Thread by @0xMert_

crypto product mistakes

i) thinking UX is the bottleneck

UX is not the bottleneck, while not perfect, it's good enough — the actual bottleneck is things worth using

the only exceptions are things like on/off ramps or bridging

I have seen tons of apps with great UX, but never used them again because they didn't solve any problems I have

ii) defining your market segment wrong

in crypto, devs tend to use the word "users" in a handwavy fashion

your market is not the set of all humans who want to make money — that is just the entire human population

you need to select the segment you're trying to serve very carefully because their feedback matters 100x more than others

a good heuristic for this is: "who would be super disappointed if they couldn't use my product anymore?"

iii) offloading "socials" or "marketing" to a random intern or agency

I put this in a post about products because marketing & product are intrinsically linked

to build a great product, you observe a market where you have domain knowledge, identify the gaps, and build solutions to address those gaps

but this is useless if you can't get the product into the hands of those users

and if you can't communicate (or market) your product, you will never get there

you can not offload this to "an intern" — otherwise that intern should have massive equity in your company as they are building half of it

most of the intern meta you see are from huge accounts that already have pmf (polymarket, phantom, magic eden)

iv) taking a random web2 idea and adding a small web3 concept to it

this is perhaps the silliest mistake

you have an entirely new, blank canvas where you can build things to push the internet forward — yet you've chosen to prepend the word "web3" to pets dot com

this is also symptomatic of another mistake: working upwards from your "idea" or "tech" vs. working backwards from market gaps

get good at something or at least very curious about it, identify the *real problems that exist*, and then build something to address them, that's product

being "the stripe of web3" is a silly concept, *stripe* is the stripe of web3 — do something novel or have a *clear differentiator*

v) focusing too much on underlying chain because of the "users" present there

with the only possible exception of DeFi where liquidity might be useful for getting off the ground, building on rollup X because it has Y users is hilariously misguided and goes hand in hand with mistake ii)

is your market: "the set of X users on rollup Y" or is it "the set of X users who have problem Y"?

if it's the former, you're likely doing something wrong (unless you're building pure infra to begin with)

crypto is early, do not make the touristic mistake of building on something unscalable because it has "users" incentivized by free money, your time horizon as a builder is on the order of decades

this also goes for solana, or any other L1, not just rollups — pick the right tool for the job

vi) monkey see, monkey do

this is the one I despise the most

the mistake here is: not taking even a few minutes to think from first principles and instantly trying to follow the hot trend/meta of the day

we saw this an insane amount with NFT "projects" adding "staking" or other companies adding "points"

just because someone else did it, it doesn't mean it makes the slightest sense for you — in fact, you are now at a disadvantage because you're not the first mover, and it'll be harder for you to get attention or differentiate yourself in a sea of noise

you are early to an insanely expressive and powerful industry where no one knows what they're doing yet

think different, be bold, take risks and talk to users — work backwards from the market