An early software startup journey is driven by iterating on the product to build something that truly delivers value to your customers. It’s a lot of hits and misses, but the teams that are successful iterate fast and talk to customers all in the search for the elusive product market fit (PMF).
When we first started working on SimpleID, we were building a wallet solution, because it was a problem we personally experienced. What we quickly found out after talking to hundreds of potential customers is that the market just didn’t need another cryptocurrency wallet and monetization was a long and complicated road.
Interestingly, our potential customers wanted to learn how users engage with their product and how to retain them. What they really wanted to understand is if they actually have product market fit (PMF). Funnily enough, while looking for PMF ourselves, we were building a tool to help others find PMF!
When you look at the current landscape of tools in the Ethereum ecosystem, there’s a glaring hole for a product analytics solution. At best you have imperfect substitutes that require a lot of hand holding, or custom tools built by larger teams to solve the PMF problem.
It’s straightforward to understand the market usage of your product and where the interactions are coming from, but in order to perform cohort analysis of user behaviors and make sense of the data, you need to script constantly changing, advanced database queries, sometimes in conjunction with a custom subgraph or external datasources.
What customers needed was an easy to use tool that allowed them to understand questions & take action surrounding: what users do and why they stay or go? This is exactly what Mixpanel has done for Web2 companies, and what we’re building for Web3 companies.Our first iteration of the new SimpleID focused on things that drove engagement and retention in Web2, notifications + emails powered by a basic segmentation engine.
After talking to our customers, we quickly realized that the segmentation engine just wasn’t advanced enough in terms of the data it’s able to parse and dissect. Unfortunately, the technology stack decisions we made while building our cryptocurrency wallet, could not address this new problem effectively or meaningfully.
We revamped our tech stack to better fit the goal of product analytics and advanced segmentation capabilities. Not only does this give SimpleID a 100X improvement on speed importing contracts & users, it also allows for increased flexibility to segment on new criteria (i.e and variations of those criteria).
Here are some basic questions customer can answer with a few clicks:
- Top 10 wallets by amount, transactions, transactions with other contracts, etc.
- Wallets above average transaction, below average transaction
- Daily active, weekly active, monthly active for various contracts
Furthermore, now segmentation can be done on function calls and events! This opens up a whole new arena of possibilities:
- Building custom trading or arbitrage bots
- Alerts if potential hacks are draining Liquidity Pools
- Dynamic surge prices to combat high gas fees
- Payout for providing liquidity in yield farming
After our next release, we plan on integrating price feed oracles and time delays that would allow DeFi primitives interact with customers at the most opportune time, for example: “Send an email to my user when their loan is due in 7 days if their collateralization ratio is below 150% because Eth price is below $400.”
We’re excited to see the new and interesting ways SimpleID infrastructure can be used to onboard and engage the next million users to DeFi.
