We recently connected with Watson Lewis-Rodriguez and have shared our conversation below.

Watson, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Talk to us about building your team? What was it like? What were some of the key challenges and what was your process like?

Hey, thanks for having me! My experience with Pigeon DAO has been interesting so far. From day one, it was just my Cofounder and I talking ideas and constantly reading the news, there was no employees or formal agreements. Through several months and research, we found contributors and volunteers to help us expand on the idea, and to help us formalize a solid understanding of what problem we are truly trying to solve. Only a couple weeks ago, after a few years of research and learning, we have finally made the right connections needed to reliably onboard and hire employees. We currently have 6-7 contributors now, and 3 part/full time employees in the project, with a variety of tasks and assignments!

Honestly, this feels pretty unusual based on the unusual concept of the business, however from my previous employment and reading countless documentation, onboarding manuals, and taking legal courses, we’re doing our best to make it work. We are fortunate to be taking a much more exciting way of onboarding people into our project, because we are a blockchain network and are a generally exciting project to be working on, developers and other entrepreneurs easily engage in this dApp, which makes the training process feel personalized and welcoming because there’s such a variety of different applicants and skillsets available to our project!

If I could start over, I would have likely considered taking the route my CFO and I are taking now, which is to hire and onboard people full time from the get-go while we work to fund the project, this is our primary focus for the next few months so we can leverage our time and enable employment for likeminded individuals around the world!

Watson, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

For sure! Well, we’re Pigeon DAO, we’re working on a Decentralized Courier Protocol (DCP) – a peer to peer courier delivery network for anyone, anywhere, to deliver anything. It’s as simple as that: We’re a marketplace that facilitates package deliveries for anyone where there is demand for it! We’re taking a born global approach towards this, and being a legally compliant network anywhere there is a courier on our dApp! Because there are previous concerns with an idea like this, it is worth noting, that we are progressing to be GDPR, CCPA, SEC, CPA2002 compliant with legally binding smart contracts, while onboarding and hiring legitimate couriers.

We are building this DCP in order to allow for entrepreneurs to build, sell and trade products anywhere in the world without corruption, greed and fear from enterprises, governments or individuals overlooking their work. Individuals have the complete right to trade and own what enters and exits their wallets and hands. But yes, anyways! I’m Watson, a recently graduated college student about to start a Bachelors in Computer Science and a Masters in Business Law, this project and working full time has pretty much been the only thing I’ve been working towards these last several weeks. I am interested in taking my SIE brokerage license in the following months, so I am learning and growing as much as I can!

I am actively learning about supply chain management, the legal system in London and the financing side of a startup in order to provide the marketplace for individuals and entrepreneurs globally. The purpose of this dApp is to build the next gateway into a truly decentralized society, and our project genuinely believes we are paving the way in Web3 to enable that dream.

We are most proud of our recent MVP, we finally have connected our Solidity smart contracts to the front end application because of our greatly motivated contributor Ayden Springer! He’s a greatly motivated student and has an excellent career and future ahead of him, he will most definitely change the world intensely some day. Because of his work, we are now able to test drives and test deliveries before starting to scale this project globally! After we test our deliveries in London, we will be taking our project into South America, specifically: Peru, Brazil, El Salvador, Colombia, Argentina and Venezuela! Naturally, Pigeon DAO will be accessible in the United States and all states through time and word of mouth awareness!

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

Although we are actively working on this, Noah the CFO, and I, have realized it’s best to work towards funding this project! I live in the United States, and he lives close to London, so we’ve found that it’s easier for me to start a full time serving position (currently working 60 hours a week to fund this, and slowing down that into 40 hours in the next few weeks!) while he works as a Smart Contract developer apart of a contractual agreement with a Web3 agency! We are both starting to fund this project gradually, however with us both working full time, we can now afford to hire 3-6 full time employees in the project. I am personally interested in outsourcing a lot of the development and workflow globally – we are fortunate to already have contributors in countries where the cost of living is much lower than the US, so we are able to pay them to work full time to ensure they have a good work and social balance!

We are currently at a 3 month goal timeframe, where after that, we will try and take our feet off the gas and take aim for seed funding, this will be used to get Noah and I back into the project full time, to networking and finding smaller communities to get involved in our project! As we now has a functional dApp, we can now aim to start making revenue and income from the business in the following months after beta testing, this should be easier and more profitable as we continue to network and share the vision of our project.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Honestly, the concept and business and push towards the MVP is probably the biggest proof of Noah and my resilience the most, we have spent countless days and he has surely spend countless nights staying up researching and learning use cases, competitor infrastructure and legal systems needed to ensure that we are a compliant, abiding and sustainable project that can help ensure a solid future in Web3. We have started discussing problems with supply chains and distribution networks since the start of COVID, however we both had a seed in our mind that this was an issue for years prior. It took us so many months to finalize the idea and finalize the vision, until one day Noah ‘just’ made it click in me what exactly we’re doing and what exactly we’re building this for: To enable entrepreneurs and individuals around the world to completely control what enters and leaves their wallet, and hands. We’ve learned much more that this is a social project and social movement rater than a for profit business. The resilience really showed through the constant reiteration and nightmares we’ve faced through disagreement and confusion! but, we’re better and starting to thrive because of it!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.pigeondao.org
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pigeondao/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pigeondao/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/pigeondao

Image Credits
Francisco Diaz, Contributor at Pigeon DAO, Ayden Springer, Contributor at Pigeon DAO, Noah Maskens, Contributor at Pigeon DAO Watson Lewis-Rodriguez, Contributor at Pigeon DAO