The fever of establishing a knowledge enterprise or a tech startup is crawling amid Iranian entrepreneurs (Iranian Startups) and despite their chances for success or failure, it is now recognizing as a trend in the nation. Considering its “not that much” old history and traction the industry has in Iran, there are pitfalls which both idea owners and VC investors must look for. New terms and phrases are now coming to the Iranian Startups ecosystem and sometimes they are confusing enough for all participants to lead them either make a wrong path for their businesses or a regretful investment decision.

In this article, we are about to dig a little deeper into a new concept raising among Iranian Startups which they use abnormally in pitch deck meetings as their future path of glory. Yes, we are talking about blockchain technology and its odd popularity amid Iranian entrepreneurs. We are not going to discuss the technology in details, however, there shall be a clear roadmap for businesses to look every time they decide to talk about blockchain showing them should they even consider the idea in the first place or it’s better to steer clear just from “big words”.

The World Economic Forum designed 11 questions (please see here for the original graphic) which every entrepreneur (including Iranian Startups)  shall ask him/herself before opening their development plans statements with “we are going to use blockchain technology in our business favour and it will boom the market!”. Answering these queries will help you make a better initial assessment of whether blockchain is the right solution for the problem you are facing. Let’s take a closer look:

• Are you trying to remove intermediaries, third parties or brokers?

If your answer to this question is no, then please do not talk about utilizing blockchain technology in your business development models.

• Are your assets digital or physical?

Once you realize that the blockchain concept has nothing to do with physical assets you will be one step closer to not wasting your time and money with ideas that do not concern you at all.

• Does your digital asset have an authoritative record?

If yes, maybe your product and business are eligible for utilizing blockchain technology, otherwise, forget about that!

• Are you dealing with high frequency and fast transactions?

In case your answer is yes, then you should be aware that currently, blockchain is not efficient on that, however, the solutions are developing. If you answer no to this query, then you should continue the questioner further.

• Are you planning to store massive amounts of non-transactional data?

If yes, the above answer applies here as well. If no, continue

• Do you need a trusted party for different reasons in your transactions?

In case of a yes, then blockchain might work for you, yet further research is needed. If no, then you shall move forward.

• Do you have contractual agreements or exchange of values in your business model?

The above statement will work here as well.

• Do you need shared write access?

If you are bound by your product or business model to create shared access of read/write provisions for authorized parties, in other words, do some/all of the members of the network in question need to be able to write transactions to the blockchain? then blockchain might come in handy. However, the following query is important to answer before taking any actions.

• In case you have several contributors, do they trust each other?

If your answer is yes, they must seek whether their interests are the same, close or completely different. If they are somehow on the same page then the blockchain tech might help your business, however, further due diligence is needed. If they have opposing takes, then you need to decide on the below query:

• Do you need to take control of the functionality?

If yes, then most probably the blockchain technology in form of a private/permissioned ledger will help you.

• However, if you need for the transaction to be public and you are okay with giving up the functionality control:

Then a public ledger from of blockchain will do the job for you.

Bottom line and considering all the above queries, utilizing blockchain technology is not something you just add to your pitch meeting impressing the investors and luring them in for raising capital. There must be a string case behind and investors must get themselves familiar with the basics of the technology in order to be fooled with pretty words.

The below image shows the top priorities that blockchain might be able to answer: