EthCC 2: Louis Millon

hi everyone louis i'm CTO and co-founder at we word and i want to talk quickly about hiding the blockchain i think there's a point to be made about hiding the blockchain in your product this will be a short talk it's mostly destined for those of you who are building stuff with blockchain but mostly products that are destined to users outside of the core community which is a great community as we can see in events like this but still there's a lot more people outside of it than inside so let's just take a quick question how many of you are actually building products currently cool obviously how many of you have already released some form of product to actually real users oh very cool ok so maybe we can have a quick conversation at the end of my short talk whether you agree or not but i think that to get mass adoption which was supposed to be for last year or two years ago hopefully for this year maybe for next year but still i think that one thing that is like taking us behind is that we're focusing too much on the blockchain aspect on our product and not enough on the user and a use case so i'll take the experience of my own team for the past year as an illustration of what i'm saying so since about December 2017 my team and I we've been trying to think about how to use blockchain to reward shoppers for a different kind of behaviors and I think we made a classic mistake we got really excited about the blockchain part and so whenever we're talking to clients so in our case its retailers the people who financed the whole app we were talking about the blockchain so basically the way we're describing a product was its cutting-edge way for retailers and brands to learn engage with the shoppers without any intermediaries using blockchain technology so basically the word blockchain was in the first sentence we use to describe a product to retailers who basically people who don't give a like we literally don't they just don't want to make corporate people want to make money you users want to have a better life they really don't care so actually we went back to the problem the problem we're trying to solve it that it's really expensive for a retailer to bring someone into this store they're spending a lot of money mostly we've Google and Facebook and the user grabs $0 out of all this value that's being transferred from the retailer's to Google the user doesn't get anything mostly because they give their data away for free so what we wanted is to find some way to give more value to the user on this process so the different way to present the exact same idea is to tell the user okay you can walk in the street I'll reward you for walking in the street you can accumulate points actual money and then you can spend them and that's it that's all there is to it and when we talk to the retailer we just tell them okay we'll track and analyze the users will monetize their well-being they can accumulate points personal offers and it can basically visit your stores because we're encourage them so on a map so basically the first screenshot here and it will be point of interest well we'll try to attract the user and if they come there they'll get a higher reward so let's say if you work if you walk five miles a day you're in five euros if you visit this point of sale this point of interest in general you'll earn the equivalent of ten miles walked still no blockchain in this description in terms of what is the point why the retailer would work with us we'll tell them we'll generate incremental visits to your store and incremental sales because when people want to spend the points that have accumulated money then they can spend it with you instead of competitors so will actually decrease your marketing costs instead of you turning to Google store visit it's a new better product or to Facebook store visit and you can do it with us at a lower cost and finally maybe if they ask how does it work then we start talking about the blockchain and I think so this just quickly was our experience the the return of the market is much better now that we had up this kind of talk and we start trying to talk to them about snazzy tech and super features that they don't really matter it's just if they try to understand how it works then we tell them that y is going to be cheaper for them and better is because of the transparency in that the blockchain that we use behind the scenes behind the scenes is going to make it more transparent for them that they can get to prove that the person visited the store they can retrieve it directly from the blockchain instead of trusting for prairie like Google to tell them oh you owe me a million bucks because I brought like a million people to your store and so more generally I think all of us it's important to reflect when we're building a product about maybe are we getting carried away about the blockchain aspect are we kind of putting it first because we live in a we work in this community where like people get really excited like when you're having coffee after you stock you're talking to anyone they're really excited about anything you're doing because it's about blockchain is that because that's we've been living for for the past two years or more but it's I think really important to get back to the basics and to think in terms of UX of UI what are you bringing to your users and I think in terms of pros and cons it's good suta high deflection behind and not put it for a force most actually it's connects to the previous talk because there's a lot of tools now to hide the blockchain more and more and put it like basically as a one micro service in your stack as many of them and maybe you can really hide it so that the user doesn't really realize like for example if you download the app the user doesn't notice a blockchain obviously because my target user is basically my mom and my mom cares even less about blockchain than cat 4 or OSHA or orally others she really couldn't care less she uses whatsapp she doesn't care about the cryptography or in whatsapp you know like she's so cool it's a way to talk about like with my sons and so the second really good thing about hiding the blockchain is that you can actually let regular people understand what you're doing with two sentences because usually again with my mom if I use blockchain she starts listening pretty fast after the second sentence sounds too complicated so it's probably not for her and you also avoid creating and realistic expectations in your users is usually we all know that what we want blockchain to do this year and what it can actually already do there's always a gap and so if you try to promise something really cool using blockchain usually it's going to take you more time and in that time you could have put less finished version of your products in the hand of your users get more feedback and a trade on the plus side talking more about blockchain gets a lot easier to get first meeting with prospects in our case we've retailers like large one like cash flows on and the smaller ones do since all these culprits have been getting more curious about the blockchain it's true then when you contact the marketing departments or whoever the innovation department at these groups they will listen to you when you talk in your first sentence you say ok I'm doing something in blockchain you'll understand when you meet me but please meet me because I'm doing blockchain it works I think it's work is gonna work less and less because their curiosity is being filled with all this project but most of I think there's more pros and cons to hide it and to hide it from your users if your user is a regular Joe and you hide it from the customers until they really need to understand why you're using blockchain but up until this point try to refrain yourself I don't let's my opinion I'm glad to discuss it with you guys for the remaining two minutes or so question okay thanks for your attention [Applause]