Category: Thoughts

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)

“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)

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)

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!

“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?