In the past few months, I have had conversations with several dozen entrepreneurial teams. I have noticed that some teams do not think about users from first principles, they have unclear understanding of user needs, and they make assumptions about what users want or make too many assumptions about users.
Technological innovation is fascinating. But the ultimate audience for all of this is the users. As Steve Jobs once said, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.” Entrepreneurs need to think more about the user-centric approach and adopt a “work backwards” mindset.
Folks, it’s time to refocus our attention on the users.
UI/UX
Platforms like Uniswap and Lido have become the benchmarks for the Crypto industry. When it comes to UI/UX design, it should be as simple and intuitive as possible, allowing users to easily understand and use it, minimizing friction, and making minimal assumptions about the users.
UI
The website is usually the important entry point for users to interact with a project. As a heavy product user, I have had two memorable moments of frustration:
When I opened a website and saw three or four entry buttons. When I instinctively clicked on these buttons, they took me to different pages, each filled with a lot of information and complex design elements. I suddenly felt anxious, where should I start?
The project did not provide any documentation. And for many users, documentation is the gateway to quickly understand project information, it is a faster and more efficient way to understand a project than whitepapers and blogs. Some “buzzwords” on the homepage do not help users fully understand a project, other than providing slogan-like propaganda.
UX
I want to give two examples to illustrate why the current user experience in Crypto needs more fine-grained optimization.
Mobile
I have always believed that the importance of mobile has been overlooked. Currently, most dapps lack a smooth mobile experience and can only be used through the (wallet-integrated) browser, requiring users to switch between the browser and wallet. Imagine you are a passionate memecoin trader, and when you can’t guarantee that you are always in front of your computer, you will feel anxious about your positions. Therefore, a mobile Dexscreener would give you peace of mind.
Through working with Privy, friend.tech has taken a step towards an integrated wallet. But compared to the mobile experience of centralized exchanges (CEX), DEX still has a long way to go in terms of user experience. For time-sensitive transactions (such as contract transactions), real-time push notifications or price alerts are useful. For social applications, the importance of being able to share anytime, anywhere goes without saying.
AI Agent
AI and LLM can help users understand a new project.
For example, when I visit a Layer2 Ecosystem page, I usually feel confused. It displays common protocols such as Uniswap and Aave, a bunch of wallets, tools, and so on. I know these protocols, but I don’t know where to start. Imagine an agent that can tell you what dapps people are playing on this Layer2 based on recent on-chain data, what is the fastest-growing protocol. It can even analyze the behavior of each user address to provide targeted recommendations.
Such things make me feel that there is still a lot of room for improvement in Crypto UX. A few years ago, I would have thought that we didn’t have good enough infrastructure to support applications for mass adoption. Recently, we have scalable underlying chains and user onboarding processes that are easy to integrate, and now it’s time to focus more on UX.
Stickness…What to do?
In Crypto, it is relatively easy to obtain short-term growth data – you can immediately launch a campaign and give away some kind of Genesis NFT to achieve short-term goals. This has become a kind of suggestion, as users have certain expectations for potential benefits in the future. However, attracting real users and gaining their long-term adoption is much more difficult, and there are almost no shortcuts on this path. (Uniswap took nearly three years to create a good product before the DeFi Summer arrived.)
It is worth noting that Warpcast currently accounts for 90% of network activity, but other clients can provide various unique proposals on this infrastructure. In addition, most people use it as a purely Web2 social media platform because users have not been trained to utilize everything it offers. An important growth signal would be individual use of the Farcaster native solution, which makes the user experience different from what they expected (decentralized social graph, frameworks, etc.), and this may take time as the graph itself is not mature or powerful enough in its early stages.
Acquisition, wait…it’s all about airdrop?
Although I don’t want to confuse airdrops with user acquisition, airdrops have become a shortcut for user acquisition.
Generally speaking, airdrops are now seen as a means of user acquisition, and the airdropped tokens are seen as the cost of user acquisition.
I think it’s important to think about the purpose of airdrops. What do you want to achieve through airdrops, and how do you manage expectations and strategies based on these goals?
StarkNet recently rewarded the top 5,000 contributors to GitHub global repos in its airdrop. Clearly, this was done to bring StarkNet and even Crypto into the view of traditional developers. Other protocols have proposed airdropping tokens to home stakers or teams developing public goods.
I agree with Regan when he says, “Community means making money with your internet friends.” We have to admit that many users use a pre-token protocol to get airdrops.
However, I have reservations about what Hayden said, “Don’t be stingy – give a significant amount away. If you don’t think the community deserves a significant amount, don’t release a token.” The “Community” in Hayden’s statement should not be confused with the “Community” in reality.
You see, in the era of airdrop madness, it is very difficult to distinguish between the real “Community” and the “witches”, which have become an industry. To address this issue, protocols need to spend more time identifying real contributors and considering long-term development.
Airdrops have become somewhat toxic in reality. Users often see venture capitalists and project teams as their absolute opposites. Project teams are in a dilemma when designing airdrop rules, as airdrop farmers make up a significant portion of the community, and if they feel they are not adequately rewarded, they may FUD your project on social media. However, if there is no witch screening, tokens often fail to reward real users and create significant selling pressure. This is quite tricky for project teams.
That being said, when you want to bootstrap with airdrops, remember to never be ambiguous, do not deceive users, and ensure clear information and rules are delivered.
My view is, if you are a long-term builder, try to bring things back to an organic state. Don’t do excessive marketing to give users unnecessary expectations, focus on building a good product.
In summary, most projects do airdrops to attract users and encourage long-term usage of their products. This requires you to have a good enough product before releasing airdrop expectations. If the user experience is poor, airdrops may even have a negative impact and leave users with a bad impression.
If you do not have clear airdrop goals and strategies, as well as a user-friendly product, then focus on building, enjoy organic growth, and wait for better timing.
Retention
Different types of projects often have different user retention strategies: for DeFi, it is liquidity; for NFT, it may be more about the community.
Uniswap has built up unstoppable liquidity and a strong brand over the past few years. When people want to swap a token, they often intuitively think of Uniswap as the platform with the best liquidity and lowest slippage, without needing to search DeFiLlama for the best pool. The brand effect based on people’s intuition creates a strong moat.
In addition, liquidity built by large funds is relatively stable, and the actions of large funds are often slower than those of small funds. Therefore, rebuilding liquidity is extremely difficult unless you can provide strong incentives.
For application-focused projects directly targeting end users, the community may be the most important thing. Of course, the concept of a community is difficult to concretize. You can say that the essence of a community is a certain culture, symbols, and a group of unique individuals who gather together for something fun.
When we judge whether a founder is Crypto-native, we usually communicate with the founder about their understanding of the community. This understanding is a long-term accumulation of intuition and mindset gained from at least one or two years in the community. For these types of projects, founders need to try to understand the community, feel this culture, and listen to what users are saying.
Seeking Token-market-fit
Tokens to some extent reflect the market’s consensus on a project. Taking the above examples, Arbitrum, as the largest L2 in terms of TVL, has a strong cash flow as the consensus. The consensus for dogwifhat’s hat is also a consensus. What kind of token does the market want? What does the market buy into? I understand it from the perspectives of utility and speculation.
Utility
Utility can be divided into several types:
One is utility based on the expectation of future returns. For example, you need to stake 32 ETH to become an Ethereum validator and earn an APR of about 4.5%.
Another type is token-gated utility: you must hold a certain number of tokens or NFTs to be allowed to enter a certain community or use a certain protocol.
The nature of some Infra projects means that they cannot give tokens strong utility. For example, most L2 tokens currently only have governance utility or have narrative-like speculative qualities.
Speculation
Retail investors believe that a token has the potential to rise in price, for whatever reason, such as direction, product, narrative, etc., and the market forms a collective force to support the token’s price.
For users, the narrative is often the most direct and easiest to understand. Many Infra projects face the problem that the concept of the project is too obscure and difficult to understand – it is difficult to expect every user to understand the principles of cryptography like ZK and FHE or similar developer tools and their benefits. But we can try to convey some simple information, such as abstracting them into a string of letters or phrases: ZK, FHE, Restaking, etc.
Trace mentioned two good points in “Unbundling Attention”: “bigness” and “simplicity”. For example, L1 is a timeless narrative in the Crypto world, it is big enough to accommodate a large number of dapps and users. For example, memecoins are the simplest tokens, with almost no learning curve, and users buy them only for the expectation of price increase, so it can quickly occupy users’ mindshare.
I also observed that many restakers in EigenLayer actually don’t know what AVS is, but because EigenLayer has a stake interface and interaction process, it gives them a sense of familiarity and makes them accept the Restaking narrative faster.
Closing
More projects and tokens are being rapidly pushed into the market, and users are facing rapidly changing narratives and dazzling projects. Attention is a scarce resource in this accelerated playground.
Crypto has developed for nearly a decade, and what users want is no longer just a user-friendly DEX like a few years ago. Today, building a successful Crypto project is more difficult than a few years ago.
However, user-centricity is the ultimate goal. Refocus your attention on the users and think about user needs from first principles. This is my sincere advice to all Crypto entrepreneurs.
