Hola partnrs!
We hope you’ve had time to reflect and evaluate the year gone by, finish your year-end reviews, and begin the new year with a bang! Hopefully, you’re still in line with your new year’s resolutions and haven’t dropped them along the way:)
The past year was crucial and a rollercoaster ride for us as a startup. Along with our founder, the team went through bucket loads of frustrations and coffee mugs. And there were also times when we probably wanted to pluck our hairs out - one by one (thank god that didn’t happen).
While we felt all these frustrations seep into our pores daily, we did not realize how exponentially fast we were moving forward. And during our year-end review, the whole team only had satisfied smiles on their faces. It was a fantastic feeling to see our hard work come to fruition after thousands of iterations and pivots.
We hope you join in our celebrations with us.
The Woohoo! Moments
partnr transformed into an official company from a mere concept in October of this year
The initial idea of an intelligent gig marketplace evolved into the Web3, decentralized model, with on-chain credentialing as its core.
After consulting and having hundreds of conversations, we drafted the final lite paper in August.
We built a fantabulous, amazing, mind-blowing team of 10 founding members. Too much? Hey, it’s okay! Or, as our founder says, it feels like a family of people dating each other (not literally folks, some of us are married here).
This year, we conceptualized our two-tier cohort curriculum after pivoting and iterating through our initial idea. So yes, folks, we have undergone tons of iterations.
We brought 20 industrial leaders together as speakers and held highly educational, free sessions for people willing to jump into and learn about Web3.
Expanded our reach through social media(LinkedIn 300% monthly growth; Twitter 200% monthly growth), and our Discord community grew to welcome 250+ members (100 to 400% week-on-week growth).
We’re so proud of our active community and the inputs we get from everyone there!
The Not So Woohoo Moments
Getting a great team together requires tons of effort and a lot of luck. 2 teams were formed and fell apart before this founding team was put together.
When we reach out for feedback, we get two types of them. Either someone voluntarily tries to pull you down, or they get inspired by your idea and provide constructive feedback. The first option sucked. The critical point is to know when people want to bring you down and when they want to see you rise and shine. (This applies especially you’re not extremely familiar with the industry).
The Web3 world is a male-dominated industry, no matter what people say. Furthermore, it’s also a place where folks can hide behind anonymous identities. Not a good combination, mainly when you try to find your home in a space where you are the odd one out. While in most of the interactions and collaborations Partnr had, gender was not an issue, the few that involved gender were particularly burdening for our female founder.
“As a solo woman founder, it’s difficult to make people take you seriously, especially in the tech world. Men do try to take advantage of the sexuality, and try to mock your opinion based on your age and gender. Which sucked.“
- Kritika Ravichandran, Founder of p a r t n r
And the lessons we've learnt along the way
Documentation. Documentation. Documentation.
When you’re starting a company off the grounds and are having short/long conversations with hundreds of people every week, it becomes easy to miss documenting crucial information, which can later be extremely valuable.We have learned to differentiate- folks with good and bad intentions, people who will help or not help. It becomes useless to waste time and energy on a lead who will not lead you anywhere—filter unnecessary feedback.
While working in corporates, everything is planned for you from the higher management, and you’re only assigned tasks with little to no flexibility. But when you start your venture, it becomes essential to have a proper beat to your work (even when you’re thrown into storms and hurdles). So plan, execute, plan, execute, plan, execute.
The initial stages of a company should have loads of self-accountability, and the founding team should be able to work on their own. When moving towards a decentralized culture, a manager-reporter culture cannot take its place.
It’s so easy to over-promise and under-deliver in today’s world. Especially when you don’t have “strict” deadlines in the beginning. But over time, we need to build an under-promising and over-delivering culture.
Everyone’s been processing the pandemic in their way. Thus it becomes vital to support each other during difficult times. The whole process has made us more empathetic and has brought us closer than ever.
For any company to go forward, they mainly require two things. First, a founding team complements each other in skill, set, and character—and second, money and resources (to put it bluntly).
Community learning and growth give us a sense of belonging and fulfillment.
We hope these points will be helpful to you in your own full-time or part-time ventures. If you want to know more about each issue or share your own experience, please feel free to connect with us (either by responding to this email or “DMing” us on Twitter/Discord). We need more people coming together and sharing their learnings.
Team Spotlight!
This week we’re featuring Shaman Shetty, our in-house graphic designer, and guitarist! We forced him to “showcase his talent” for us during our Year-end call (sorry, Shaman!). When Shaman is not playing guitar or working for his day job, he helps Partnr with different design works. If you are curious to see what he can do, you can have a look at our website, POAPs for various events, or even our logo.
He was the one who got this brilliant idea to come up with our entire journey as of now in a visual format, and kudos to him! The visuals are uploaded on our website; you can check them here.
It's also up on YouTube in video format as below:
Want to keep the conversation going or have any questions? Feel free to respond to this email or ping us on our Discord/Twitter accounts! We’ll respond as soon as we can!
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