On the 28th of April, BlockStart organized a Webinar that promoted startups and SMEs collaboration. The experience shared by Blockstart startups Kedeon and Rexs.io brought great insights and recommendations for other startups – blockchain developers – and SMEs – blockchain adopters. Throughout the webinar, Industry experts shared their thoughts on the topic
On the 28th of April, at 3pm CET (Brussels Time), all eyes were on BlockStart’s Exploring Blockchain Ecosystem: Collaboration Between Startups and SMEs, which was broadcasted live on Facebook and YouTube and organized by project partner CIVITTA in the scope of BlockStart’s programme.
Since the beginning, apart from supporting more traditional blockchain sectors, such as financial technologies and cryptocurrencies, that are usually associated with blockchain, BlockStart has also tried to focus on supporting blockchain awareness and applicability in other sectors, such as retail and more general ICT products. The invited startups represented the latter: Kedeon – wholesale and retail, and Rexs.io – ICT. SME – blockchain technology adopter – Latitudo40, which worked with Rexs.io to implement their blockchain solution, also joined the event to share their collaboration experience. All discussions were over-viewed by the experts’ opinions – Richard Crook, Founder and CEO of LAB577 and Mirko Lorenz, Expert at H2020 blockchain project NGI TruBlo.
During discussions on the collaboration topic, Krzysztof Radecki, Co-founder and CEO of Rexs.io admitted that they were afraid of deploying the technology knowing the associated risks and possible failures, however, everything turned out seamlessly great when working with SME adopter Latitudo40. He encouraged this kind of collaboration by interacting with smaller companies and talking with decision makers directly as they did with Latitudo40.
Reinis Skorovs, Founder and CEO of Kedeon, told the audience how his startup collaborated with 5 different SMEs, what were the experiences in initiating the collaboration, and also about the very first initial steps and how the collaborations themselves turned out. The founder of Kedeon highlighted and praised BlockStart project, which gave Kedeon an opportunity to develop their product until reaching a market ready solution and test it in real-life conditions in the scope of Blockstart Pilot stage, without the company risking both under-delivery or unfulfilled expectations. He also shared his experience and advice of not trying to simply sell the product, but first make connections with the companies and try to understand how their solution can make other company’s issues smaller.
The experience sharing session was concluded with final thoughts and recommendations for startups wishing to collaborate with SMEs by Richard Crook “Don’t be stuck trying to sell one product, keep moving, keep changing, keep adapting, and hopefully you’ll find your product market fit”.
Watch the video recording here: