Earned Advantages: How Indicio Turned Open Source Leadership into Global Business Growth

The Startup Credibility Challenge

When Indicio, a Public Benefit Corporation focused on decentralized identity solutions, launched in March 2020, the timing couldn't have been more challenging. The newly formed team, veterans of the decentralized identity and verifiable credentials space, unexpectedly found themselves building a startup in complete isolation, operating 100% remotely from day one.

But the pandemic wasn't their only challenge. Like all startups, Indicio faced a fundamental question: How do you prove you're enterprise-ready when you're brand new?

And for startups in the identity and blockchain space, the challenge is even more acute. They must convince governments and enterprises to trust their technology with sensitive data and critical operations.

The Traditional Playbook—And Its Costs

For many B2B SaaS startups, the answer involves significant capital investment. According to SaaS Capital, a leading provider of growth capital to B2B SaaS companies, private B2B SaaS companies spend a median of 8% of annual recurring revenue (ARR)  on marketing and 13% on sales, for a combined 21% of ARR. However, other industry research suggests that for early-stage B2B SaaS companies in aggressive growth phases, that number is even higher: 30-50% or more of new revenue on combined sales and marketing efforts.

If you have a startup aiming to reach just $2 million in revenue, that could represent $600,000 to $1,000,000 in sales and marketing expenses.

Traditional approaches include:

• Building case studies over several years through customer deployments
• Investing heavily in PR and analyst relations to establish thought leadership
• Paying for event sponsorships and speaking slots for $10,000 to more than $50,000 per conference for packages with speaking opportunities
• Spending years networking to build industry relationships and credibility
• Waiting to expand internationally until reaching $10 million in domestic revenue, which could take 5.5 years

For a well-funded startup, this path could easily take 3 to 5 years and several million dollars in marketing investment before achieving the kind of global, enterprise-ready credibility that opens doors to government contracts and international deployments.

Indicio took a fundamentally different approach.

Choosing Community Leadership Over Traditional Marketing

Indicio's founding team brought deep experience in Hyperledger Aries, Hyperledger Indy, and related projects that eventually became part of LF Decentralized Trust (LFDT). Rather than treating this experience as merely a technical background, they made open source community leadership central to their business strategy.

This infrastructure need aligned naturally with LFDT's mission. LFDT wasn't just hosting code; it was creating an ecosystem where technical, organizational, and governance components could come together to enable real-world deployments at scale.

Indicio built its flagship offering, Indicio Proven, directly on technologies openly developed by LFDT and, in some cases, now OpenWallet Foundation (OWF) communities:

• Aries Framework - For agent-to-agent communication (now part of OWF)
• ACA-Py - For issuer and verifier agent functionality (now part of OWF)
• Credo - For wallet and credential management (now part of OWF)
• Hyperledger AnonCreds - For credential format and standards 
• Hyperledger Indy - For decentralized blockchain ledger that serves as a Verifiable Data Registry
• Trust Over IP (ToIP) - Standards for governing decentralized identity 

But more importantly, Indicio committed to actively contributing back to these projects and leading within the community. These weren't theoretical contributions. Indicio builds and deploys solutions for customers' toughest challenges. Its contributed code delivers proven customer value in production environments: practical solutions that work at scale, not academic concepts.

Keeping Besu as the technical foundation reflects these trust requirements. "Besu is the underlying tech that LACChain deploys," Melendez explains. "It is the only protocol widely adopted that we consider mature enough and neutral from any vendor in the market."

From financial seeds to development harvest

LACChain's vision extends beyond financial applications to broader development goals. "We promote strategic use cases to solve real-world problems and engage strategic partners like IFAD to maximize adoption," says Melendez. IFAD, the International Fund for Agricultural Development, is a specialized United Nations agency focused on rural poverty reduction and agricultural development.

Rather than creating many small private networks, LACChain envisions purpose-specific networks for applications like CBDCs and financial use cases, all operating within a coordinated regional ecosystem that maximizes knowledge sharing and interoperability while respecting local regulatory contexts.

Rede Blockchain Brasil: A Blueprint for Governance

Public skepticism about government processes impacts everything from policy implementation to the functioning of essential institutions, including banks like the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES). BNDES is a federal public company associated with Brazil's Ministry of Development, Industry, Trade and Services. It provides long-term financing for projects contributing to Brazil's economic and social development, particularly in infrastructure, industry, and environmental sustainability.

"Trust of citizens in government processes is one of the most important problems in democracies, especially in those that are maturing," explains Gladstone Arantes Jr, Blockchain Specialist at BNDES. "It affects the whole country and society, but BNDES can be especially affected. Political movements that disagree with the Bank's activities can exploit the distrust to attack what they don't like."

This decision set the stage for what Indicio calls their "open source flywheel"—a self-reinforcing cycle of participation, contribution, visibility, growth, and reinvestment. It would prove to be a far more capital-efficient path than traditional marketing could ever provide.

The Open Source Flywheel: Five Earned Advantages

The open source flywheel circles through five stages:

1. Participate → Join working groups, contribute code, engage in governance
2. Contribute → Create meaningful technical contributions and thought leadership
3. Visibility → Earn speaking opportunities, analyst recognition, community reputation
4. Growth → Win customers, secure partnerships, expand globally
5. Reinvest → Learn from deployments, contribute improvements back to the community

This cycle, in turn, creates five specific earned advantages that define Indicio's growth.

Earned Advantage #1: Instant Credibility

Indicio team members immediately took on leadership positions within LFDT:

• Sitting on working groups and governance boards
• Contributing regularly to project roadmaps and technical documentation
• Serving on the LFDT Governing Board (CEO Heather Dahl)
• Chairing the Marketing Committee (Helen Garneau)

Rather than spending years and a significant marketing budget building credibility through traditional PR, analyst relations, and paid channels, Indicio demonstrated deep technical expertise and commitment to the community from its founding. 

When prospects researched the company, they found Indicio leaders actively shaping the very technologies the industry relied on. This credibility proved essential when competing for government contracts and enterprise deployments. RFPs increasingly require open source technology, and Indicio could point to its direct contributions and leadership in the exact projects specified.

Earned Advantage #2: Premium Speaking Opportunities

Through technical contributions and working group leadership, Indicio team members earned speaking invitations at events including:

• LFDT Member Summits
• LFDT Regional meetups and workshops
• LFDT Technical Working Group Presentations
• ID4Africa
• MyData
• European Identity Conference
• Internet Identity Workshop
• Trust Over IP Foundation events
• Identity Week America
• Open Source Summit Europe
• IDentity Week Europe
• Finaccellerate Europe
• Money 20/20
• Passenger Terminal Expo 2025
• CES
• Global Innovation Forum SAKA
• Phocuswright Conference
• IATA World Financial Symposium and World Passenger Symposium

And the value goes both ways. Indicio secured speaking platforms at major global conferences without incurring sponsorship expenses. More importantly, these weren't promotional slots. Indicio earned these positions because it is a technical expert and thought leader. The trust and authority that come from this distinction are impossible to quantify.

"You can’t buy the visibility you earn through participation," says Garneau.

Earned Advantage #3: Global Market Access

By building on open standards and maintaining deep interoperability with the LFDT ecosystem, Indicio deployed solutions across borders without traditional market entry barriers.

• Aruba: Travelers pre-submit digital credentials from their mobile devices for a seamless border crossing, from "plane to beach in 30 minutes." The system uses verifiable credentials derived from passport chips, which are sent directly to the Government of Aruba without third-party intermediaries.
• Kansas: School administrators hold state-required continuing education credentials digitally, which can be used to apply for higher education programs—streamlining a previously paper-intensive process.
• Japan: Students collect course credits from multiple universities in a mobile wallet through Digital Knowledge, addressing a common challenge where cross-institutional coursework is not standardized.
• Europe: Indicio was selected for the EU's APTITUDE large-scale pilot (Q4 2025), one of the world's most significant digital identity initiatives.

Rather than waiting years to reach $10 million in revenue before expanding internationally, and then spending 2-3 years and $30,000 or more per market on a traditional setup, Indicio achieved a six-continent footprint within five years of founding.

"Part of why the Government of Aruba–our partner in that project–was so keen on working with Indicio is because of our commitment and our leadership in the open source community," notes Garneau.

Earned Advantage #4: Early Market Intelligence

By being active in LFDT working groups and technical committees, Indicio's engineering team watched market needs as they emerged, before they became formal RFPs or public initiatives.

"As marketers, we need to understand where our technical teams are participating and what they are seeing," explains Garneau. "Because they see things in those contributions and those meetings that we might not. They see where the technology is headed because of what functions enterprises or governments are asking for."

Rather than subscribing to expensive analyst reports and market research services that provide after-the-fact analysis, Indicio gained real-time market intelligence. This early visibility enabled it to align product roadmaps with emerging market needs before they became widely known, identify which jurisdictions were moving toward digital identity deployments, understand regulatory requirements before they became formalized, and hear directly from potential customers about their pain points.

"These are early indicators that let us know where the market's headed," says Garneau.

Indicio could make strategic product and go-to-market decisions months ahead of competitors relying on traditional market research. Their roadmap reflected real customer needs because they heard those needs expressed directly in standards discussions. The marketing-engineering partnership became essential: "There is definite overlap between our events and marketing strategy for the year and the engineering and technical efforts going into the projects,” says Garneau. “I definitely encourage teams to keep those lines of communication open."

Earned Advantage #5: Partnership Magnetism

"Thanks to the community that LFDT offers and our participation and contributions to that community, we've received awards. We were mentioned in several analyst reports,” Garneau says. Indicio began receiving coverage from major analyst firms early in its history. Most recently, Gartner included Indicio in a Market Guide, a distinction that established companies often spend considerable resources pursuing. 

This recognition has led strategic partners to seek out Indicio based on its reputation in the open source community.

For example, Regula, one of the world's largest document authentication services with a library of 1,000+ document types from around the world, had collaborated with Indicio on its use of document checks for customer projects that use verifiable credentials for document verification. During that time, Regula witnessed the impact of Indicio's community leadership and the portability benefits the technology delivered to mutual customers. This led to a formal partnership integrating verifiable credentials directly with Regula’s authentication technology, enabling organizations to create verifiable credentials derived from authenticated paper documents and plastic cards.

Rather than investing in dedicated business development staff, trade show presence, and lengthy partner recruitment cycles, Indicio's community leadership served as a pre-qualification signal for potential partners. Partners could see active project contributions, technical expertise recognized by peers, participation in governance, and real-world deployments. This reputation accelerated partnership discussions from months to weeks and significantly reduced the typical friction in establishing strategic relationships. The approach has yielded more than eight strategic partnerships with industry leaders, including NEC, SITA, Dai Nippon Printing, Nippon RAD, AWS, Google Cloud, and Thales—with more in the pipeline.

More Effective Economics

Indicio's approach didn't eliminate marketing costs, but it fundamentally changed where those resources went. Instead of paying for visibility, they invested in:

• Technical talent that could meaningfully contribute to open source projects
•  Time for engineers and executives to participate in governance and working groups
• Community education through Indicio Academy, thought leadership, and technical documentation
•  Interoperability events that strengthened the entire ecosystem

The return on this investment wasn't just internal capability. It was external credibility, market intelligence, partnership opportunities, and global reach that would have cost millions to achieve through traditional means.

What's Next

Indicio remains committed to its role in LFDT governance, technical contributions, and community education.

"Open source gave our company visibility at an early stage," reflects Garneau. "The ecosystem gave us that credibility. That participation, those contributions, and then the deployments gave us our growth."

The strategy continues to pay dividends: each deployment creates new proof points, each proof point strengthens credibility, and each bit of credibility makes the next partnership easier to establish, allowing the flywheel to keep accelerating.