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Thoughts

Don’t Listen To What Your Customers Say, Look At What They Do

We spotted this from an interview of Instagram’s Kevin Systrom – the known product wisdom is to listen to customer feedback always and tune the product accordingly. But there is always a difference between what the customers say and what they do. They might say they do not like feature X, but they might be using it often. Or, they might say that they love a particular feature, but might not be using it at all. This scenario is not an exception – it occurs more often than many of us realize. 

With all the amplification effects of social media, it is a challenge to ignore what customers ‘say’ and focus on what they ‘do’ with the product. But it is extremely important to measure and understand how your customers interact with your product. That is the signal. What they say about your product, is mostly just noise.

If you are working on a product / service and are trying to work on a list of ‘to-do’ items derived from customer feedback, apply the ‘word or action’ filter – and work on those feedback items that come under ‘action’. Not just because actions speak louder than words – in this case, words do not mean anything at all.

(You can follow the author on Twitter)

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Thoughts

You Do Not Have To Sell What You Make

“In the factory, we make cosmetics. In the drug store, we sell hope.” – Charles Revson, Founder of Revlon (Source)

It is a lesson that is easy to forget, particularly in the world of software, where we mostly try to sell what we make. Well, think again. Is your marketing message tuned to what you make or to what people want?

You do not have to sell what you make. You just have to sell what people will buy. Sounds crude, but works all the time.

(You can follow the author on Twitter)

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Thoughts

A New Heuristic For Startup Ideas

Sometimes, you will see that users of some popular product/service are “inventing” new uses for existing features, to help them achieve something that they need. When that happens, it is a clear indication that a product/service that does just that “newly invented” piece potentially has a solid number of users right off the gate.

Let us take some examples: real time status updates – before Twitter, users were trying to use offline messages in messenger services – “stepping out for lunch” – an indication that a real time status update service was needed. Foursquare (with its check-in feature) is another example.

We do have two examples that are open right now – Reddit’s AMA (Ask Me Anything) is probably a good standalone service. And the fact that Pinterest is used to pin things that are not really pinnable – there are many services waiting to be tapped there.

Any more ideas that you can think of?

(You can follow the author on Twitter)

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Thoughts

‘Your Map Is Wrong’

On stage with John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly at the 2010 Web2.0 Summit, Mark Zuckerberg stared at the Summit backdrop, that had a map with various consumer technology areas that have been ‘conquered’, charted out. “Your Map is Wrong,” Zuckerberg said. “The biggest part of the map has to be uncharted territory — this map makes it seem like it’s zero-sum, but it’s not. We’re building value, not just taking it away from someone else.” (Source)

“It is not a zero-sum game” is something we tend to forget as we start competing in the marketplace. There is this beauty of economics – you don’t have to make anyone poorer in order for you to become richer. Wealth is not a fixed pie (PG).

Steve Jobs famously said that there is no point in asking the customer what they need because they wouldn’t know until it is given to them. That is classic uncharted territory. None of us knew we needed Steve’s devices until they were given to us.

The next time you look at a map, look for the uncharted territory. Without that, your view of the map is most definitely wrong.

(You can follow the author on Twitter)

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Thoughts

Web3: Let’s Not Miss the Forest for the Trees

Something interesting is happening in the technology world – many brilliant and accomplished technologists are outright dismissing Web3 in its current shape and form- criticisms range from ‘it’s a solution searching for a problem’ to ‘all of Web3 is one big Ponzi’.

There are certain points that need to be addressed in more detail by the Web3 community – for instance, the criticism that VCs with deep pockets and strong networks get in early on token sales, and use ‘bull markets’ to use retail money as their exit liquidity – but such criticisms mostly miss the big picture – Web3 promises to fill a critical missing piece in today’s world wide web – provable ownership of digital assets recorded on decentralized and immutable datastores.

Who owns your email address? If it is not you, how is this not the biggest problem that everyone should be trying to solve? How about other important pieces of your digital identity – let’s try this – can you name a single digital asset that you truly own?

Let’s define the term ‘ownership’ so we clearly understand the magnitude of the problem here. Here is an attempt – If you truly own a digital asset, you should be able to prove that you own it without relying on a trust hub and nobody should be able to take the asset away from you or control your access to the asset or limit your ability to do anything with it.

Now let’s try the same question we asked earlier – can you name a single digital asset that you truly own?

The fact that Web3 makes these digital assets programmable is really just icing on the cake. It is clear that there is a fundamental, multi-trillion dollar hole in the current iteration of the Internet that Web3 is attempting to fix – provable, decentralized, ‘true’ ownership. Our world has seen a lot of progress through capitalistic models, so it is only natural that Web3 would have such flavors and hence it its current shape might not appeal to all ideology sets – but it will definitely help if the critics really ask themselves what is it that they are missing that the Web3 folks seem to be so deeply convinced about. Let’s Not Miss the Forest for the Trees!

(You can follow the author on Twitter)

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Thoughts

The Future Is Getting Minted, One NFT At A Time

NFTs are not just glorified digital receipts – they are the building blocks of a new ‘user-owned’ internet. Consider these three points:

  1. All of us are creators. We all create stuff – with varying scope and impact – but we all create stuff all the time. Photos, tweets, emails, messages – every single one of us, every single day. We have always been creators – and the new tools (smartphones, cameras..) just enable us to create even more.
  2. All of us are collectors. We all collect stuff – in different forms and domains – but we all collect stuff all the time. Photos, art, souvenirs, in-game assets – every single one of us, every single day. We have always been collectors – and the new tools (digital goods, tokens..) just enable us to collect even more.
  3. A new way to prove ownership is gaining acceptance – “NFTs are blockchain-based records that uniquely represent pieces of media. The media can be anything digital, including art, videos, music, gifs, games, text, memes, and code. NFTs contain highly trustworthy documentation of their history and origin, and can have code attached to do almost anything programmers dream up (one popular feature is code that ensures that the original creator receives royalties from secondary sales). NFTs are secured by the same technology that enabled Bitcoin to be owned by hundreds of millions of people around the world and represent hundreds of billions of dollars of value.” Source

A perfect storm is brewing. The future is getting minted, one NFT at a time.

Categories
Thoughts

What Most Critics Miss About NFTs: The Participants Are Non-Fungible Too

These are early days in the march towards a truly user-owned internet, and it is quite normal that the critical building blocks of such an effort (in this case, NFTs) get misunderstood and criticized quite a bit. Here is one perspective to help NFT critics see the light.

Who pays 69 Million dollars for a gif that you can download on the Internet? How about 2.9 Million dollars for a tweet? Even if you knock off a few zeros from these numbers to discount for bubble-time behavior, it is impossible to miss the signal here – this has all the makings of something huge. Or does it?

In most cases. the buyers of these non-fungible tokens do not even get to own the copyright of the artifact in question. There is also no direct way to monetize these purchases at the moment, and not all of them fall under the ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ bucket – particularly since what is being bought, is basically ‘digital certificates of authenticity’  – surely it would take quite a bit of imagination to see beauty in 0s and 1s, right?

So here is the perspective that might clarify things a bit – the user-owned internet magnifies the fact that the participants – which is all of us – buyers, sellers and middlemen – are basically non-fungible. We are all unique in our own ways, and, critically, that includes what we value and how we value them. Unlike other markets where a lot of analysis can be done with ‘buyers’ and ‘sellers’ as groups, with the user-owned internet, it is impossible to group the participants in any way that would facilitate such analysis. Every single participant is unique, and more importantly, for the vast majority of transactions, unlike other markets, mostly represent individual interests alone (DAOs are the exception). This, coupled with the fact that our digital lives will soon just become our lives overall, should help the NFT critics see the light.

If you can imagine a world where you wake up, look at your fungible portfolio (stocks, currencies etc) and your non-fungible portfolio (your NBA topshots collection, that Elon Musk tweet etc) – complete with performance stats (returns in the case of fungible, and revenue / interest indicators – video views / bids in the case of non-fungible) and extrapolate that to the whole world – each with their own non-fungible portfolio, based on their own interests (Chess NFTs / Recipe NFTs / Movie Moment NFTs..) – you will see the light. We are all unique – we are all non-fungible!

Categories
Regulation

Crypto: A New Era Beckons?

Two very significant developments happened in Crypto this week: Coinbase filed in preparation for an IPO, and the US FinCEN released a new proposal effectively mandating KYC for unhosted wallets. Together, we believe these developments would have profound implications for the crypto space.

While Coinbase has always had high standards to list coins on its platform, as a public company, such a key revenue-generating activity for the company could see meaningful changes. The “Coinbase pump” could get a totally new meaning in the Crypto space – the extreme scenario could be that the “pure crypto” world – coins and teams that uphold privacy and censorship resistance as the key values that blockchains stand for – could move away from the Coinbase world altogether. The scenario at the other extreme, where most coins do what it takes to move over to the “official” side – also accelerated by Wall Street’s expectations on a newly public Coinbase – forcing the other coins fade into irrelevance – is also possible.

The other significant development is FinCEN’s proposal – that transactions from regulated exchanges to individual wallets not subject to regulation (as well as unregulated foreign exchanges) should be subject to an existing automatic reporting requirement – Currency Transaction Reports (CTR) for cash transactions (Source),

In summary, the proposed rules would

  1. “Require banks and money service businesses (‘MSBs’) to submit reports, keep records, and verify the identity of customers” who make crypto transactions into unhosted (read: private) wallets.
  2. Require that “convertible virtual currency” and “legal tender digital assets” be classified as “monetary instruments” and are therefore subject to the requirements of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA).
  3. Require that any transaction(s) totaling more than $10,000 in a 24-hour period be reported to FinCEN, a bureau of the US Treasury Department, and that customer’s identity must be verified; many transactions would require a lower threshold of $3,000. Know-your-customer (KYC) rules, then, apply to even private crypto wallets.

Source

These two developments, along with Facebook’s Diem could very well end up defining a “new Crypto” – at least for the US – a new asset class that is completely regulated, that looks like the “old Crypto” – but does not feel like it. But the new Crypto could be a fun new world – enabling a new generation that would clearly see digital assets as a category of things to own, along with physical and financial assets, and decentralized in the sense that it is not owned or operated by one party – and censorship resistance and privacy could become concepts that might just need to wait a lot longer.

As we enter this new era in Crypto, it would be helpful to remember this: A list of wallets with names and addresses, with Bitcoin balances that add up to 21 million, is probably not what Satoshi had in mind when he/she/they hit publish on that white paper in 2008. That said, a promising new era beckons the space, and crypto being crypto, it will be exciting!

Categories
Thoughts

Decentralization Deserves a Chance

“In crypto, the price is the news” said a smart person on Twitter. Today, it most definitely is. With Bitcoin blowing past 20K USD and folks in technology and finance struggling to fit narratives to price changes, it is important that in the midst of all the noise around price we don’t lose sight of a very significant and impactful paradigm shift that Bitcoin is an instance of: Decentralization.

The ‘Digital Gold’ narrative has given a very effective model for most of us to understand Bitcoin. But the simplicity of this model is also its curse – it mostly hides the actual promise that Bitcoin represents – that trust can indeed be decentralized, and a ‘hubless’ world is very much possible. In fact, in a digital world where we all increasingly understand that “we are the product” – a move towards such a hubless economy might be inevitable.

It will help to remember that Decentralization is not a discrete point in the space of how economies work, but a continuous spectrum. The most recent changes in economic models that we have witnessed (Hotel chains to AirBnB, Taxi companies to Uber) tell us that directionally, we are definitely moving towards a peer-to-peer (P2P) model for many economic functions – and while there might be attempts to decentralize most functions (very comparable to the Internet), the ones where a P2P model would be the best fit, the model will stick. Crypto (and the token model representing ownership/utility/governance) just happens to be the current transactional framework that enables such economies to function. There will be more.

Unfortunately, Bitcoin – the first instance of this shift – happens to address a very tricky concept: Money. The fact that many of the early cryptocurrencies that came after Bitcoin chose to just refine the concept – improving what Bitcoin did, on parameters like scalability, privacy and programmability, but still focusing on the concept of Money – brought a lot of skepticism and negative commentary to the space. Obviously, if you put anonymity and Money in the same sentence, the interpretations cannot be very positive. The 2017 ICO boom, where many players chose to ignore the regulations set by governments and organizations that oversee fundraising, added strength to the perception that decentralizing trust is not a good idea – and made many smart people both in technology and finance just stay away from Crypto.

So here is the one good thing that the price of Bitcoin does to the space: it brings the attention back. And while we have the attention, it is important for us to ask: If the Internet – with its promise of disintermediation – deserved a chance, if the sharing economy – with its promise of providing more economic opportunities to individuals – deserved a chance, then, with its promise of a P2P world with no hubs that might misuse our trust for profit – Decentralization Deserves a Chance?