Two years ago, we set out to begin building The Relationship Layer of the Internet. An idea forged by the extreme neglect that modern B2B software has for the value and information that is available in emerging technologies. Instead, the industry remains hostage and completely dependent on the infrastructure of a centralized professional network application that was developed nearly 30 years ago. 

The most essential tools and technologies are completely inadequate to service blockchain-based businesses. It is impossible to connect any emerging data source if it doesn’t fit the traditional schema of LinkedIn or professional email. Further, phishing links, imposters, scammers, and draining created a frustratingly difficult process to execute basic functions of business development. None of which are issues for traditional teams. 

This is a massive problem for the industry and for adoption of amazing companies being formed in the fire of a bear market. It is difficult enough to build in an emerging economy, but web3 teams are at an extreme disadvantage without having the essential foundation for growth.

A few insights that we noticed in particular:

1. The infrastructure layer now captures more value than the application layer. This changes “sales” into a more collaborative process. Now, infrastructure is paying applications to build integrations or bring a new existing user base. This changes the objective and process of outreach entirely. 

2. Conferences were the industry's way to create any infrastructure for trusted connectivity between teams. Specifically, you could discover new projects that you might not have seen on Twitter/X in addition to validating yourself as a real person and not a bot/scammer. 

3. Mass outreach, a staple of calculated growth for BD in web2, was absolutely not accepted in this industry. You can quickly get banned on Discord, Telegram only allows 5 cold outreach a day, and Twitter has a dense filter on cold DMs. 

4. Teams are not using or paying for LinkedIn anymore and are instead reliant on the aforementioned tools in order to discover and cultivate professional relationships. 

5. There is no way to connect these new tools into traditional B2B software making the process of team-wide collaboration nearly impossible. All of these channels remained unable to be processed to fit the traditional schema of LinkedIn and business email. 

All of these changes might be seemingly minor and insignificant if they stand alone. However, the compounding implications of not being able to run a predictable GTM can lead to the failure of a potentially massively successful business. 

Teams shouldn’t need to pay 20x the price in conference costs, traveling around the world, to connect. They should be able to identify perfect candidates to connect with and be able to reach out in a cost-effective manner with some predictability in ROI of these actions. 

Teams shouldn’t wait for everyone to adopt traditional tooling. They should be able to use whatever platform they prefer and have the freedom and flexibility to leverage their professional equity without sacrificing value by switching platforms. 

Teams shouldn’t play a guessing game on their growth projections given a finite amount of runway. They should be able to calculate a basic LTV to CAC ratio using the tools that drive and run their business. 

Simply put, we took all of these insights and boiled down our efforts into three main categories that we wanted to transform: 

1. Discovery

2. Connection

3. Value

In a borderless ecosystem, our belief was that we could accomplish a transformative improvement in these three areas by focusing on what we believe to be the modern gold of the internet: relationships. 

Relationships are the most valuable resource online. Relationships are what drives business forward. Relationships are what validates humanity. Relationships can be the difference between success and failure. 

What’s incredibly unique about online relationships in 2024, is that they are no longer linear. Instead of collecting connections to a professional identity (maintained and carefully curated on LinkedIn), you might just meet your next co-founder or investor named Ho Li Kow on Telegram or PotatoHead#2121 in a gaming Discord. There are infinite possibilities on not only the source of the connection but even more in the nurturing of that connection. 

That is why we wanted to solve these problems by understanding “how do we connect today?” 

This question of the evolution of modern, online, and global connectivity was at the foundation of the three pillars that we wanted to transform. 

We couldn’t build a discovery engine because we didn’t know who you already knew. 

We couldn’t build a connection tool because we didn’t know how to define what a meaningful, long-term partnership really looked like. 

To discover these answers, we needed to solve how to properly value relationships.

Our belief is that if we are able to truly understand the dynamics of relationship development, everything else can be built on top of that foundation. We could build the most valuable infrastructure for the future of connectivity. And, we could do it in a meaningful way that enables our contributors and users to create their own value for the future of the internet. 

An internet that has verifiable customer data, complete permissioned access, and an ecosystem of applications facilitating and aggregating the transfer of this new data layer.

Relationship data that isn’t beholden to a closed off ecosystem, paid API, or only accessible through expensive integrations. 

We believe in a new era of software for professional relationship data. That is what we aimed to build with 3RM. A tool that is able to connect to any source, operate as a middleware between web2 + web3, and create the foundation for valuable customer data.

For the past two years, this is what we’ve obsessed over. We support 1,500 different teams in how they manage their external relationships. 3RM works with some of the largest names in the industry and has imported 300,000+ conversions that we estimate to be well over 1b in potential data points. With plans to consistently scale this by adding more requested channels and sources like Slack, Discord, Calendar, and on-chain integrations.

All of this without ever compromising on our integrity for the privacy of our users and our user’s users.

So, why was it free?

3RM was always going to be free for two key reasons. 

The first is that we ultimately wanted to support teams the best way that we could. Our mission was to understand relationships and a lot of our learning came from connecting with almost all of our users to understand their unique business use cases. 3RM made it possible to deeply connect with countless teams in order to build a great brand and entrench ourselves in understanding the problem that we are aiming to solve. 

The second reason is that we always wanted to build an ecosystem of products that revolutionizes B2B software with blockchain-enabled technology. We never wanted to only make 3RM. Sure, there are plans to create a paid enterprise verison in the roadmap. But ultimately, our vision has always been a lot larger in building an ecosystem of products attached to what we believe to be the most valuable customer dataset ever created. Real, validated relationships.

An ecosystem that allows its users to own their own data, bring it wherever they want, and exist in any tools available. B2B software enables so many uniquely beautiful opportunities to build software on top of valuable relationship data. Where a protocol enables users to contribute more value by participating with other applications. More importantly, practical applications. 

Applications that transform data enrichment, prospecting, ads audience building, recruiting, customer success, or marketing automation. Applications that create real value for business that can be measured in ROI and push the industry further solving the problems that we outline above. 

We believe that 3RM has been beyond successful in both of these objectives. We have been able to connect with countless teams and our users have been generating more value for themselves as they use our first product in the ecosystem. 

We started with the tool and now we are beginning to build the network. 

That is what we are excited to share with you today. 

Over time, we are working on progressively decentralizing and creating complete user controls for 3RM users to be able to port their data to other applications within the ecosystem. Our ultimate success would be creating a data layer that connects all versions of the internet together - past, present and future. 

For what it’s worth, the intent of this post isn’t to change any of our policies or practices. 3RM remains the exact same in the fact that we don’t sell any of your data, we don’t store any message content, and we maintain the highest level of honor to practicing the best practices around security and compliance. 

We wanted to take this opportunity to share more about our vision as a company. The reason ‘why’ we are building these products and what we aim to accomplish. 

We believe a great opportunity to start sharing our vision begins today. 

We are beyond excited to announce the private beta launch of our next product within the ecosystem - BD.xyz

Focused on solving the “discovery” problem, BD.xyz is a next-generation prospecting application unlike anything available on the market today. 

The vision of BD.xyz is to be able to contribute more information to the relationship layer by displaying potential leads, paths to connections, and a frictionless way to leverage your network for connections. Enabling our users, companies, and ecosystems to leverage the value of their verified relationships to create a layer of trust in online connectivity. 

To date, BD.xyz is working with a large segment of early 3RM users with rolling invitations to more teams and individuals over the next couple of months. Establishing a valuable, curated network of professionals with the ecosystem and generating more discovery than any platform available. 

We are incredibly excited about continuing on with our mission and vision for the future of the internet. We’ve received an incredible response from our early adopters and believe that this will play an integral role in further the development of our protocol. 

Over the coming weeks, you can expect more exciting information from the team about our continued development in both of our first products. In addition, we will be setting up a third entity (3Labs), to share consistent updates about the development of our network. 

If this is something that you would like to contribute to or if anything said here resonates with you, we would love to hear from you. Please feel free to reach out to us on email or Telegram. 

We look forward to having more exciting news in the future.