You built something cool, now what?: Creating a strategy to gain mass adoption with Amelia Guertin

[Music] I'm Emilia gerten I'm the CEO of Bender thank you so much for waking up early well I feel like it's early to come see me today um so for those of you who don't know what bandar is bandar is a data layer that is built on top of our weave and really what we're working towards is creating a trustless source of Truth by enabling access to permanent censorship resistant data storage by making it scalable performant and easy for everyone to use so you can sign and pay in 14 different tokens before I joined bundler I was at coinbase for about a year and snowflake in Salesforce in a bank so I had a really fun time in web 2 and yeah excited to chat with you guys about how you can actually go to market with what you've built so quick agenda for today um really we're going to be going through quite a few different things so one looking at some of the failed products due to lack of adoption we're going to talk about getting intimate with some of your users and your Marketplace um and then basically unbox a lot of the problems that um their experience right now and how you're essentially creating the solution for them then we're going to talk about how you're going to make an impact and actually create a plan so really the goal for today is to help Builders find your Market fit and how you can ultimately go to market by executing a very specific strategy um okay so I'm not sure if anyone recognizes some of these products on the screen but um these all fail to launch so Innovative Technologies despite its coolness have failed um so even the best things can become obsolete overnight and it can happen to any size company you'll see that Google's up there twice and Google is obviously a very large company so really these companies actually failed to monetize the product that they had created and understand what Their audience really wanted and lacked adoption um so that's even with their huge massive user base they were not able to get anyone to really care or use their products um so why is that I think it's because they aid and spend some time getting to know their users and then um really sort of differentiating themselves on why they should be ultimately used and not to scare anyone but this is even more difficult especially if you're a startup so we know that 75 of startups fail this is even more significant for blockchain startups at 90 and so with the fact that we're blazing new Trails um with the centralized system and creating new parallel line paradigms um we started focusing on some different things that sort of got us away from our foundations some things like the number of wallet addresses how many participants we have in our Network how many Twitter followers we have and the price of our token um but ultimately that doesn't mean adoption and I think we need to start paying attention to some other things that are important when it comes to again really understand your users and knowing if they're going to be adopting you um as whether it's a product so whether it's b2c or B2B so let's talk about how we could start focusing on the right things in reconnecting with our users so first off like let's get in a minute who is your user um a lot of projects have told me that they are focused on Builders I don't know what that means um we need to get like very specific and intimately understand who you your users are um I'll tell you a little story about bumper specifically we had um not a lot of clarity when I first started on who our users were um again we also said Builders But ultimately we had two different products one which was a very b2c Focus so it was an end consumer product and then we had one that was very focused on back-end developers who are building decentralized applications that needed permanent data storage essentially which is what we initially offered so we had two different focuses which really wasn't sustainable for a nine person team and we actually decided to offload the b2c product to a different team so that we could really focus and get intimate with our back-end developers and when I say get intimate I mean understanding not only some of the technical pains that they're experiencing but like how does that impact them from a psychological standpoint right like what's really keeping them up at night and why are they hanging out that's the other thing too so knowing the watering holes of where those back-end developers who are focused on decentralized data storage are hanging out and I call them watering holes is really important and I'm actually spending time with them is key to really understanding your users so lessons learned from our experience try not to split your time by having multiple different audiences especially if your team is incredibly small try to focus on one audience and again getting to know them very intimately and spending time with them so now that you know your audience let's unlock Pandora's Box so we know the myth myth of Pandora's Box to be this box that really created a lot of misery and the fact of the matter is if you're not understanding the underlying problem or creating a net new opportunity um I don't know really why anyone would care because they're not making their life incrementally better so for us that we really focused on within the our weave ecosystem is that are we've had this ability to essentially promise permanent data storage that was censorship resistant but it wasn't very easy to use and it wasn't going to be performing to the state that a lot of people needed in order for it to be effective so when we were unlocking what Pandora's Box was we really honed in on specifically the scalability usability and performance and realized that that was going to be the problem that we're going to lead into um so when you're thinking about basically determining whether there's a problem or opportunity I always like to ask these three questions so what is the problem that you're solving for how substantial is that problem so it might be a small problem that no one really cares about or it's a really big one that's really impacting their day-to-day and then again how much Missouri is that audience member or the audience that you're targeting really going through um both from a technical but then also psychological standpoint so then there sort of comes a point where you need to decide whether you're going to play in the sandbox that currently exists or are you going to blaze your new Trail um and so what the heck does that mean basically you can either decide to present a solution that's similar to a lot of competitors within the space or you can create a brand new category um so if you want to build a new one that is going to require quite a bit of Education in onboarding I think a really good example of this in the space is um Celestia and fuel with modular blockchains and I don't know if anyone's familiar with them but they basically continuously repeated this new concept of module blockchains and they basically Blaze this new Trail where they were the leaders within that space for a really long time and they were setting the rules for their own game because they weren't playing in the same sandbox as a bunch of other people um so yeah think about whether or not you want to create a new category that is going to require more education and communication but it presents a really great opportunity if you could do it effectively um by creating the new rules one of the things that we are currently actually doing at bundler is traditionally we've always played within the same category of data storage but what we've realized recently is that we actually need to create our new category so that's something that we're actively working on as a team and creating our own rules within the space um some things that we are doing in order to create that new category is taking a look at our community and what they're saying about us and how they understand who we are also looking at the competition um if they're gonna if we're gonna create a new category is there going to be competition that exists probably not um and when we do create that new category they're probably going to try to play Within that so how do we quickly position ourselves in a strong way that is going to allow us to blaze that trail and really be the leader once you've determined essentially whether or not you are going to play in the same sandbox or Blazer new Trail I always like to call all heroes to talk about what they do and really communicate clearly what you do and why you solve those problems more effectively than anyone else in the space um so yeah simple question what is your project uh why did why does it matter and what makes you truly different when I say be really detailed and specific I mean think about your audience think about the people who you spent a bunch of time getting to know and tie it back to what they care about because again you could build something really special but if the the people who are ultimately going to be using it don't understand it or don't really care then they might not be using it so again core a core understanding of what your Project's DNA is um is really really key to be able to effectively communicate that to individuals who are ultimately going to be using it and that's whether you're a B2B or B to C or B to B to C it doesn't matter you need to clearly communicate your value okay impact impact impact I love business value we don't talk about it enough within the space in my opinion but why is this important now so why are why should someone care in this moment what is the driving force behind what's going to ultimately make your users lives easier and your lives can be easier in a number of different ways so I put a couple of examples on the screen so how is what you're building essentially saving time how is it reducing costs increasing the number of users if they're adopt for example improving inefficiencies or creating new market opportunities so one of the things that we specifically hear a lot at bundler from our Builders is ultimately they're able to save a lot of time on back-end infrastructure by easily integrating our SDK with the depths that they're building and when I say significant significant amount of time I mean that they don't need to spend weeks they actually reduce it to a couple of hours by disessential using bundler and then when you also think about their end users and the experience that they're going through they don't have to wait for any of their say nfts that are being uploaded to bundler it's a near Instant Upload time which when you're thinking about the user experience for those end users that's really important for them because ultimately that's going to create a better experience for their users so again when you think about the overall impact don't only think about your users but also think about what they care about at the end of the day which sometimes is not always what you care about and because of that because we reduce the complexities and created great experiences for their end users that really justifies the premium that we have on top of uploading data storage to our weave so again business value really helps especially if you're charging for um using your network to really justify why exactly you're charging that amount all right so now that you've heard all of this where do we go from here anyone who is in this room I'd always challenge you whether you're one person team or a 20 person team to stop building for a couple of days lock yourself in a room and go through a lot of the questions that I talked about today so at the end and if you want to actually have access to this I'm happy to share it with everyone but filling out a messaging and positioning I call it a messaging house you can call it whatever you want but filling that out and getting really specific on a lot of the questions that I'd asked today in knowing who your audience is really defining what that challenge or opportunity um that you're solving for is clearly communicating what the solution that you're building for that problem um who you are what makes you uniquely different from anyone else within the space and who you should also determine what your mission and vision is especially if you're going to be building out a project so Mission Envision missions what you're doing today Vision what you strive for in the future um so this to me is like the Bible it's what everyone in your team should really look at read understand and when everyone asks what your project is you're ultimately communicating the same thing over and over again um and then give feedback from your users too this should be not a one and done doc this should be something that you constantly iterate on and change especially as the market changes you want to continue to stay relevant but always stay core to your mission and vision um there's a ton of really great examples of missions and Visions ours at bundler is again to be the data layer of the internet to create a trustless source of Truth to ultimately set Humanity free and the way that we're doing that is by creating access layer to our weave to be able to deliver permanent censorship resistant data storage so again really thinking about what's going to continue to keep what you're building relevant within the space long term and then again always tying it back to what your audience in Target Market cares about so short presentation today but if you have any questions or if you want to have access to the messaging house happy to share that with you guys can connect with me on telegram Twitter or if you want to learn more about bundler because you care about decentralized data storage feel free to follow us on some of our socials but I appreciate the time today everyone and have a happy conference everyone [Music]