Community members of blockchain projects are often curious to read technology roadmaps, like it would be an important measure of a project’s success.
Such roadmaps usually plan the development activity for several years in the future, describing what components the project team will develop, and when it will be released. Then the followers of the project think that if such plan exists, and the team delivers the software components, success is guaranteed.
This is where they are wrong.
Technology roadmaps have absolutely nothing to do with a project’s success. Blockchain communities might think the goal is the technology, while the goal is the product (that the product has a market).
If you search Google for “Why startups fail”, you can get a million of articles about what leads to the failure of a new company. The most common reasons are:
- No need for the product (product/market fit)
- Pricing problems (too expensive, not compelling)
- Human resource problems (improper leadership)
- Mistimed product (too early, too late)
- Poor money management (ran out of money)
And looking at the relevant charts, the biggest reason by far is the first one: there is no real need for the product / service.
This means no matter how many features a project has built in, no matter how cutting edge technology they use, if there are not enough customers to generate a profitable operation, they are doomed.
But how can you see if a project has a product/market fit?
The answer is obvious, you see it from the number of paying customers. If it has a lot of paying customers, it’s a sign that it might have found product/market fit. If a project has only “partners”, this means the product still hasn’t found a market.
The usual and recommended approach in the startup world is to create a minimum viable product (MVP), then go to the market, try to sell it, and collect customer feedback. Then fine tune it, and try to gain more feedback. Then repeat this several times. Often, the initial plans turn to be bad, and the company has to pivot. Change the target segment, the features, the pricing model to find a market. The less customer feedback a company gets during the initial stages, the larger the chances that they won’t achieve product/market fit. To learn more about the concept of product/market fit, everybody should reed Marc Andreessen’s post: The only thing that matters.
So the fact that a project plans for years ahead doesn’t mean that it will be successful, in fact it’s more like the opposite of that.
It means they are not clear with the basics, how business is done. They think they know what the market wants in the next several years, and all they have to do is putting tens of thousands of man hours to develop it. This is why most blockchain projects don’t have customers, because they didn’t ask for feedback when they made plans for several years.
TE-FOOD had plans in 2018 to develop a data marketplace, where supply chain companies can be incentivized by selling batch specific data they collected to their customers. After spending a lot of time to survey several food producers and retail chains, it turned out that — even if the idea sounds good — companies are not intended to pay for such information. We could have spent months or years to develop the perfect solution for it, but that would not change the fact that there is no market for such feature. Eventually, we had to abandon the concept.
Nobody knows what the market wants in the future. This is why most new technology companies are working tirelessly on getting market feedback. This is why we don’t engage with a roadmap for years. We see ideas, we do market research, and we move forward if the feedback is positive. We suggest other blockchain companies to do the same.
