Calling all nights and weekends BUIDLers!

This week, ConsenSys Labs, Gitcoin, and Microsoft announced the launch of the Ethereal Virtual Hackathon, an endeavor focused on upending the orthodoxies of finance and banking — and hackathons in general — while launching the future star developers and entrepreneurs of the blockchain industry.

By far one of the hardest parts of participating in a hackathon is honing in on a good idea, and getting traction — fast. At ConsenSys Labs, I spend a good amount of time with our entrepreneurs helping them think through strategies to validate and scale their Blockchain businesses.

I believe that entrepreneurship is all about engineering solutions that create signals to find Problems and Customers. Find an interesting problem. Find a customer. Then build your product. In the game of entrepreneurship, sequence matters.

Find an interesting problem. Find a customer. Then build your product. In the game of entrepreneurship, sequence matters.

Here are 3 ways to get signals…

The SaaP-Wrap Strategy: Service as a Product, that you wrap in a product post-launch

Okay, so let’s talk about a couple of light-weight “products” you can build fast and cheap. The SaaP-Wrap strategy is starting by finding customers and building your business as a service. I know, “service” is a dirty word in tech, but let me explain.

Most of us in tech love building products and start there. I LOVE building non-scalable services, then wrapping a product around it. It’s the fastest way to build a company, and your customers pay for product development.

In addition, service-oriented businesses tend to have higher AOV than product SaaS businesses, and as you productize elements of the business, your margins go up. In this instance, you end up with the best of both worlds — High MRR/AOV, and High Margins. A wonderful combination. For a refresher on the alphabet soup of Unit Metrics for your startup, check out this handy guide.

“But how do I do that?”

Here are some lightweight products you can use to sell your primary value-proposition to your customers

Static wireframes

Dynamic wireframes

Spoof demo video

Landing Page with email opt-in for “Early Access” (I’ll talk more about this, in a second)

Then… Make an Irresistible Offer. Find 10 people who have signed up for your product and ask them, “If I do X for you in the next 30 days, would that be worth $Z? If I don’t, just so you know, you won’t pay me a dime”.

You’ve de-risked your offer, in the eyes of your customer, and now you work on delivering that service to them. Unlike building vaporware, you’re getting real customers to pay you for your time/service, to fulfill a need.

While one of you delivers the product via blood, sweat, and tears, the other team members are documenting the process. Once the service is delivered, successfully, you refine the process and begin to productize the most cumbersome but easiest part to automate, via tech.

Voila! You officially have a business. Congratulations!