I came across the questionnaire by IDEO. The main differentiator for IDEO is they get deeply involved in the projects they back. They not only do the UI/UX design but also get involved in the economic/incentive design on the protocol front.
A question that stands out from the survey is:
The question above is a great insight into how they think about the crypto space. It addresses the fundamental challenge of the product managers concerning:
- Market sentiments - the general attitude of developers in the market
- Consumer pain-points - specific problem areas developers are facing
- Needs and aspirations - unsatisfied desires that motivate their actions
The entire crypto industry is working diligently towards mass-market adoption. How do crypto product managers know that they are directionally correct when the state of the world is still a vision and not a current reality. Vision or Hallucination?
In our framework, there are two primary ways of navigating in the right direction:
- Make crypto adoption and on-ramps easier - grow existing user-base
- Point crypto innovations towards the mainstream, existing user-bases
Numbers behind the crypto market
| Options | Current size | CAGR ~ 3 years |
|---|---|---|
| Developers with non-crypto experience | ~25 M | ~1.5x |
| Developers with Crypto experience | ~50,000 | ~10x |
Case study 1: Near protocol
With NEAR, developers can build and deploy scalable decentralized applications in minutes on their developer-friendly blockchain. With the narrative that NEAR has, they are fundamentally making it easier for non-crypto developers to onboard on their blockchain.
Their thesis is that there are currently and optimistically about 10K dev in the crypto world. If they can grow the number of crypto devs to 500K (10x growth) – that’s a massive opportunity they are unlocking.
Case study 2: Fortmatic
Fortmatic, with their flagship product Magic, eliminates the need for passwords by making them customizable, future proof, and passwordless. Developers can essentially build apps with a few lines of code.
Their approach is to target existing devs (25 million) and capture a meaningful share of the market. So, even if they were able to convert 1% of the existing user-base, they will have 250K devs, which is pretty exciting.
Conclusions
Both the case-studies tell us that you need to considerately focus on a specific use-case. Please read our previous blog post on narrow use-cases with a meme-able narrative.
What other case-studies you think are focusing on peculiar use-cases?