@BigSky7 has an excellent overview of business development here.
However, the Coop needs to establish the mechanics of partnerships in order to maintain best practices and avoid reinventing the wheel for every prospective partnership (rather than tweaking the general framework).
Have we executed any partnerships where we’ve already produced a deal memo or legal agreement?
Do any other assets already exist regarding partnerships?
Do we have anyone in the Coop with experience or deep knowledge of current customs for partnering with DeFi projects, Wallet projects, Exchange projects, or Media projects?
For example, we are contemplating a Media partnership for a BED Index. As I wrote:
Please provide comments and feedback regarding:
how you envision the details of partnership frameworks for each partnership type above; and/or,
any customs you can reference from partnerships happening in these ecosystems.
Managing Expectations
This task is fluid. We can get a solid set of bones for a framework, but may need to go through a few real-world negotiations to learn what meat will ultimately rest on those bones
Looking forward to helping move this critical set of IP to a finished product for the Coop.
A quick layperson’s way to think about partnerships at a high level:
Roles: What will each party do?
Rewards: What will each party receive?
Duration: How long will the partnership last?
Termination: How can either party end the partnership, how do we unwind the roles of the partnership, and how will each party relate to the underlying venture (see previous three items) post-termination?
Questions and comments are welcome. This is not the fun stuff
When you say “partnerships” what specifically are you referencing? You give a few references, which seem to encompass “distribution” broadly, and there indeed are folks actively focused on some of those areas.
What specific problem(s) are you trying to solve here? This might help me, and others in the community, provide the comments/feedback you are looking for
Or if more resonent, what are you trying to achieve/create?
I noticed your mention of BED, which is confusing me a bit! That is not really a “media” partnership, rather that fits squarely in the Methodologist Program.
Not Tim, but his post resonates with me so I’ll just sound off on what I’m hearing.
We have a strong sense of what we want to achieve when interacting with other players in DeFi, media partners, or wallets, but once you’re at the point of connecting with someone, what are the tactical steps to take? How does the Coop engage with other entities (on-chain, off-chain, whatever)? What does someone do if a counterparty asks for a (not smart) contract?
These are all questions I have as we’re building out our institutional sales process. I know the Coop has, for example, engaged a law firm. But maybe that isn’t the best example. As we’re running things down in BD we’ll keep in mind that we’re all building interaction norms for the Coop and try to help frame that out (unless this already exists somewhere I haven’t seen).
@fallow8 Exactly. Frameworks are the “code” for any and all partnerships.
Sorry for the confusion. I didn’t mean to reference any specific partnerships as a starting point. I intended to say we need to go up a level and deal with partnerships as a meta-category, and types of partnerships as sub-categories. Then, Biz Dev simply has to properly categorize a deal in order to retrieve necessary frameworks for action steps.
An efficient and effective way to grow partnerships—as well as avoid countless pitfalls which are costly (eg, time/resources)—requires an off-the-shelf blueprint for each category of partnerships. In crypto land, we might call these legos for composing partnerships.
We do not want each partnership to begin with a tilt toward bespoke. This is a major loss of time and resources. This also increases the risk of important stipulations falling through the cracks in any random deal.
The goal is to give Biz Dev clear best-practice action steps AND engage a lawyer at the last possible step and for the least complicated possible work (ideally, final draft contract review). Engaging legal prior to this stage will encumber deals and increase costs in time/money at best and ruin deals at worst.
Let me illustrate with an example:
If you begin a negotiation with an advertiser, they will ultimately send over a draft Insertion Order. Although the ads and website are unique to the deal, everything else is generic. Thus, they send a customary boilerplate and simply adjust the key variables: length of order, specific ad campaign, and pricing (CPMs).
The boilerplate handles the rest: each party’s roles and termination.
Without this framework, what can take a couple days and even avoid legal review will turn into weeks or longer and include lots of legal review.
Also, Biz Dev can do many more deals per week/month/year with frameworks. This is commonly under-appreciated leverage for a small organization—especially early in the life cycle. I want to help the Coop fast-forward if possible
Sorry. I must have misunderstood the BED thread. I saw several members question whether the proper compensation to a media partner was Methodologist rewards (versus the Coop building a similar basic product and paying the partner as a distributor).
Please forgive anything that comes across as verbose. I am trying to over-communicate as I’m new to the group and don’t want to assume levels of experience/expertise.
Distribution is one sub-category. Engaging a service provider (eg, lawyer or accountant) is another. There are many.
My goal is to get us thinking about and ultimately setting up a system for engaging with third-parties.
Of course, putting content into the system can get very nuanced (eg, how do we treat formal versus informal distribution partners?). That’s one level below setting up the system.
