Product
A place to talk about software products and the craft of building them
Dan Romero pfp
Why aren't there more compelling "consumer" crypto "apps"? 1. Up until recently, blockspace was expensive and slow. In the last year, that's no longer the case. Also embedded wallets / smart contract wallets / Passkeys will continue to make it straightforward to make any crypto app aware. On-ramp APIs are also much better (but still the largest point of friction for a pure consumer app). 2. It's 2024 — the consumer web is 30 years old and the modern smartphone era is almost 20 years old. Internet software is a mature industry. Obvious ideas (regardless of whether they involve crypto) are solved. 3. So if it's an existing idea + crypto, you usually getting, at best, a 10% improvement. It's not a 10x improvement. And if it's not 10x, you won't really get people many people to switch. (And for the last 2 or so years, crypto's brand association has been more negative, so if anything it's made a product overall worse from growth standpoint.) https://danromero.org/significantly-worse-or-non-existent.html
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There’s a long term misalignment between everything apps (eApps) and the developers who build on their platforms. The value prop to devs building on an eApp platform is distribution. At small scale this is win-win: the dev gets audience and the platform gets activity. Unfortunately if devs create something really successful on an eApp platform their next steps are adversarial. If you’re a dev with traction, you’ll usually want to add features to your app and deepen the relationship with your users. But eApp platforms are necessarily feature-shallow; they only expose functionality to engage on their own platform. They don’t want users leaving their experience for another. In the best case you’re constrained as a dev and in the worst case the eApp platform will copy your functionality natively into their platform to cut you out. All this to say devs should be thoughtful when building for eApps. Don’t build ON the platform, USE the platform for early distribution and testing. Think about the path to convert eApp users to YOUR users (ie by collecting email/SMS), and take what eApp builders say with a grain of salt. Everything apps provide a lot of value to developers, but it’s not in their interest to speak of the adversarial incentives. It’s your job as a product developer to understand them.
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