Companies track and optimize every single customer interaction in order to achieve the golden 3:1 lifetime value (LTV) to cost-of-acquisition (CAC) ratio. For every $1 spent on acquiring new customers, that customer should return $3 in revenue. 

These calculations are typically made from the top of the funnel (SEO, PPC, etc.) all the way down until customer conversion.

Using 3RM as an example, let’s walk through an example of running a tight process. 

Say that we want to grow new inbound leads by 10% month-over-month (MoM). We know that our cost to acquire (CPA) 1 new lead is ~$3. If we currently have 100 leads in our CRM, then our objective should be to get 10 new leads at a cost of no more than $30.

That is a great measurement for the top-of-funnel. 

Now, let’s say that we acquire those 10 new leads but our salesperson (me) has an average close rate of ~20%. That means that we would only have a net-new 2 converted leads for that originally spent $30. 

Our expectation of these two leads is that before they churn, they should provide ~$90 in revenue for our company. This can be calculated by knowing what your average revenue per account is sitting at. 

This example is the simplest version of building stable business operations because it doesn’t account for the cost of my employment with the company and a variety of other factors. 

All of this matters when you are running a business because “doing things that don’t scale” can be an exhausting process that doesn’t necessarily support product market fit. PMF can be found quicker by installing a repeatable and scalable process that allows you to calculate your growth in order to project success and have clearer timelines for more costly expenses. 

As great as the crypto Twitter (X) and conference circuit are, there is a large chasm of reliability that needs to be crossed by early-stage companies in the space. Once teams are able to discover the ability to fairly calculate the size of their market, the cost of acquiring new users, & the results of their efforts in a scalable way crypto might finally have the opportunity to be realistic about the expectations of changing the world. 

Teams need reliable sales operations instead of interoperability. It would be better to calculate what is or (more importantly) is not working instead of making useless products more widely available to different chains with crypto-native users.

“Founded in 1999, Salesforce enables companies of every size and industry to digitally transform around their customers by harnessing the power of automation, artificial intelligence, and real-time data to make every customer experience more personal, valuable and memorable.” - *The History of Salesforce *

Enterprise sales technology has cemented itself as the backbone of growth for modern companies. Salesforce has displayed how much the market values being able to have a complete customer lifecycle management tool. For nearly the past 25 years, teams have been able to optimize their acquisition costs without committing to large financial or technical investments. 

This scalable software was built around the modernization of business and the advancement of the internet. USPS to email. Paper ledgers to Quickbooks. Rolodex to digital contact management. 

Salesforce was able to be incredibly successful because of the vision of how technology would be able to shape relationships between companies and people.

With a $220B market capitalization, it would be foolish to imagine $CRM as anything near “dead” or “antiquated.” 

However, it feels less outlandish to use these same terms to describe the data that defines the modern customer relationship manager (CRM). 

Email. LinkedIn. First and Third Party Cookies. Conversion Tracking. PPC. SEO. 

In the same way that the digital transformation of the early 2000s killed companies like Borders, Blockbusters, and even Macy’s (to an extent), our bet is that the transformation from a closed centralized internet is how the future of business technology will be built. The next decade of business isn’t going to be generated by web scraper, bots, and automated cold outreach. 

At present, there exists a critical divide between the traditional, centralized version of web2 and the emerging, decentralized iteration of web3. These distinct digital realms each offer unique value, utility, and data, yet the two remain frustratingly disconnected.

Blockchain enables a new paradigm to be able to measure the value of information and data. Our mission is to facilitate the integration of these digital worlds, thereby unlocking the transformative potential of web3 for businesses, creating a more expansive, efficient, and trust-based data marketplace, and ultimately reshaping the landscape of enterprise interactions in this new digital era.

Imagine a world where the postman delivering the mail to your mailbox could not be replaced, he falls sick and you get no mails. The mailbox and postoffice here serves as proxies in the overall mail delivery process, how the mail is moved between the mailbox and post office does not matter and can be changed.

In this post, I would like to explore the concept of immutability in smart contracts and discuss how the Proxy pattern emerges as a potential solution to strike a balance.

One challenge that has been on my mind lately is the balance between immutability and updatability in smart contracts. From my observations, it seems like the Proxy Pattern is a solution commonly used to address this challenge.

In the blockchain landscape, smart contracts serve as a significant building block. They function as autonomous programs that execute contract stipulations, inscribed directly into the code and preserved on the blockchain. One interesting aspect of smart contracts is their immutability - once deployed, they remain unalterable, a feature that upholds transparency and security. However, this 'carved-in-stone' characteristic, though instrumental in establishing trust, does present its own unique set of challenges. If a bug surfaces or there's a need to introduce a new feature, you're faced with a hurdle. Tweaking the existing contract or appending new functions isn't an option. Instead, deploying a new contract becomes necessary. While not necessarily costly, this can be inconvenient and potentially disruptive. The previously produced data is tied to the original contract, and applications interacting with the contract need to be adjusted to communicate with the new one.

This is where the Proxy Pattern comes into play. It involves creating two contracts - a Proxy Contract that users interact with, and a Logic Contract that carries out the operations. When changes are needed, a new Logic Contract is deployed and the Proxy Contract is updated to point to it. This provides a way to update the system without disrupting the dependent clients.

Proxy Contract Example

Let's explore a simple implementation of the Proxy Pattern to illustrate the concept. In this example, we have three contracts: Greetings (the proxy contract), GreetingImplementation1, and GreetingImplementation2 (the implementation contracts).

The Greetings contract acts as the proxy, with the implementation contracts GreetingImplementation1 and GreetingImplementation2 providing different greeting messages.

When the Greetings contract is created, the address of an implementation contract is passed through its constructor, allowing flexibility in selecting the desired implementation.

An important feature of the Greetings contract is the updateImplementation method, which enables the dynamic update of the implementation contract address. By invoking this method, the implementation contract can be changed, facilitating upgradability and adaptability.

When the greetings method is called on the Greetings contract, it delegates the execution to the implementation contract specified by the current address stored in the implementationAddress variable. This way, the specific greeting logic within the selected implementation contract is executed.

By implementing the Proxy Pattern in this example, the Greetings contract maintains a consistent interface while enabling seamless changes or upgrades to the underlying implementation contract, providing versatility and ensuring a smooth user experience.

I am still learning and sharing as I explore and would love to get your feedback.

For those of you who've worked with smart contracts, how have you managed this balance between immutability and updatability? Have you experimented with the Proxy Pattern, or have you found other innovative solutions? What are your thoughts on applying classic design patterns to the world of blockchain?

I'm eager to hear your experiences, insights, and learn from the collective wisdom of this community. Let's navigate these intriguing Web3 waters together.

We kicked things off by building our product as a centralized web2 platform. This was a vital first step that allowed us to deliver immediate value and gather essential learnings. But now, it's time for a pivot. We're shifting our focus towards network decentralization and the development of a protocol aimed at stimulating an ecosystem in the CRM and professional networks domain.

Over the coming year, I'll be sharing our journey from a technical perspective. As we transition our platform to embrace the potential of Web3, I'll be keeping you all in the loop, sharing our thoughts, questions, and experiences. So, stick around!

🌱 Summary

In May, we hit all-time-high records in new users, active users, and almost every other statistical category that we measure. This improvement can be attested to our team’s resilience in consistently improving our native Telegram integration and improving our success rate to 99%.

With the integration (a consistent headache of tedious work for our team) behind us, our team is now expanding the scope of the CRM and network products. In June, we plan to ship more high-impact features than any other month prior.

Since our February launch, we’ve onboarded 363 organizations, yielding 511 users, who have collectively imported 20,000+ conversations that have been comprised of 30,000+ unique participants.

This month, we are asking for more support in helping shape our vision memo. We are putting more priority on sharing our vision with the world. We would like to start by sharing our memo with our direct investor network. If you are interested, please reply and I will happily send it over! I would love to connect further on what we are excited about.

Thanks again for everything. I look forward to sharing more updates in the coming weeks.

💬 Asks

Provide Feedback, Edit, Proof Read, or Help Improve Our Vision Memo

During May, our leadership team spent a substantial amount of time crystallizing our vision for the future of 3RM. We’ve put together a Notion page detailing the problem, solution, timing, market, and competition that we are building towards. It would be incredibly helpful to share our ideas and vision more to get feedback and dive deeper into the opportunities that we see ahead.

🙌 Appreciation

Thanks To Jasper de Gooijer of Seda Protocol, David Silverman of 3SE Holdings, Alex Lin of Shima Capital, Joe Mahon of Lechuza, and Grady Wells of Distributed Global

In our last update, we asked for support scoping out a variety of topics between tokenization, social graphs, ZK, and more. Each of these people stepped up and provided their time and resources to support our team. Thank you so much!

📈 Key Metrics

Go-To-Market Analytics

We saw an overall increase in users and organizations that signed up for our waitlist in May but we’ve only been able to onboard ~30% since we launched. Similar to other enterprise software, we’ve found more success activating our users through a very hands-on consultive approach to setting up their CRM tooling. However, in June, we expect to grow our top-of-funnel and begin more aggressive outbound marketing campaigns as we have found ways to begin streamlining our onboarding flows.

Waitlist - 1,581 users, up 17%

3RM Company Twitter - 1,161 followers, up 1.5%

Twitter BD Community - 148 members, down 2%

Telegram Broadcast Community - 147 members, no change

Telegram Web3 BD Group - 216 members, up 4.1%

Product Analytics

Our focus for May was continuing the habit-forming behavior we saw from some users and expanding that as widely as possible. We saw a 40% increase in the number of orgs using the notes and follow-ups features (from 37 orgs to 52), and heard from users that they were finding a rhythm that made them much more productive.

We were very excited to see the pace of orgs adding Telegram chats continued faster than ever, including batches of new chats added from those who had already imported hundreds before.

With 10,957 chats added in May, our “hidden network” of Telegram users has expanded. Across 20,056 chats that our 512 users have added, we now have records of 30,659 unique chat participants. With the upcoming Network product, we plan to tap into the latent potential for viral social growth.

Each chat represents a relationship, project, deal, opportunity, or partnership between two organizations. We believe there’s tremendous value in this graph and this will feed in perfectly.

🌧️ Lows

In May, the team was hyper-focused on improving our direct integration into Telegram. We were able to successfully navigate some difficult engineering problems. As a result, we now are recording a 99% success rate in our ability to import the data directly into 3RM!

However, we have noticed that follow-ups get better adoption than notes. In our discovery we understood this is because notes need to exist in a software that is their team’s system-of-record, for many that’s their existing CRM like Hubspot. Follow-ups, on the other hand, are useful for individuals. We are experimenting with integrating GPT-chat, adding more properties, filtering context, and adding more diverse contact/relationship management. We have a tremendous amount of confidence that we’ll be able to unlock usage in the next month and are looking forward to shipping more features than any other month!

🚀 Highlights

Since our February launch, we’ve onboarded 363 organizations, yielding 511 users, who have collectively imported 20,000+ conversations that have been comprised of 30,000+ unique participants

We’ve seen our software naturally integrate into the foundation of communications between web3 organizations. While we are not able to view the subject matter of the above data, we have been able to shape a powerful social graph that we believe will play an integral part in building the future of professional networking and sales.

Increased sense of clarity on vision and roadmap

Our leadership team spent tons of time together in May to reformulate an updated vision and strategy. We’ve started to map out value props for a protocol and align with others in the space who may want to build on it.

Our ideas for a professional network are also shaping up to focus on the key problems we hear in the space in the order that they are likely to be adopted. We’re envisioning a viral, game-like experience that takes social selling to the max; to not just create connections but also foster them past the initial meeting.

With more clarity around what the protocol and network entail, we’re feeling much more confident as a team in how we move next.

🛣️ In June, We Expect To:

Expand the scope of our CRM product

To serve a broader set of use cases, in June we’re launching:

• Customizable Properties for Status, Owner, Source, Priority, and Category. This will help small teams rely on 3RM as their only CRM.

• Contacts and Organization records are automatically created from your imported Telegram chats. Since onboarding is one of the huge problems any CRM faces, we’re excited to be using GPT-4 to infer the organizations from each chat title and auto-populating and enrich the CRM records for our users.

• Pipeline View — a kanban view to manage chats by status, helping teams coordinate their activity and visualize it more clearly.

Altogether, these changes amount to a lightweight yet complete CRM experience, giving many go-to-market teams everything they need to operate in the space.

Launch experiments focused on the Network product

As mentioned above, we see a massive latent potential in the hidden B2B network around Telegram chats. We plan to experiment with a matching service and events that help the network emerge and engage with each other before productizing our findings later this summer.

Thanks so much for reading and look forward to chatting soon. Don’t hesitate to check in and happy to set up a time to connect with anyone.

Cheers,

Jackson + the 3RM Team