Onboarding SMEs

I’m wondering if there is a dfinity department (or a seperate company) that has the capability of onboarding small to medium-sized enterprises.

IC might still be at the early stages, and not quite ready for this level of expansion. That said;

My experience as a salesman in a technical field is that i had a job solely because customers (existing and potential) don’t want to read a manual. They don’t even want to search for the solution.

My job was to find the solution for them, and in-person explain how to install operate and maintain their capital investment.

Are the intended customers for the IC meant to be technically-minded, i.e. they can do their own research and self-learn?

I understand that people with technical skills are (usually) technically-minded because they don’t like interacting with people (potential customers). These kind of customers bring problems like [1] wanting something for nothing, [2] wanting discount, [3] take up time from developers that won’t be worth their hourly rate, [4] attitude, arrogance, impatience etc.

I understand why a technically-minded organization would rather spend 6 months developing an AI customer-service bot, rather than pick up the phone (let alone, make a call) or deal with random emails.

That said; i can’t see how it wouldn’t be a good investment to have a 20-person department solely dedicated to handling customer queries and complaints.

My experience with CEOs is that their speciality is getting people together to serve a purpose in local or regional community. They don’t have the time or resources to hire someone new to do the legwork of learning a new technology. There’ll already be a capital cost for adopting a new paradigm (like transferring their database and operations from traditional to IC).

I do understand the motive for focusing on catching the big fish (like the government of Cambodia), but in my experience with these big fish: they are slow to move. In my experience, big fish only move faster when they worry about smaller fish moving faster than them.

The example of Cambodia’s government might not be the best anology (as they might be the small country gaining on larger countries). But i trust you understand my meaning (?)

Regarding the potential acquisition of the Cambodian government, i would even go as far to say that acquiring SMEs would make their decision easier. If dfinity could present 10-15 companies, SMEs, in terms of their capital investment to transition from traditional web to IC, and the ROI they’ll make moving forward; a government like Cambodia could see this as benefitting their country.

Very long post, apologies. But it’s just something that came to mind when i thought about Steve Jobs finding a company that created the ‘mouse’ for computers. I hope that dfinity isn’t making a product that they aren’t prepared to sell (making adoption easy, rather than technically-superior-for-the-technically-minded). I can’t even recall the company that invented the mouse.

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Technology and solution adoption is an interesting topic.

Working with the CEOs, CIOs, …, the government can work. But often it starts with the consumer or the developer. See for instance GitHub and open-source: for a long time companies wouldn’t touch it but developers made it happen. Same for iPhone: consumers drove adoption.

For Web3 it is very likely that it will be similar: developers built for consumers (gamers were first, then DeFi,…) and only then enterprises and institution started adopted it.

IMO the goal of Web3 foundations should be to keep the technology ready for builders with a focus on consumers.

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Gotchu
So dfinity is strictly the technical side of development

Further adoption is the technically-minded for their own purposes,

Adoption by the non-technically-minded is by start-ups incentivized to assist these potential customers

No problems. I’m still a monthly investor, stacking those canisters :slight_smile:

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