Summary
Proposal/TempCheck/Suggestion centered around encouraging ENS DAO or ENS Labs to consider putting a little more focus on their business development efforts. Particularly, to consider hiring an ideal person to take on a full-time position of BizDev / Partnership Manager for ENS.
Introduction
I recently asked the following question on the Ecosystem Working group weekly call - “Does ENS Labs have a full-time Partnership or Business manager?” It first came off as if I was critiquing ENS. Not at all, I want to be clear about that. As I said on the call, I still remember the beginning of Nick’s presentation at Devcon last year opening with a slide that shows the growth of new ENS integrations. Good stuff. As someone who builds on top of ENS, and has dedicated the last 8 months to the DAO, who recently became a delegate, and plans to stick around, writing all of this comes only with the best intentions at heart.
The first time this occurred to me was when I was listening to Brantly’s recent podcast. Whatever inner kerfuffle that happened there put aside, after he stepped down I simply believed that someone else took his place as he struck me as a business-oriented person in the team. That’s the main reason why I asked if ENS Labs has a full-time Partnership or Business Manager in the core team now, to make sure that I’m not writing this in vain and have my facts straight.
One other big reason why I felt inspired to write this, besides @matoken.eth saying that it may be a good idea when I asked about it on the Ecosystem call, is after I saw @accessor.eth’s post recently (ENS + Exchange Integrations).
TL;DR - there are a lot of possible CEXes and Wallets primarily, and then Dapps, where ENS could be integrated with that would bring A LOT of new users.
Reasoning Why
I want to talk about why this is a good idea because I believe it is and should be of the utmost importance and strongly considered by the team.
I will refrain from giving you the pitch with the basics and essentials for why business people are generally needed and a crucial part of every growing organization. Everyone should be well aware of this.
What I want to mention though is that every major company/organization/startup in web3 (and web2) has a business-oriented person or a team. Usually called Partnership, Growth, Business, or Integrations manager depending on their scope of work.
Polygon, for example, has managed to become of the most dominant chains, despite previous shortcomings, by having one of the strongest business development teams. Lens Protocol also has a person who is dedicated to Ecosystem Growth as they call the person in that position I believe. And many others. And yes, I know, we’re a public good. But that doesn’t change a lot.
The core competencies of the ENS Labs team are development skills. And as a former developer myself, I truly admire the development-focused approach. It’s one of the reasons why I love ENS so much and decided to be here. However, there comes a point in every organization’s growth cycle where diversification of skills needs to happen in order to keep up with the market and set other equally important foundations besides development and sole focus on technology.
I’m given to understand that the entire spectrum of business-related tasks, that had not been pursued but had come as a byproduct of your, respectfully, multiyear dedication, hard work and effort put towards creating a good tech as ENS is today, is handled only by the core team of developers.
As a result of this current setup, there are a lot of other opportunities we are missing out on for not actively pursuing this. But also the core team’s strength (development) is not utilized at its full capacity if they are required to address business tasks, meetings, negotiations, etc. as well. Which will only increase in number as the ENS keeps maturing and going forward.
One of the benefits that this currently imaginary business person would bring is to unburden the core dev team from being at the center and responsible for dealing with these efforts and allow them to focus on their core strengths instead of spending additional, and if I may add very valuable time and energy, doing something that is not their strongest suit.
We as a protocol plan to be the naming system that will exist everywhere I think the number of new projects popping up is growing exponentially to the point where it’s getting hard to keep up with everything. Therefore, a professional backup is needed and it’s becoming more evident.
Job Description
As someone who has worked as a partnership/account manager (and other bizdev jobs) for years, I can try to give a brief description of what I would pursue and would like someone to focus on.
The person holding this position would need to focus on partnering with all prominent and up-and-coming web3 companies to make sure ENS is used as the go-to naming system across the entire web3 space.
As someone who is building on top of ENS, there are certain industries I believe that are going to be especially worth paying attention to where ENS can position itself as the best option and are the most obvious.
- Gaming and Metaverse
- CEXes and Wallets
To back this claim one only needs to look at what has currently been done. Coinbase implemented ENS and gives away free subnames. Great, let’s focus on chasing other CEXes to do the same. Rainbow implemented ENS and gives its users subnames. Great, let’s focus on finding other wallets to do the same. Decentraland gives subnames for all of their new users who enter their metaverse. Great, let’s focus on chasing other metaverses to do the same. Phi Land uses ENS names as a lookup and reserve resolution system to lookup lands based on ENS names. Fun! And there’re thousands more coming. The bare minimum is that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel and this could still be a positive thing with a full-time effort from someone.
If you want to go deeper and have a business person who is fully immersed in crypto then they can identify all integration partners across all industries, create the strategy and execute accordingly. Some of the places I believe ENS can actively maintain and increase its presence are:
- Metaverse
- Gaming
- CEXes
- Wallets
- Social media platforms
- Defi apps on different chains
- Identifying Web2 companies looking to expand into web3 using newly created gasless DNS ENS integration and facilitate the entire transitioning cycle
- DAO organization and DAO tooling systems
- Possibly identify some web2 and web3 payment providers (PayPal, Stripe, and others)
- Shopify will pave the way for e-commerce platforms, this should be actively monitored and pursued once the use case becomes clearer. The same goes for .ART domains and others following that path.
- Keeping an eye on industry trends and innovations like with soulbound tokens, DIDs, account abstraction, and so on and figuring out if ENS can play a role there.
- And so on and so on, there’s no shortage of good opportunities with a product like ENS.
For reference – Wallets like Exodus for example have more than 1.25M users (according to a quick Google search). That’s 1.25M potential users, and a lot more as the adoption keeps increasing over the years. There are some really great research reports regarding wallets market outlook, size, share, trends, users, etc.
I wish I had the time to do a full analysis for each of these categories above.
To conclude
I think one of the long-term goals for ENS should be to change the culture to where when people say – ‘send me your wallet address’, you send them yourName.eth instead of your long chunky 42-character address. This will require getting into every CEX and permissionless wallets out there in my opinion as a first step only. And of course, still having the clear goal of being THE naming system for every digital resource in the world and providing underlying tech infrastructure to support it. That’s tech + business for you going hand in hand all day long baby singing kumbaya in perfect synergy.
That said, I want to emphasize its importance and that this aspect of the ENS as a whole, should not be neglected. Therefore, I’m encouraging the DAO, core team, working groups, and community members to consider putting more focus in the months and years toward business development efforts.
And besides, among the immense growth of Dapps across 50 already super popular chains where ENS needs to be present, while working on NameWrapper, collaborating on CCIP and other tech endeavors, expanding to L2s, maintaining the DAO, replying to community members, IRL events, podcasts, interviews, and travels, fighting Unstoppable Domains and their patent trolling? 
and God knows what else is happening and is going to happen, do you really need to handle business as well? All of these things are kinda stressful and big big big energy consumers that if not handled correctly can cause a burn-out, and if handled correctly, leave you with very little time to focus on what you love and do best.
That’s all.
Looking forward to your thoughts and seeing if I missed or misunderstood something or unknowingly left something out that you are doing with regards to business efforts.
