‘Ask’ and ‘Listen’ Irys Josh Benaron Advises Founders
Web3 is booming, and Arweave is becoming a popular infrastructure choice for developers. PermaDAO is a community where everyone can contribute to the Arweave ecosystem. It's a place to propose and tackle tasks related to Arweave, with the support and feedback of the entire community. Join PermaDAO and help shape Web3!
Author: Adeola @ Contributor of PermaDAO
Reviewer: Henry @ Contributor of PermaDAO
The founder of Irys, formerly called Bundlr, Josh Benaron, has identified the act of asking and listening as important skills for founders and idea pitchers to have so as not to alienate prospective partners.
Benaron in an interview on Permaweb Frontiers podcast described the stage a founder should do more asking and listening as the discovery phase. He further stated that he has learned in two years that it’s important to spend as much time on the discovery phase as possible as well as build relationships with people.
“One of the typical things that people do is they just pitch the solution without listening to anything and it’s not so much they don’t listen, it's that they don’t even ask. I think the key thing is asking like the right questions super early on,” Benaron said.
“...a lot of people just jump into okay this what we do; this is where i think we fit in and then you know you can quickly alienate prospective partners by shoving or forcing yourself upon these people.”
Benaron built and launched Bundlr (now Irys) in August 2021 to scale Arweave from a volume and transaction outlook. At the time, Arweave had a low throughput; it could only process eight transactions per second on average which amounted to 2,000 transactions every two minutes.
Furthermore, limitations in the accessibility of Arweave in some countries and some projects built on other blockchains were not open to acquiring the $AR to use the Arweave blockchain. There was also the need to solve the challenge of data seeding and replication on the Arweave Network.
Bundlr provided the solution to these problems by scaling transactions to more than 50,000 per second while also guaranteeing users of Arweave through its innovation that transactions and data are seeded and payment could be made in over a dozen tokens.
The success of Irys suggests that Benaron knows what it takes to build an important product. On its usage side, Irys has grown to process more than one billion transactions and has more than 800,000 users in two years. “I am fairly confident that we will hit 10 billion within the next two years,” Benaron said in August.
Only a few people will doubt that confidence especially with Irys latest announcement that it processed 15 million transactions in 24 hours, which makes it an all time high.
Indeed, a good product may have gotten Irys this far, but another factor that may have contributed to its progress are its strategic partnerships. Before it launched fully as Bundlr, Benaron said he had a partnership with Metaplex which was Solana’s biggest non fungible token platform to bundle files with an ANS 104 specification he had built. He revealed that the bundling was manual until the team found a way to automate operations.
Two years later, Irys has partnered with projects that have contributed to huge transaction records and adoption. The most recent of the top partnerships is one where Lens Protocol built Momoka with Irys and Arweave to help Lens protocol increase capacity to the level where it is able to process transactions at what it calls hyper scale. Others are Lit Protocol, deBridge Finance, Omni X.
For Benaron, forming strategic partnership is intentional. He said that his activities in business development, setting up partnerships has compounding value as opposed to focusing on product or other things.
“ I'm not saying don't focus on products you obviously need to work on making sure you have a sustainable business model and things like that but I think my time spent on BD (business development) has always been the most valuable way of me spending my time over the last two years,” he said.
“And for us it's really finding or at least finding partners before like really one aligned with the vision that sees the value in what we're building as well.”
“Debug" Program: If you find errors in this article, including typos, grammatical mistakes, incorrect descriptions, ambiguous meanings, redundant descriptions, or other problems, you can give us feedback and you will be rewarded with incentives. Click "here" to give feedback.
🔗 More about PermaDAO ：Website | Twitter | Telegram | Discord | Medium | Youtube
