Product-Market Fit in Crypto — a Different Beast
Let’s meet another acronym. This time, one that doesn’t have its origins in crypto, but that has been bent and reshaped by the conditions of Web 3. We’re talking about Product-Market Fit (PMF). PMF has undergone a remarkable transformation within the crypto sphere. It’s a journey that turns the conventional wisdom of tech products on its head, leading us to a place where user-centric features take a back seat and investor-centric features ride shotgun.
PMF Unboxed
Traditionally, PMF is the Goldilocks moment when a product is “just right” for the market, capable of attracting a healthy cohort of users. It’s that sweet spot where the service it provides aligns seamlessly with the desires of an intended audience and their ability to grasp it. It’s the marriage of features and context, and serendipity plays a pivotal role.
Think back to when Mark Zuckerberg first unveiled Facebook to college students. It was a time when every dorm room came equipped with an internet-connected laptop and a competent web browser, and Zuck came up with a platform that gave students some very exciting information while requesting nothing from them other than time, attention and help spreading the word. PMF happened because Facebook provided the right service to the right people at the right time. It was the perfect storm.
Crypto’s PMF: A Different Beast
In the realm of cryptocurrency, PMF paints a different picture entirely. Forget user-centric features; here, it’s all about investor-centric offerings. We’ve seen a great example of this with Friend.tech lately.
Friendtech: All Crypto, No Content
Friend.tech offers a curious proposition. It allows users to purchase shares, disguised as “keys,” in people’s social media presence. In return, key holders access a private chat, where, initially, the most thrilling feature is the ability to send and read text messages in an early 2000s-looking chat interface. As exciting as watching paint dry on a blockchain.
Just one week after its debut, Friendtech erupted onto the crypto scene like a comet on a collision course with fortune. It raked in millions in revenue and put Base on the map while only offering nothing more than the text-based private chat. It wasn’t until two weeks in that it added the revolutionary option to include images in those chats. But by that time it was already too late in crypto’s breakneck speed standards, and the spell had vanished. Not because Friend.tech is a lousy piece of social media. It’s because the right time for the right people had passed.
Friendtech’s PMF had little to do with the substance of its content; instead, it revolved around the ability to tokenize social personas and allow them to be fractionalized and traded. Customers fell in love with the process of bridging assets to Base and making purchases to the tune of a bonding curve, in an industry that’s starving for the next piece of excitement. Content is the last thing early adopters were interested in; instead, it was the ability to bridge their funds and flip some keys just like they used to flip memecoins before that too went stale.
The Crypto Conundrum
This peculiar phenomenon is emblematic of the cryptocurrency landscape at large. The challenge it faces is finding added value beyond the investing use case.
What Friendtech accomplished is no small feat. It delivered a user-friendly experience in a process often characterized by confusion and roadblocks. If it does not succeed by itself, it will certainly inspire others. The real question is how we can harness this power for a more profound purpose. Once we come up with a use case where payments, digital asset transfer, investment, and maybe some degening are necessary, crypto will have battle-tested, ultrasound infrastructure to offer. Stay tuned.
