Intro
Last week, Stratis exhibited at the Blockchain Expo in London; which they have done every year since their inception. Similar to last year, I accompanied the team to provide what I would call ‘community support’ with the additional task to observe how the team ‘performed’ (in my opinion) compared to last year. With this entry, I hope to provide a detailed evaluation of the Stratis Platform team at the 2019 Blockchain Expo compared to last year’s. I’ll be breaking up my evaluation into several categories:
- Appearance
- Business Development
- Community
- Effectiveness
Appearance
It’s almost common sense that exhibitors keep their image somewhat at the forefront of their efforts when we talk about the Blockchain Expo. It’s not always correlated with the legitimacy of their project, but projects that execute appearance properly are deserving of their credit to some degree - and Stratis is most certainly deserving of that credit. Stratis’ 2018 booth was a feat on its own when unveiled last year. It had all the qualities I personally look for from projects exhibiting - professionalism, great design, strategic location (near the very front of the expo), and presence (one of the largest booths there). With all that said, I was incredibly pleased with this year’s efforts and will go as far as to say that this year’s booth improves on most of those qualities. The booth was larger and updated with Stratis’ current design language. The location of the booth (albeit, not at the entrance) was placed near one of the speaker platforms, every attendee who stopped by to listen to a speaker of that particular area had visibility of the Stratis booth. The professionalism was maintained from last year and in from my perspective even more improved with the addition of two team members focused on business development and sales (which will contribute to our next category). With the drought we’ve encountered across crypto markets in the last year and a half, it’s reassuring to see that Stratis doesn’t spare any expense for this category and still recognizes its importance.
Business Development
Stratis’ continued iterative code release of their platform has been the project’s strongest attribute for most of its existence. It’s no surprise that the attention from most community members have shifted from its software development to its business development. I share the same sentiment expressed from most that Stratis’ business development has been outpaced by the development of its platform. The Blockchain Expo is a great way to gage how far the management team responsible for this has improved compared to last year.
Before we continue, let me express what I mean as far as business development. This is not a simple ‘wen marketing’ evaluation, let’s make that very clear. You can drop seven figures on marketing efforts to boost awareness, but at the end of the day the effectiveness of your business development solely relies on active and outside utilization of your product.
End Rant
On the surface, there has been great strides to improve on the business development compared to last year’s efforts. What carries over from last year are the presence of Stratis’ software development team to interact with clients who are in need of a more technical overview of the platform. Management, including the CEO, was also there to interact with potential clients/users for various needs. The notable difference I’ve witnessed is the addition of two team members dedicated to business development, Paul Farrington, and a lead sales guy, Ian Frew, who were extremely active in their engagement with attendees of the expo. With these hires also came the addition of two presentations from the Stratis team (compared to one from last year). Paul, was responsible for presenting Stratis’ DLT solution while Rowan de Haas, a smart contracts developer, presented a proof of concept (POC) of Stratis’ Smart Contracts solution. To follow up Jordan’s excellent smart contracts presentation from last year with Rowan’s real world use case of those smart contracts cannot get enough praise for how brilliant that decision was.
With some of these notable improvements in the business development category, one thing that cannot be measured (at least in the time of this post) is the actual success rate of interested clients after following up with leads that were gathered from the expo. That does not mean, however, that it’s a subject not worth discussing in this post - but I will defer this till the last category (Effectiveness).
Community
Community turnout can be a good metric of evaluation especially for a crypto-based event. However, it’s understandable that this year’s turnout was significantly less than 2018’s. Crypto has made everyone so fcking broke over the last year that they couldn’t even afford to attend a free expo /s*. There was a turnout of familiar faces from last year’s expo with the addition of another long-term Stratis holder (shout out to Neurosploit), and the time spent with the community was far more often compared to last year’s (here and here). On the subject of those hangouts, as casual and unofficial as they were, it was disappointing that some of the notable individuals from the team attending the expo were absent. Attending a gathering of the supporters of your project (if possible) is worth that investment of time, to every team in crypto. With that said, within the expo itself community engagement was excellent. There were numerous team members there to interact with and show gratitude for everyone's continued support of the project. Overall, based on this year’s turnout, I am very optimistic for next year’s turnout when Bitcoin steadily climbs back up to $20k$10k$5k$1.
Effectiveness
With the naming of this last category, I knew there was a possibility to confuse readers of what ‘effectiveness’ meant for this post. To put it simply, it’s combining the effectiveness of all previous categories and seeing if they contributed to the overall goal of Stratis exhibiting at this expo. That goal (to me, a community member and not an employee) is growth - growth of traction, growth of support, growth of users, growth of business, growth of the overall platform. And considering everything that I’ve described in this post, has Stratis achieved that goal? My answer is yes (sorta).
Why the ‘sorta’ part?
Earlier in this post I’ve referenced the point of not being able to measure a key metric in business development which is the success rate of actual interested clients post-expo. I group this together with ‘loosely’ with a project’s client onboarding process, although anyone can make an argument that an effective onboarding process doesn’t necessarily translate to customers (there are more factors that contribute to this). The point I’m getting to is Stratis can exhaustively plan out how they’re going to represent themselves at the expo, events centered around the category, and allocate large funds to further expanding their reach to potential clients - those efforts will not matter if their client onboarding process doesn’t take advantage of any business leads gathered from the expo.
Closing Remarks
It may seem like I’m delivering the hammer late to what is a generally positive experience at the Blockchain Expo, but please do not interpret that as anything more than constructive criticism. I have been an investor, community member, and active contributor of the Stratis Platform for nearly 3 years. My experience at this year’s London Blockchain Expo with Stratis only reinforces my own personal belief that the future with Stratis is extremely bright, and that we are only at the beginning stages of Stratis’ full potential.
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