Three KEY Steps to Becoming a Web3 Entrepreneur

Koinos is in need of more entrepreneurs that can bring concepts like "free-to-use" and "tokenless access" to everyday normal people. In this newsletter, I'm going to highlight the three key elements that lead to the creation of Koinos Account Protocol (KAP) and how anyone, including yourself, can do something similar.

If you don't know who I am, my name is Kui and I'm a structural engineer and I helped co-found KAP with Full Stack developer Luke Willis (the creator of the Koin Press).

1. Seek Answers To Questions

Throughout 2020-2022, many of us were asking "What is Koinos?". Thanks to the wonders of the internet, thousands of people had access to the Koinos Telegram & Discord in their search for answers.  This is where most of you met the early community members who shared whatever knowledge they've gained and who would also become the founders of projects like Fogata, Kollections, KoinDX and KAP. Despite not knowing then, many of us had already begun our journey to become Web3 entrepreneurs by simply seeking answers.

To become a Web3 entrepreneur, we must become deeply connected to the journey of answer seeking. Because blockchain is a frontier, we will always find road blocks and it is this impasse that creates pain and struggle. When you understand this phenomenon, you should have a sudden eureka moment and understand that your job as an entrepreneur is to simply resolve user pain.

Pain doesn't need to be complicated, it just needs to persistently exist. This means we're all entry-level entrepreneurs in many ways!

For Luke, his persistent pain was simply learning about blockchain. Like many others, he has a job and a family. He could have spent hours searching the internet but he decided to take a more direct route. He began the Koin Press Podcast and his first interview was with Andrew Levine, CEO of Koinos Group. He went straight to the source.

My Koinos journey began with Steemit which meant I was familiar with blockchain technology in general pre-Koinos. Steemit showed me and hundreds of thousands of others that the blockchain experience in Ethereum (and its many fee based clones) made it impossible to scale its userbase. I loved blockchain, but it was painful to use. I knew Koinos was built on the free-to-use technology of STEEM, and I was looking for answers as to how we can improve blockchain and share it with hundreds of thousands of users much like those that once flooded Steemit.

2. Share What You Find

If entrepreneurship is a journey of seeking answers then like any journey, we go alone when we want to go fast, but to go far, we must go together.

What this means is that we must create a team of like minded people and the only way to do this is to be vulnerable with our knowledge. Do not be afraid to do this. It's far more likely you'll find someone who shares a common interest with your journey than you would find someone who is trying to steal your knowledge to become a solo-preneur.

It is the public discussion of questions and their potential answers that unite people in a way where new and innovative solutions can be thought of. Once you understand this, you should have yet another eureka moment: The #1 reason why ideas don't go anywhere is because no one knows about them!

Here's the first time Luke mentioned KAP in discord:

And here's what I did when I first mentioned an idea called dAppMana which would eventually become Mana Stations. I went as far as writing a whole whitepaper on how it would work.

We ultimately merged the ideas of Koinos Address Protocol with dAppMana and created Koinos Account Protocol with a feature called Mana Stations.

As far as becoming a Web3 entrepreneur, the stakes are extremely high if you don't share what you know because you'll be a want-preneur and eventually end up seeing your solution get developed by someone else and think to yourself:

"That was my idea!". Yes, it was your idea. Now it's theirs because they built a team by sharing information. Then they executed on it, which leads us to my last and final point. The MVP.

3. MVP

MVP stands for minimum viable product, which is the first user facing component to be released. There are many topics on how to MVP your idea. I won't get into those details but I want you to know that the most common way to launch an MVP is to find a technical co-founder but it is not required.

Technical co-founders in Web3 are often software engineers whom you've met along your answer seeking journey but there are many times where a developer is not involved.

Alternatively, you and your non-technical team can scrounge together enough money to hire an engineer. Thanks to the accessibility of Web3, launching an MVP on Koinos can cost you anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000 USD for engineering cost, depending on it's complexity. Keep your MVP simple, and you'll be able to keep your cost low. If you don't have $5,000 then you're not done building your team. Keep sharing information until you find someone who shares and collectively believes in your vision.

But there is a bigger point here that I don't want you to miss. You and your team MUST understand the problem you are solving to sufficiently define what your MVP product should be. And the way to do this is to share what you already know with your future users!

You'll now realize that the common theme about entrepreneurship in Web3 is sharing knowledge and working together. The reason why this method is effective is simple:

There are not enough entrepreneurs in blockchain. So if you're willing to do the work to bring together people in search of solving user pain, you're going to succeed, period.

BONUS

Koinos recently launched a hackathon where you can build a team to quickly develop an idea and win a piece of the $20,000 prize! Not only will you get a chance to test out everything I just said, you'll also be rewarded with cold hard cash! Checkout the hackathon at https://koinos.hackerearth.com/. If you have any ideas you need help flushing out, feel free to reach out to @lukemwillis or @kuixihe on twitter or reply to this email!