The Supply Chain Analogy

Finding business opportunities can be described as a supply chain problem. In supply chain management, supplier is paving it's way to his end consumer. The supplier has to take care of the entire value chain, from:

1. Finding the right consumer

2. Getting access to their attention

3. Making the delivery of the service or product in the most efficient, cost-effective way

Supply chain optimization has evolved with the growth of marketplaces like Amazon, which have increased efficiency in matching supply and demand and streamlining product delivery.

Applying Supply Chain Concepts to Business Development

When we consider business development, similar concepts apply. If you're offering a service or product and trying to find potential customers, you face several challenges:

1. Finding potential customers

2. Identifying the right ones out of a long list of potential prospect

3. Determining if you have a direct access to approach them

4. Gaining access to reach out to them

5. Capturing their attention

It's not enough to have technical means of reaching out. Countless "cold outreach" platforms exist across various communication channels. The real challenge lies in:

1. Getting potential customers to consider your offering or hear your pitch.

2. Convincing them to make a decision to acquire your services or partner with you.

This could involve becoming a design partner, customer, or complementary solution provider.

The Last Mile Problem

In both supply chain management and business development, the most challenging aspect is the "last mile". In supply chains, this refers to the final step of delivering products to end consumers. In business connections, the last mile is equivalent to making that crucial connection and capturing the attention of your target to initiate a transaction.

This is where most fail.

It's pretty easy to build a huge funnel of prospects. Where most fail is the last mile. The attention.

Last mile (transportation) - Wikipedia

In supply chain management and transportation planning, the last mile or last kilometer is the last leg of a journey comprising the movement of passengers and goods from a transportation hub to a final destination. The concept of "last mile" was adopted from the telecommunications industry, which faced difficulty connecting individual homes to the main telecommunications network.

http://wikipedia.org

The last mile in business is still constrained by human limitations, as described by Dunbar's number. Humans can only maintain a limited number of genuine relationships built on trust. This makes it challenging to scale businesses where trust and relationships are core to decision-making.

Scaling Trust via On-chain Reputation

To address this challenge, we can break down the problem into two parts:

Part 1: Identifying Your Target

This phase involves discovering the ideal party B (customer, partner, design partner, investor, or employee) for party A's intentions and goals. We can leverage on-chain credentials and reputation to identify people's behaviors, experiences, knowledge, and relationships.

It is not different from how businesses find opportunities in the traditional way. However, today this is captured by closed-garden CRM tools operated by companies building moats around enriching their private databases, to sell it as a service.

Leveraging on-chain reputation - open and permissionless professional graphs - reduces intermediaries and allows the parties that are directly adding value in the process to get the credit and reward for facilitating any business interaction that was formed.

Part 2: Bridging The Last Mile

This crucial step involves gaining the attention of someone with whom both you and your target have established trust relationships. This mutual trust can be the difference between no interaction and a potentially game-changing collaboration or partnership

Such a small gap, thanks to better coordination and a spice of trust, is the difference needed to take both parties down the road of forming their own trust relationships and evaluating each other's offering, potentially creating new value.

Conclusion

In a world where AI and technology automation makes everything 100x better, faster, cheaper, I believe the only thing that remains as a limitation to scale is the trust problem. Trust tends to be seen as a "problem". We do think that I any place we can we should eliminate of the need for trust by using transparent systems such as blockchains and web3 apps.

Now that web3 infra is ready, it's time for us, the people building and working in creating positive value, to build our professional onchain graph, in our journey to unlock more value and create more opportunities for all.

About us

At Covariance Our mission is to empower anyone to participate in value creation and get rewarded for the value they create. We believe our network is our most precious asset, and the trust we build throughout the years is mostly an underutilized asset for most people.

Read more about our vision and get in touch if you find it exciting and want to take part of it!