What you see in the picture above is a demo of a smart contract deployed on Ethereum, implementing a loyalty program with NFC cards, smartphones and, of course, a blockchain. It happened a few hours ago, at the second edition of Vertical Open Connect - Blockchain. We also talked about Bitcoin and, of course, Steemit. For those of you who don't know what a VOP is, well, it's an iteration of Open Connect - a soft fork, if you want - the event that bootstrapped a community with more than 5000 members, started by yours truly, 4 years ago, in a Starbucks.
How we ended up here?
Well, it's a long story, but I will try to shorten it by giving you only the best parts. Let's go.
The Good Old Days
As I said, 4 years ago I started a networking event in a Starbucks. At that time I was more of a digital nomad than I am now (but I'm getting ahead of myself) so I was spending a lot of time working from coffee shops. The event was taking place everyThursday morning. For some reason, people enjoyed it. At every edition we had a turnaround between 30 and, sometimes, even 100 people. The format of the event was quite simple: 4 pitches of 1 minute each and a mentoring of only 8 minutes. All preceded by an ice-breaking session and ended with a networking session.
The initial group of people wasn't bigger than 200. But we grew organically, week by week. In 2 years, we were around 3500 people, the event was replicated in another few cities in Romania and we reached a critical mass. At that point, backed by 2 angel investors, I decided to create a coworking hub on top of it. That's how Connect Hub, the business I'm managing right now (and where the picture above was taken) came to life. That's why I'm not more of a digital nomad right now, because I'm actually managing this business on the field, but I still work in coffee shops, especially in my circle day.
After we moved to Connect Hub from Starbucks, the structue of the audience changed a bit. Some people were just too cozy in coffee shops to enjoy the stretching of a coworking place, so they stopped coming. But other people, more business oriented, took their place. Instead of having people looking for fun in a coffee shop, now we had freelancers, entrepreneurs, programmers, coaches and so on. There was also a significant layer of transactions going on (coworking subscription, events, etc).
Slowly, Open Connect, as it was in its golden days, lost its momentum. But it took almost two years until it faded completely. After it was clear that it became just an empty form, we spent a few months to understand what happened and how we can leverage what we learned. We created a few iterations - in startup lingo, you could say "we pivoted" - and some of them turned to be really successful. For instance, we create a version of the event called Open Connect Summit, which was happening only once a month, but it was a full day long, with many keynotes, panels and even a one hour long workshop. It was a real success. We're still doing it, by the way.
So, the weekly Open Connect became less and less appealing. So, 3 weeks ago, we decided to leave it behind completely.
Instead, we created a new event, called Vertical Open Connect, in which we leveraged the experience we gained during the last 4 years, but we made it more targeted. Basically, every Vertical Open Connect addresses a specific market. There are VOPs for Blockchain, but there are also VOPs for minimalism, social media marketing or vegetarian cooking. It's like each resident of Connect Hub is creating, using the knowledge and experience we gained from Open Connect, his or her own tribe. Instead of having just one large, but diffuse, community, we now have a few much smaller, but also much targeted tribes.
Change Is Good
We live in a world where the only constant is change. Even if you stay still, you're still changing. You're growing older.
The thin line between running a successful business and struggling is to accept and embrace change. To lelverage as much as you can the experience, knowledge and intelligence you obtain from everything you do, and invest it in new stuff. Adapt and adjust. That's how you go forward.
Some things will be lost, that's for sure. Sometimes I miss the atmosphere at the Open Connects in Starbucks. Those were the "good old days". But they're gone and nobody can bring them back.
The good news is that in 3-4 years we will say the same about VOPs: "Remember how nice it was, when it all began? We were just a bunch of people, meeting at Connect Hub, talking about the future and the blockchain. And now we're so much further away on this road."
This post is part of a 30 days challenge on business, you can find the entire list of articles here.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
