3 Things: GTM Mastermind for Founders, Cross-Chain dApp Wormhole, Just Boxes

Happy Sunday and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotion so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:

• GTM Mastermind for Founders

• Cross-Chain dApp Wormhole

• Just Boxes

1. GTM Mastermind for Founders

If I ever get some spare time, this is one I should actually do. There is an adage: “first time founders think that product wins; second time founders know that distribution wins”. It is so true, and in a world where tech is becoming more and more open source and/or commoditized, GTM (Go-To-Market) motion becomes increasingly important, especially in competitive markets. In general, there are only a handful of different GTM motions and business models. You are either top-down enterprise leveraging a sales-driven model, bottoms-up SaaS doing a freemium or product-led-growth (PLG) motion, GMV/AUM (gross merchandise value and assets under management) where you need to get significant volume of transactions or assets and take a percentage, consumer subscription, consumer transactional, or B2B2C where you sell to businesses but the end users are their employees or customers. On top of identifying what business model is the right one for your company, there is also nuance in identifying your primary champion, how to charge, and main channels to get in front of your target users and buyers.

Regardless of business model, nearly every company struggles in the early days to hone their GTM motion; understanding their ideal customer profile (ICP), iterating on messaging/positioning, figuring out correct pricing & packaging, and determining the right acquisition channels. When we onboard new seed or Series A portfolio companies, the two things that they are always looking for help with are recruiting and GTM, and often on the GTM side, they specifically want to connect with other founders who are of similar stage and sector. Cohort based learning models have proven to be very successful. Chief has raised $140M for it’s cohort-based membership club for executive women. Tiger 21 brings together high net worth peers, YPO is for CEOs with certain amount of revenue or AUM, and Mastermind groups bring all kinds of like-minded people together to learn. Someone can take this paid, cohort-based model and focus on founders at similar stages and with the same business model. Create curriculum, bring in speakers/moderators, and help the groups help each other build world class Go-To-Market organizations. There are opportunities to host events and other programs for members to encourage an ongoing membership model.

2. Cross-Chain dApp Wormhole

When you look at the dApp (decentralized application) ecosystem, the vast majority of products are built on Ethereum or EVM compatible chains like Polygon or Avalanche. Out of a total of just over 4000 active dApps, Ethereum still accounts for around 3k or around 75% of the market. Over the past year, we’ve started seeing some teams build on chains like Solana or NEAR which promise lower gas fees and faster transaction speeds. Solana cites sub $.01 transactions and 400 millisecond block times and has around 1500 projects that have ever been built on the chain. The message has resonated creating a lot of hype among investors and developers alike, and Solana’s token SOL went from $3 at the beginning of 2021 to a high of $259 in November. NEAR similarly started 2021 at only $1.40 and reached a peak of $20 in January 2022.

Despite the continued dominance of Ethereum, many builders are experimenting with other chains due to the more attractive fees and throughput and placing bets on which ones they think will grow a large ecosystem and become a long term winner. This is a super risky move since today, when you build your dApp on one chain, it is very challenging to port it to another chain without essentially rebuilding from scratch. Since we are still in the very early days of the web3 space, there will likely be many chains that come and go in terms of popularity and the jury is definitely still out as to which ones will ultimately become dominant. A company that creates wormholes-as-a-service from one chain to another and focuses on porting dApps between chains could be incredibly lucrative and maintain relevancy over time. Today it might be moving dApps from Solana to Ethereum as many developers are frustrated with the user experience and performance of the chain. In the future who knows what chain will be the in-vogue chain and where people might try to migrate from. It is definitely a non-trivial product to build and will likely involve a lot of services but could be a very profitable business and currently there is zero competition. The opportunity exists to become the go-to brand for moving dApps across chains, especially as we continue to see more and more people building in the space.

3. Just Boxes

In 2021, there were 21.3 billion packages shipped in the US which equates to almost 60 million parcels a day. The 3 largest US couriers, which are USPS, UPS, and FedEx, account for over 13B of the packages, and every day, Amazon alone delivers 1.6 million packages (which is 66k per hour 🤯). While the contents of each package might vary, the one thing that is consistent is that each one comes in a box (and more often than not there is at least 1 box within the box!) The sheer number of boxes shipped within the US each year could reach from the Earth to the Moon more than 7 times which is over 3.2 billion kilometers.

Boxes are made of corrugated cardboard (this is a great short video that shows how boxes are made) which involves turning partially recycled pulp paper into outer liners and a fluted medium and using a water/starch mixture as the adhesive to bind the pieces together. While there is a lot of controversy over what is actually recycled/recyclable, cardboard boxes are one class of item that is definitely recyclable and in fact can be recycled 5-7 times. Plus, if they don’t get wet or damaged, cardboard boxes can easily be reused multiple times without being recycled. Given the ridiculous number of boxes that households are currently getting, a company could go around collecting broken down boxes from houses for free (they’re going to get rid of them anyways), sort them by size and shape, and then sell/distribute them to various parties like people who are moving, e-commerce startups who are just getting off the ground and need shipping boxes, on Craigslist, or to other companies looking for boxes. So simple, but an opportunity that could be so lucrative. You have zero cost of acquiring the boxes (aside from labor) and can rent a very cheap storage space in each city you service so overhead is minimal.

That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please share with a friend or two!

~ Elaine