🔥 Co-founder for Decentralized Identity needed

Hey! I'm a full-stack engineer who wants to build a product around Decentralized Identity.

You can learn more about this market here: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/decentralized-identity-market-report

From the report:

The global decentralized identity market size was valued at USD 379.66 million in 2021 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 88.2% from 2022 to 2030.

(eye on the prize baby)

Example of an existing solution: https://spruceid.com/

I'm looking for a co-founder who is a strong business developer, preferably with experience in web3.

The connection with web3 is that at the root of Decentralized Identity stands the user's wallet, hosting cryptographic keys, data, credentials, or utility NFTs (technically, the core is the DID Registry, but I'm speaking from a user's perspective). As a parallel, I learned that the Daimler / Mercedes group is looking into ways to rent electric cars where users could unlock the car using an NFT.

For example, our product could enable users to:

• host their driver's license inside their wallet in a verifiable way (meaning it was issued by a trusted party); a car rental website could request to know if the user has a driver's license, before allowing him to rent the car
• selectively allow sharing of personal information, like medical records, with a public institution requesting that piece of data
• login into a website using their wallet, and save their data inside the wallet, instead of the website's database
• many other use cases that can easily be brainstormed into strong differentiators; but most importantly we should ask ourselves if it's a "nice to have" or "must-have"

In other words:

• on one side, users will own their data and can choose who can access it
• on the other side, apps & websites will have to integrate with wallets, exposing a myriad of new features impossible today
• we can profit from offering solutions to the both sides

The cool thing about Decentralized Identity (also known as Self-sovereign Identity, or SSI) is that it will bring a paradigm shift in the way people use their identity and data over the internet. People already name it web5.

Once we build the technical foundation (infrastructure, SDKs, APIs, with enough abstraction in mind to enable us to fit pieces like legos), it would be easy to:

• maintain our main product
• implement custom customer needs
• build adjacent products.

It's tough to build a rock-solid foundation and deliver an MVP in a timely manner, so balance is key to avoiding technical debt.

Some challenges:

• finding a business developer who understands the web3 market and has a strong network;
• even if I can code everything myself (supposing that we have a plan), we would need to scale to speed things up
• I need to spend more time on R&D, absorb information, and build confidence (already doing it)
• the first draft of the W3C DID standard was published 3 years ago, and even if people have been building SDKs to implement it since then, SSI still represent a development and business challenge, being so alien (I couldn't easily identify a mature solution yet); this means we should expect breaking changes, but the good part is that we will grow together with the ecosystem
• an early investment would be great to support the team
• judging by the above report, there are some big players in this industry, and we should be keen enough to get our fair share of the pie

Our objectives for Q1-Q2-beyond would be to:

• analyze existing solutions
• identify customer needs
• write a pitch
• build an MVP (composed of a SaaS and a mobile wallet app)
• land our first paying customers
• get funded
• expand

What do you guys think? Could you recommend someone?

Please comment or email me: andrei /at/ popa /dot/ nz

Thanks