30 essays 30 days

I am writing an essay a day as a habit to improve my writing. I will write about product-market fit in crypto.

#2 Application and Infra Cycles (09/23/22): A few weeks back I started the process of finding a job in crypto, which meant a lot of conversations with investors and participants — both crypto believers and sceptics — to make an honest bet on what the next big things in crypto are. The question that stuck with me was: why aren't there enough applications in crypto that solve real problems? That sent me back to one of my favourite pieces of all time, App Infra Cycles, which explores how new technologies move through cycles of infrastructure followed by applications.

A lot of the infrastructure built in the last bear market was focused on buying and selling — exchanges, DEXs, marketplaces, wallets, and L2s — which made the main use case speculation. What we need now is better application-infra (middleware) that makes building in crypto easier, applications focused on utility rather than speculation to cross the chasm, and experiments that keep pushing both the technology and adoption frontiers forward. There will end up being two clear sets of companies in crypto: the ones building for billions, and the ones expanding the frontier.

#1 Technology and adoption — the two frontiers in crypto today (09/15/22): A lot of activity in crypto falls into one of two buckets — expanding what's possible (the technology frontier) or expanding adoption, getting crypto to people who otherwise wouldn't use it. Take two examples in NFTs: NounsDAO is using NFTs and DAOs to experiment with funding, governance, and community — its users are crypto natives who don't care much about UX because they're motivated by being part of new experiments. Starbucks Journey Stamps, on the other hand, targeted the brand's 30 million loyalty members, most of whom had never heard of NFTs — the program never even used the words NFT, crypto, or blockchain, and let people buy with a credit card.

Both approaches matter for crypto to get big: we need to expand the technology frontier while also getting more people into crypto. Other ideas I'm chewing on: using token incentives effectively, loyalty points on-chain, and why composability matters for making a whole product easier to build.