Building a startup is never easy. But with the right strategy and process, it can be quite manageable. Sounds intriguing? We will show you how!

We all know the key factors investors look for when analyzing an opportunity

• Idea
• Timing
• Team
• Funding
• Business Model

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Some of these factors are hard to control. Some are easy to plan for.

But for now, let us take a look at relite.finance, a Dragonlabz project.

WORK IN STEALTH

OCT 2020 || The First Idea

Before you start a business, you need to have a concrete idea that hopefully matches market trends and current user expectations. The idea must not be too futuristic, but it must be innovative enough to attract the attention of potential customers and, of course, investors.

In our case, we identified the trend around DeFi in the fall of 2020 and focused our creativity on being innovative in this emerging market. Now that we agreed on the trend and therefore the direction of the new company to be created, we had to agree on a problem to solve.

In our understanding, it is still not attractive for non-technical people to enter the world of cryptocurrencies. Therefore, we focused our plans on building a product that would decisively simplify the user experience without losing the benefits of decentralization.

The idea was born: We want to build an application that allows users to borrow crypto collateral with just a few clicks through an easy-to-understand user interface.Delzar Khalaf, Managing Partner @dragonlabz

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Let us take a quick look at the main pillars to see what we have already covered:

1. THE IDEA

Yes, we have an idea that solves an existing problem. But is it tangible enough to attract attention? We instinctively knew that just focusing on UI /UX was not enough, so we had to work hard on the solution.

To create a unique value proposition, we broke our idea down to actual user flows and found that there was an interesting gap between what our competitors were offering and what we, as crypto enthusiasts, were looking for as customers.

The most important aspect we discovered is the risk associated with decentralized lending, in terms of market volatility and instant liquidation of an end user’s collateral. We need more time to react to such incidents as a real person.

With this in mind, we have further structured the business model and developed a reserve fund to address this critical gap from an end-user perspective. The reserve fund was intended to buy time for the end user to respond to market declines and other unexpected activity so that they do not lose the valuable collateral they have provided to the platform.

‍2. BUSINESS MODEL‍

As we continue to flesh out the idea, we define a business model – not validated and high level – but it is a working model. Sure it needs more attention and it’s too early to check it off the list. But it looks like we have found something interesting.

3. TIMING‍

One of those pillars that you can not control and can only predict with a bit of luck. However, in this particular case, we were sure that the timing was right and we were on a good track in terms of market acceptance.

4. FINANCING‍

Since we are looking at a decentralized business model, we all agreed that raising funds through a token sale is inevitable. But first, we need a team.

5. TEAM‍

One of the most important aspects of building a new business and making it work is the founding team. Fortunately, Dragonlabz has strong individuals in its network that we can approach with new ideas. But as of now, we do not have a team.