With any product or suite of products it’s critical to know who your customers are. Your customer set (or target market) informs what features get built and when. Since this is ultimately the responsibility of the community, I think we can’t begin this discussion soon enough. Keeping the customer set focused will make product discussions easier because we will agree on who it is we are trying to provide value to.
The 3 big factors I think of are market size, market attractiveness and product market fit. Here are some questions you can ask to think about these factors. This is not exhaustive, it’s just a starting point.
Market Size
- How many potential customers are in this market?
- What are those customers willing to pay?
Market Attractiveness
- How competitive is the market?
- Are customers expensive (in resources and time) to acquire or market to?
- Does the market have potential partners that can make acquiring customers more efficient?
Product Market Fit
- How well is the product suited for this market?
- Does the product provide value to customers in this market?
- Is the product hard for this market to use?
- Is the organization suited to supporting this market?
- Can we provide the kind and level support for these customers?
- Can we access the partners or resources necessary to reach these customers?
- Is this market unable to or restricted in the use of the product due to local regulations?
- Does the community have connections or knowledge within this market that can be leveraged?
The UI we’ve seen so far, especially Copilot, I think will be very exciting for the existing Defi market. But it’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Ref: Copilot
I think it would be great if some community members took the above questions and applied it to some potential markets. If you do, feel free to add other questions and categories you think are important. And don’t feel the need to provide specific numbers about things like market size or number of competitors. At this stage it’s ok to use some relative language like ‘Very big,’ ‘Small’, or ‘a lot.’ I think we can use some common understanding to know what you mean. We will get more specific as we filter the potential markets down.
Potential Markets:
- Existing DeFi Users
- Other DeFi Protocols
- Solana native
- Ethereum and other chains
- DeFi Aggregators
- Solana native
- Multichain
- DeFi Games
- Traditional Banks
- Consumers who haven’t used crypto
- Consumers who have crypto but have not used DeFi
- Traditional Hedge Funds
- Crypto Hedge Funds
- Insitutional Funds
These are just some I came up with. Please do come up with others or pick one of the above for analysis.
I think we as a community should start to filter down this list to the market or markets we want to target. This will help us as a community form the vision and product roadmap for Jet Protocol.
It’s also important to note that the market we decide to target first will not necessarily be the only market we target. But we need a starting point.
Please don’t be shy! Don’t be afraid of ‘getting it wrong’ or ‘getting it right on the first try.’ This is about having the conversation so we can build something better together.
Your voice, opinion and thoughts are important!
This is based on my own Product Management experience. I also pulled some language from the Where to Play Framework.