Two things that product-led fintechs can learn from crypto projects
When I write blog posts, I tend to write about either crypto or product-led growth. I am very interested in both subjects, but they are very different from each other.
Or at least that’s what I thought. Over the past few weeks I have come to realize that they have far more in common than I initially believed. Crypto in itself is a very product-led industry, especially within DeFi. Protocols and dApps are not pushed into the market by a salesforce, there is no need for demos and trial periods. Products are rather adopted based on their features and well executed community building.
There are elements that product-led B2B fintech founders can learn from the playbook of crypto projects. Two in particular stand out: permissionless access to products and the power of community.
Let me elaborate.
1. Permissionless access to products
One of the key mantras of product-led growth is to reduce friction in the user experience (see here for more on this: The three mantras of product-led B2B fintech).
This begins with the sign-up and onboarding process, which should be designed to be simple, quick and intuitive. Prospects should be able to interact with the product without having to jump through unnecessary hoops like having to book a demo or speak to a sales rep. Product-led teams optimize for low adoption hurdles and intuitive onboarding workflows.
Now, if there is one thing that crypto and especially DeFi do really well, it is an absolutely flawless onboarding experience. If you have never dabbled with DeFi dApps before, I highly recommend you create a MetaMask wallet and start interacting with various platforms.
In crypto, users do not have to create an account, choose a password, confirm their email address, etc. before getting to see the product. In crypto, you simply connect your wallet (e.g. MetaMask) to the dApp and voilà, you are onboarded and can start interacting with the product immediately.
It usually takes two clicks to go from visiting a website to being a user. This is the most extreme example of a reduction in friction, and is a truly “permissionless” process: there is literally nobody blocking anyone from gaining access to the product.
Let’s look at an example of how this works at PoolTogether, a type of no-loss crypto lottery:
When you visit the PoolTogether website there are two links that guide you to the webapp. Once there, you just need to click “connect your wallet” in the top right corner. You choose your wallet, click connect, and you’re done.
This is an incredible user experience that is virtually unheard of in traditional fintech, and rarer still in B2B products. It is one of the reasons I enjoy testing out new DeFi products and protocols so much, and why user adoption within DeFi is so explosive.
Of course, you might say that PoolTogether is a retail product and that these generally require less onerous onboarding procedures. That is true, but the same permissionless process also works with more complex, non-retail products such as Aragon, a platform for managing online communities:
Initially, the same two-click workflow applies. You go from the website to the dApp, and then connect your wallet by clicking the button in the top right corner. To be fair, a few more steps are then needed to set up and start running a community on Aragon. But this process is much smoother in directional terms than many within traditional B2B fintech.
Granted, these workflows do not work for some B2B fintechs. Take Mambu (CommerzVentures portfolio) as an example. Their cloud-based core bank-as-a-service platform does not lend itself to permissionless access and self onboarding. The product is simply too complex.
However, there are many B2B products that do lend themselves to this kind of workflow. And while you cannot perfectly replicate the onboarding process of DeFi in the traditional world, you can get very close. One perfect example of this is Prewave, a supply chain risk intelligence platform. Looking at their website (left image below), you could almost think that this is another crypto project. The website structurally looks very similar to the ones of Aragon and PoolTogether.
Prewave is an example of perfectly-executed permissionless access. From the front-page a prospect gets immediate access to a freemium version of the platform. The user — with no need for any registration — gets to choose a few parameters and is then sent to the platform. Usage is free for all (go and see for yourself!), but premium features are available for paying clients.
Prewave uses a pure product-led strategy. It takes less than a minute to become a user and start deriving actual value from the product. All without so much as having to enter an email address.
Crypto and DeFi are leading the way in terms of convenience and ease of onboarding. Product-led founders should take note and experience the magic of these workflows for themselves. I firmly believe that products with low adoption barriers will gain traction faster than those burdening their prospective users with unnecessary steps.
2. The power of community
Another mantra of product-led growth is that you need to build for the user. Not for a team, not for an organization, but for the human beings that are actually using the platform.
This implies selling directly to end-users, using tactics that are much more akin to consumer marketing than to enterprise sales. You need to find and target your end-users and build product awareness wherever they hang out.
One tactic that crypto projects have mastered in that regard is community building. It is a tactic that requires significant investment and cannot be done overnight. But when executed correctly, it is a tactic that pays off big time. Having a lively community around your platform can become a significant moat.
Jumping into examples again, see below a few website headers of crypto projects:
Did you notice what all headers have in common? Well, actually they have a lot in common. But also, they all feature a community button.
When you click on them you will find a variety of channels that these projects use to build awareness, connect with people and keep them interested. Engaging content is posted on YouTube or Twitter. Discussions are spurred on Telegram or Reddit. Many of them spin up a Discord server to give their community a home.
Almost every crypto project runs its own Discord server these days. Join any of them — invite links are usually on their websites or twitter pages (e.g. here or here) — and you will find yourself among thousands of members, with plenty of on-topic and off-topic conversations going on.
Usually there are core team members online to actively engage the community through Q&A sessions, feature discussions, product announcements. They throw in the occasional meme, competition and give-away to make the community fun to be part of.
But you will also notice the level of engagement between non-team members. They help each other out, answer each other’s questions and solve problems together. By giving their community a home on Discord, these crypto projects leverage their limited resources by transforming mere users into active contributors.
The best teams put a lot of focus on building a community that is inclusive, easy to join and fun. They thereby increase identification of the users with the product, which helps to build loyalty. Some even manage to create a little bit of FOMO by giving away goodies to the members such as preferential spots on waiting lists, first look at new features, free premium memberships and sometimes even swag (and NFTs — we are in cryptoland after all).
As with permissionless access above, not every B2B fintech is made for community building — or at least it is easier for some than for others. I think, however, that product-led B2B fintechs are ideally suited to this approach as their focus is on the end-user of the platform.
Few product-led teams have adopted this strategy so far. But there is hope. One example of founders having understood this potential is lemon.markets, a developer-centric platform for building stock brokerage use cases. This company is ideally suited for community building, and it is doing just that: in a team of only ten people, there are already 2.5 FTEs dedicated to building and managing the community of beta users. They engage with them regularly in chat groups, and give them a voice in the development of the platform.
The founders of lemon.markets have clearly understood the importance of community building as part of their growth strategy, and are dedicating resources to it at an early stage. They have understood that developers — who are choosing between different platforms — will favour the one that has an accessible and engaging community attached to it, where problems can be solved quickly and a little fun can be had.
In the future, they could and should consider adding a native token into their platform to increase the incentives for active participation, and to reward their (early) contributors. This would put their community-building efforts on steroids, and make it even more attractive for developers to build on lemon.markets.
Dharma, a crypto project, once put it like this: “a flourishing community is what will separate a crypto wallet from a bank account”. The same is true for next-gen, product-led B2B fintechs.
I am deeply convinced that product-led B2B fintechs will have an advantage over their sales-led competitors. I am happy to see more teams adopting this strategy, but there is still much to learn. Crypto excels in some dimensions of product-led growth and can serve as an interesting case study to inspire certain design decisions.
For more on this topic please see my other posts:
- Is product-led growth the next frontier in B2B fintech?
