lot of validation from the people who have already built stuff earlier so that's what happened we started building we started uh having a lot of even failures we're like hey you can do this you can do that and that led to building stuffs which led to a a product which was matured enough to be used by people in the hackathon itself so a 30-day hackathon generally helps in in building something which is an MVP which could be used by consumers people clients Etc yeah thank you yeah first of all uh does uh this um map of the of the stages like fit well with what you were doing yeah absolutely so this is how yeah if you just talk about it this is how we started off when we knew about that we have to go into the hackathon we had to learn webrtc first as a protocol uh we didn't know webrtc earlier uh and since it was a very long stage uh hackathon we got time for uh for essentially like five days to just uh learn more about it iterate into it and then as we move forward into it we we had a couple of ideas on what we can do uh in the in the hackathon that means if we are building a video content platform what kind of uh where we are catering towards which kind of category is it education is it representative in ftps communities and then we moved on to an accelerator uh Gabriel is here uh we had a chat with Gabriel and then we got into techyon uh and from there our mental models start getting built then we raised a pre-seed round seed round and now our series a so that's the overall Journey like yeah awesome thank you and huge congrats by the way like really amazing to see all your progress in two years it's so cool going from uh hack hackathon hack to uh where you are now here don't press with these guys yeah and uh I wanted to bring up uh one more person uh harsh from Bush product protocol are you here harsh yes no maybe he's he's probably in in the booth uh making sure that things are going well so if you see her somewhere around um you can get his story as well uh he started in um he and his team uh started in hack money uh right before um with huddle and had a very similar story built a product uh through a hackathon uh tested out a lot of different pieces then you know the early product um it was pretty pretty varied had a lot of different possibilities then they kind of found one of those features they narrowed down on that focus and then they went on to joining um an accelerator and then from there um race funding and whatnot so a very similar kind of trajectory here so uh you know the two success stories of many if you look around the room just tons of the groups that are now sponsoring and building and coming here to sponsor hackathons in equal in in ethania and many of the East Global hackathons got their own start in an eve Global hackathon which is so cool like it's such an awesome um Testament to how um how kind of growth oriented this whole Community is all right cool so I wanted to kind of uh finish with just a quick blog for um our Network and being able to kind of help and support you along this way uh from you know kind of first of all helping build a group of people that can help you um kind of think about how to build these these startups helping you start them from the beginning from the early stages of thinking about ideas thinking about potential startups through a requests for startups um getting involved in hackathons getting involved with both early search Brands and so on to then helping connect you to lots of different sources of capital whether that's funding from investors in investment capital or funding from Grant making organizations for network network Capital um and then helping you connect to Talent uh to be able to kind of hire and grow your team um then access a lot of knowledge um uh in terms of being able to tap into lots of different super knowledgeable people with office hours um as the Huddle guys mentioned uh office hours are an extremely useful way of kind of tapping into the knowledge of the network um and also connecting you to service providers that can help solve a lot of your problems for you um just in terms of you know networks and so on think of like being able to build a whole community of people and other organizations and so on and being able to keep in touch over the Internet um I think one of the things that is very important to remember is that the Internet connects you to everybody else in the world so they're really only kind of a few messages away um and so if you kind of can lean into the connectivity of networks whether that's the youth Global Discord or any other telegram groups that you're part of or any of these kinds of Networks um you can lean into that and lean into especially structures that can give you kind of office hours or they have some structure to to help like um tap into the knowledge uh that people have and yeah some like other you know uh PL can help you with Talent um help you with like people processes uh can help do coaching and advice um can help you with some of the tech um and the service providers and so on great so that's all I wanted to talk about uh that's how to start a startup uh great to see everybody good luck with all of your hacks and all of your development and remember like that this is a super iterative process and you're going to be in each one of these stages for quite a while and I strongly recommend that you super enjoy the hackathon period and process and you know do a ton of hackathons learn a lot get to know everybody um uh try out and grow your knowledge and then from there um get get to building startup thank you very much