In the past few months, I have had conversations with dozens of startup teams. I found that some teams did not start by thinking about users from first principles, were unclear about user needs, made assumptions about what users want, or made too many assumptions about users.
Technological innovation is fascinating. But the ultimate audience for all of this is the users. As Steve Jobs said: “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.” Entrepreneurs need to think more about being user-centric and adopt a “work-backwards” mindset.
It’s time to refocus on the users.
UI/UX
Similar to interfaces like Uniswap and Lido have become benchmarks in the Crypto space. In UI/UX design, it should be as simple and intuitive as possible, allowing users to understand and use it easily, minimize friction, and make the minimum assumptions about users.
UI
Websites are often the main entry point for users to a project. As a heavy product experience user, I had two moments of collapse that left a deep impression:
When I opened a website, the first thing I saw was three or four entry buttons. When I instinctively clicked on these buttons, they took me to different pages, each of which contained a lot of information and complex design elements. I suddenly felt anxious, not knowing where to start.
The project did not provide any documentation. Documentation is a portal for many users to quickly understand project information, a faster and more efficient way to understand a project than whitepapers and blogs. Some “buzzwords” on the homepage, besides providing slogan-like promotion, do not help users fully understand a project.
UX
I want to use two examples to illustrate that the current Crypto user experience needs higher granularity optimization.
Mobile End
I have always believed that the importance of the mobile end is being overlooked. Currently, most dapps lack a smooth mobile experience and can only be used through (wallet-integrated) browsers, requiring switching back and forth between the browser and wallet to operate. Imagine you are a fervent memecoin trader, and when you can’t guarantee that you are always in front of the computer, you’ll feel anxious about your position. Therefore, a mobile Dexscreener will give you some peace of mind.
Through a partnership with Privy, friend.tech has taken a step towards an integrated wallet. However, compared to the mobile end of CEX, DEX still has a way to go in terms of user experience. For time-sensitive trades (such as contract trades), real-time notification push or price alerts are useful. For social apps, the importance of sharing anytime, anywhere goes without saying.
AI Agent
AI and LLM can help users understand a new project well.
For example, when I visit a Layer2 Ecosystem page, I’m usually confused. It displays common protocols like Uniswap, Aave, a bunch of wallets, tools, and more. I know these protocols, but I don’t know where to start. Imagine an Agent that can tell you what dapps everyone is playing on this Layer2 based on recent chain data, what the fastest growing protocols are. It can even analyze the behavior of each user address to provide targeted recommendations.
These things make me feel that there is still a lot of room for improvement in Crypto in terms of UX. A few years ago, I would think that we didn’t have enough usable Infra to support mass adoption applications. Recently, we have scalable underlying chains, easy-to-integrate user onboarding processes; it’s time to focus more on UX.
Stickness..Wat do?
In Crypto, it’s relatively easy to obtain some short-term growth data – you can immediately launch a campaign and give away some Genesis NFTs to achieve short-term goals. This has practically been seen as a hint that users have some expectations of potential benefits in the future. However, attracting real users and gaining their long-term adoption is a much more challenging task, with virtually no shortcuts on this path. (Uniswap spent nearly three years making a good product before DeFi Summer arrived)
It’s worth noting that Warpcast currently accounts for 90% of network activity, but other clients can offer various unique proposals on this infrastructure. In addition, most people use it as a purely Web2 social media platform because users have not been trained to utilize everything it offers. An important growth signal will be individuals using the Farcaster native solution, making the user experience more like what they expect different features (decentralized social graph, etc.), which may take time, as the graph itself is not mature or powerful in its early stages.
Acquisition, wait..it’s all about airdrop?
Although I don’t want to confuse airdrops with customer acquisition, airdrops have practically become a shortcut for customer acquisition.
Generally speaking, airdrops are now seen as a customer acquisition tool, and airdrop tokens are seen as customer acquisition costs.
I think the important thing is to think about the purpose of the airdrop. What do you want to achieve with the airdrop, and how to manage expectations and strategies based on these goals?
StarkNet recently rewarded contributors to the top 5,000 GitHub repos in a recent airdrop. It’s clearly to bring StarkNet and even Crypto into the view of traditional developers. Other protocols also propose airdropping to household stakers or teams developing public products.
I agree with Regan: “Community means making money with your internet friends.” We have to admit that many users use a pre-token protocol to get airdrops.
However, I have reservations about Hayden’s statement: “Don’t be stingy – give a significant amount away. If you don’t think the community deserves a significant amount, don’t release a token.” The “Community” in Hayden’s statement and the “Community” in reality are not the same thing.
To distinguish between true “Community” and “witches” in the airdrop season, which has become an industry, protocols need to spend more time identifying true contributors and considering long-term development.
Airdrops have become somewhat toxic. Users often see venture capitalists and project teams as absolute opposites. Project teams are in a dilemma in designing airdrop rules, as a significant portion of the community is made up of airdrop farmers, and if they feel they are not being rewarded well, they may fud your project on CT. However, without witch screening, tokens often do not reward true users and may create significant selling pressure on them. This is quite tricky for project teams.
Returning to the subject, when you want to bootstrap with airdrops, remember not to be vague, don’t deceive users, ensure clear communication of information and rules.
In my opinion, if you are a long-term builder, try to bring things back to organic growth. Don’t overdo marketing to give users unnecessary expectations, focus on building a good product.
In conclusion, most projects airdrop to attract users to use and use the product long term. This requires you to have a good product before releasing airdrop expectations; if the user experience is poor, airdrops may even backfire, leaving users with a bad impression.
If you don’t have a clear airdrop goal and strategy, as well as a user-friendly product, focus on building, enjoy organic growth, and wait for a better opportunity.
Retention
Different types of projects often have different user retention strategies: for DeFi, it’s liquidity; for NFTs, it might be more about community.
Seeking Token-market-fit
Tokens, to some extent, reflect the market’s consensus on the project. Taking the above examples, Arbitrum, as the largest L2 TVL, with strong cash flow, is a consensus; the hat consensus of dogwifhat is also a consensus. What kind of token does the market want? What does the market buy in? I understand from utility and speculation.
Utility
Utility is also divided into several types:
One is utility generated due to expectations of future returns. For example, you need to stake 32 ETH to become an Ethereum validator, earning approximately 4.5% APR.
Another type is token-gated: you must hold a certain amount of tokens or NFTs to be allowed to enter a community/use a protocol.
The nature of some Infra projects determines that they cannot give tokens strong utility; for example, most L2 tokens currently only have governance utility or have a narrative speculative nature.
Speculation
Retail investors feel that this token has the potential to rise, for whatever reason, direction, product, narrative, etc., the market will come together to support the token’s price.
For users, narratives are often the most direct and easiest to understand point. Many Infra projects face the problem that the concept of the project is too esoteric – it’s hard to expect every user to understand the principles of ZK, FHE, or similar developer tools and the benefits they bring. But we can try to convey some simple information, such as abstracting these as a string of letters or phrases: ZK, FHE, Restaking, etc.
Trace mentioned two good points in Unbundling Attention: “bigness” and “simplicity”. For example, L1 is an enduring narrative in the Crypto world that is big enough to accommodate a large number of dapps and users. For example, memecoin is the simplest token, with almost no learning curve, users buy it for the expectation of an increase, so it can quickly occupy the user’s mindshare.
I believe another important point is how users perceive a project and interact with it. An intuitive example is when users experience Solana, the most obvious feeling compared to Ethereum is fast and cheap, so users feel that Solana is better than Ethereum. This is a fairly simple logical thinking. I have also observed that many EigenLayer restakers actually don’t know what AVS is, but because EigenLayer has a stake interface and interaction process, it gives them a sense of familiarity, and they will accept the Restaking narrative more quickly.
Closing
More projects and tokens are being rapidly pushed to the market, and users need to face rapidly changing narratives and dazzling projects. In this playground where everything is accelerated, attention is a scarce resource.
Crypto has developed for nearly a decade, and what users want is no longer just a user-friendly DEX as it was a few years ago. Today, building a successful Crypto project is more challenging than in previous years.
Nevertheless, the ultimate goal is to focus on users. Refocusing on users, thinking about user needs from first principles. This is my sincere advice to all Crypto entrepreneurs.
