In Search of the Mythical dApp User - Zach Herring

all right we're gonna uh stick with the ui ux theme um let's see and miraculously we are still right on time i think the crypto gods are shining on us today i don't know how this happened we are right on time um so for our next talk we're going to welcome back zach who you just saw on the prior panel we had um i see the name of this is uh in search of the mythical dap user i'm not ex exactly sure what zach will be talking about but this sounds fascinating you know like who who are these people we're trying to target uh they do feel a little bit mythical especially with the unicorn there so uh yeah let's see what zach's thoughts are on this thanks yeah thanks for having me back it's uh it's been a whirlwind so um yeah it's a bit of a weird talk um but this is essentially this is sort of like what my specialty has been i would say especially for the last 12 to 18 months i've been working with a ton of startups in the crypto space who are just starting out they've just put the their dap together they've started to think about user acquisition specifically around this idea of um like the first users right so in search of the mythical dapp user an extremely zero to one approach to finding strangers and converting them to users um so first just a little bit about me if you didn't see the previous panel product and design founder also product strategist what is that strategist is really just a fancy way of saying i help teams get out of their own way look at problems from the outside of their own head and prioritize the most important thing and ignore the rest so i've been working with a ton of companies both in the web 2 and the web3 space um both as a consultant as well as an intra slash entrepreneur um depending on on sort of what my role was in those companies um and to answer kent's great question like why are we even calling them mythical dap users in the first place um we're calling them that because uh if you look at dap radar and and other sort of kind of traditional traditional examples of of how growth is sort of measured and how web 2 dapps are or what two apps are measured um the amount of users in the crypto space is still pretty nascent um this is this is from dapp radar monthly active users over a 30-day period you look at this and you see that we've got about 500k is about where it tops out at and then a pretty pretty quick decline right like especially especially if you go down to 36th place you see like just kind of like 1 to 2k users which means that um we're all kind of competing for the same niche in a lot of ways um i was thinking so i originally gave this talk in october i was thinking well it's a bull run so surely things have like actually improved since then um they actually haven't so i took these screenshots from last night um possibly because of the increasing fees we've actually seen kind of a decline uh in monthly active users over the last 30 days where it topped out at uh five at whatever what was it for 400 almost uh for 430k now we're looking at uh 340k as the top user um with a pretty pretty radical decline in users two three and four um so again like it's it's a it's not necessarily a um it's a growing space but there's still a lot of room to grow and and that's partly why i really love working this space uh it's kind of cool that i'm coming raw on right after rick um he said this i think what back in november um there are only 30 erc 20 contracts that have more than 50 daily active addresses interacting with them um this goes to show how early ethereum is i i think there's really however way you measure it we're still really early in the space and um we're still kind of thinking like these sort of like zero to one one to ten sort of terms so um there's a hierarchy of growth whenever you think about user acquisition i'm going to primarily be speaking from a user research plus biz dev perspective um once you start graduating from there you start thinking in terms of like marketing sort of like scaling growth and then finally community which you turn your community members into the people who kind of bring more people in i work at both ends both on user research as well as community um and we're going to be talking kind of at this at this first level so what are we covering so i've got some assumptions i'm assuming you've got a product uh i'm assuming it works and it's ready for people to actually start using it i'm also assuming that you've kind of hit the low-hanging fruit the low-hanging fruit are people that you're your friends and your family um why do you want to on board your friends and family first before you start thinking about getting strangers onto the app it's really simple honestly like your app is not going to be ready for prime time however however much you are an amazing designer you're probably not going to be ready for prime time until you do those first initial people walking in there's going to be some kicking the tires you're going to discover a ton of edge cases and so it's going to be important to get those through friends and family because essentially your friends and family are the most generous users you are going to find um they want you to succeed they're rooting for you they're going to give you a lot of time in correcting a lot of these like kind of like early edge cases as you kind of start navigate navigating it um and then and then basically like once you start doing that um you have spent a lot of time onboarding them and kind of refining it this is not actually like i know this kind of sounds like you know um really really nascent sort of way to do it but i would say even giant companies this is how they started out um a story kind of an anecdotal story from slack look they said that they got their some of their first companies um just kind of like begging friends uh to try it out right and this is a company that raised 1.2 billion they've sold for i can't remember how many billions but like from humble beginnings uh some pretty incredible things can happen and so don't discount the friends and family method but this is assuming you've already maxed that out you've already gotten everybody on you've already made those discoveries so what we're going to be covering is how to meet people you previously didn't know how to talk to them about what you're building how to pitch them on giving your product a chance and then finally how to make the most of the chances strangers take on your product um so key takeaway number one i got four of these i want you to make sure that if you don't really remember anything else and this is a fast talk this is about hours worth of content that i'm cramming into 15 minutes but that's why i'm kind of talking so so quickly uh the first thing i want you to take away is know where your users are um there are two different designation open channels and closed channels open channels are reddit twitter stack overflow etc this is essentially where people use their outside voice um in discussions close channels telegram and discord and like um these could potentially be more valuable because since they're closed they don't have to necessarily worry about strangers or outsiders um to use kind of like an outside voice they can they can talk in specifics that um only they're in groups or necessarily understand but it's still really really useful why why do whenever we talk about like finding users why is it important to know where they are well a couple of reasons one take quantity of conversations as a signal for overall market size um basically when i tell people to go find users and they say i really can't find too many people talking about the problem that we're wanting to uh we're wanting to solve to me that is a first signal that maybe the problem that you're wanting to solve isn't as broad or general or has a wide enough niche for your product to actually live in so it's actually really really useful as a way to start understanding the product that you're the problem that you're solving in the first place i would honestly encourage you to start doing this before you even write a line of code uh honestly or draw a box in figma whichever whichever your uh your discipline you can take what is being discussed as the direction of the market so if people you find a place it's has a ton of people that you would uh potentially want to want to have as users and they're not necessarily talking about the things that you want to solve or you can't find really those conversations that's a good way to think about it or let's say they're talking about uh the problem space that you're thinking about but not necessarily in that direction um these are really interesting important nuances that really help you kind of understand the product that you're building and and how to frame it in such a way that it's going to deliver value for those users and it's it it's both easier and also more difficult uh now than pre-covered um this really just kind of goes to show like everyone is moving online east denver is online um literally every hackathon that uh had i have had some sort of physical presence has moved online that means that the signal-to-noise ratio is a lot more difficult so you have to be more aggressive in filtering stuff out um i'm just going to kind of rip through these i'm going to be tweeting releasing a tweet thread as well as as well kind of annotating the biggest missing parts as well as this slide deck on at z herring on twitter so i will kind of go through this this in my opinion is definitely something that you should be watching cold calling for introverts most people who build products who write code are not necessarily what they consider themselves extroverts i am not an extrovert i'm an introvert and this is a fantastic discussion between jay and katie user researchers and strategists for facebook and google respectively where they're kind of talking about how to find the people that you need to talk to to get the insights that you need to build the amazing products that everybody are going to want to use this is fantastic and this is also linked in the deck um twitter fishing i think i really like twitter i'm probably i'm i'm okay at it i'm not great at it but i'm okay at it and so twitter especially tweetdeck for me is how i tend to observe conversations and look for strangers that i can then start turning into users and i cover all of this uh in the expanded talk and the twitter thread whenever you find those users it is key um to ask for advice not a sale um so this is kind of where we get into i would say kind of a specialized approach that i take i really haven't found too many other people that do it besides one book that i recommend in the appendix i'll cover that in a bit but essentially what i'm recommending people do is double dip with user interviews and business development um what does that look like so i let's say that i was uh wanting to build something that that was kind of an nft onboarding experience it took me literally 30 seconds to find someone on twitter who was publicly complaining about a terrible nft onboarding experience um the temptation whenever you start thinking of that zero to one like beginning of customer acquisition sort of hustle is to just start spamming your twitter spamming your links um this is actually the wrong move why is that the wrong remove um for a couple of reasons so like one people don't like spamming two and i think this is more important is that insights are much more important than payments right now the first users that you're going to onboard may be getting it for free right you may be like giving them kind of like a free beta um it's much more important for them to start using your product and create an open channel to where they can start expressing their asks their interests etc um and so like essentially when you start reaching out you don't want to spam your link you want to start with empathy and you want to start with advice when you ask for advice people are actually amazingly generous um in how they're thinking about the problem um at this point in your product's life cycle insights is way more important than payments let's say someone does it one time like buys an nft off of my brand new platform for 50 bucks or uh you know even even 100 bucks right if i don't get the experience right they're never going to use my product again right um customer interviews can be anything from five minutes to 50 minutes um it's easy to overthink but it really just boils down to asking questions and listening to users so in the inventory interview don't make this overly academic you're exploring exploring the problem space from their perspective and looking for opportunities to deliver value and this is a really rich area of study uh like i said an hour worth of content here um and like tens of hours to like continue if i was to like give anyone an 80 20 um it was someone who wanted to like start building products and they're like what's the 80 20 as far as product design goes i would honestly say this this type of product research and co-design is the 80 20 for product design uh in my opinion i know a lot of people we tend to think about usability tests and that sort of thing when we talk about ux design this to me is like where you actually get most of the value because it saves you time and development it really gives you unique insights the thing that you're working on the idea that you have it's very unlikely that nobody else has had that idea so what it comes down to is execution can you have unique insights that nobody else's head on the idea that you're executing on and can you know your users better than anyone else that you're competing with those are really what separate um the good products from the great products that actually succeed in the market um and then finally takeaway number three is build relationships then communities value exchange is a two-way street um really this boils down to doing stuff for free um co-creating with users is actually one of the most underutilized methodologies that i've seen both in the web 3 space as well as the web 2 space but really just like co-building with them usability tests it kind of creates a stop start you design something you put in front of users you design something you put in front of users and you like continuously do that it's actually can speed up the process a lot by scheduling a co-creation session with some of these early users micro experience is another really great way to test out value that you want to deliver especially if it's a established product that you want to test out features to and then finally industry reports one of the things i really like about the web3 space is just how deep the research goes people who are working on side projects will write white papers around everything that they've kind of discovered think of these in terms of industry reports and how they can serve uh the people that you want to maybe like start building a beta list out of or or your first user base um these are also really really useful uh giving and asking for an email for beta it used to not it used to be a lot cheaper ask than it was previously my inbox is an absolute mess because of all of the thousands of newsletters that have been launching building a beta list has actually gotten harder recently and so you have to think about delivering value first before you start building that beta list um i think i've got two minutes or a minute and a half so i'm just going to kind of like rip through these communities the new moat this is ex this is especially true in open source an opt-in protocol level where people can just fork uh your product and then go build something else this is how you start building the community is by actually talking to users and building responsively in terms of their needs and then finally be creative iterate and find your own strategy something i've noticed is when i hand out these i guess these playbooks around it people start using them and then whenever they find situations that don't necessarily apply to their specific use case they kind of stop this is not a copy and paste activity you can't build something unique by just copying pasting user acquisition anywhere that you can build revolutionary tech by copy pasting from stack overflow be creative and solve things um this is also linked i'm just going to riff through this this isn't the end point these are kind of the first steps like i said zero to one one to ten this is where we start thinking in those terms and then finally takeaways know where your users are ask for advice not a sale create value for people and then build relationships and then communities on my further reading i basically have like kind of a list of like user research and biz dev about marketing and then community building these are all links that i found really really helpful uh and again thank you i'm about to drop a giant twitter thread about everything i didn't get to talk to in this as well as links to an expanded uh video and a uh and this deck of all i think like 75 slides so again thank you all so much for your time [Music] awesome zach thank you it's a it's great to hear you kind of run through and share all that value that you've built over so many years working on these problems and helping teams solve them so thanks for sharing all that happy too and and thanks again everybody for the opportunity i love love speaking at east denver all right