Why You Need Privacy Preserving Communications and You Need it Now

For the business owners—the founders who give a damn about the people using what they built—you HAVE to be concerned.

The world has gone remote. Because of this, digital communication has become a paramount need for businesses. But for the crypto community, communication has always been digital. Telegram, Discord, Gitter, and more. Much like the messaging boards of the early 90s, these group chat applications have served as the town squares for each application or protocol in the crypto community.

Unfortunately, it’s not enough.

During coronavirus pandemic, it would be easy to sit back and watch privacy take a back seat. We need to collect data. We need to be able to help stop this thing. Whatever it takes. Right? Fortunately, there are people building tools out there that don’t share that mentality. There are people building tools to collect the data needed to track the spread of coronavirus and keep people informed without invading the privacy of the individuals participating in this data collection.

One such example is Zerobase. Operating as a non-profit funded by grants, their team has built a system that utilizes QR codes and device identification while minimizing the risk of privacy violations—all in the name of getting reliable data to the people who need it during this pandemic.

They are not alone. There are coronavirus-specific applications built around communicating with people and tracking necessary data in a private way coming to market almost every day.

If there is one silver lining during this pandemic (and I hope there will be many), it’s that product people and engineers have doubled-down on creativity in an effort to build useful tools that preserve privacy. The technology has long been available to do so, but there’s been a lack of desire among the builders (not the consumers) to build privacy-focused tech. Thankfully, that is changing.

What does this have to do with crypto and SimpleID?

Every founder in the crypto space should be going to bed each night with two concerns (granted, they are surely going to bed with more than two):

1. How do I avoid the economic ramifications of a worldwide recession?
2. How do I not repeat the mistakes of Black Thursday?

If you’re a founder and those concerns aren’t at top of mind, ask yourself whether you’re focused on the people using your product and tools or if you’re interested in just building cool tech. If it’s the latter, there is no shame in that. But that’s not a business. That’s a hobby or a research project. For the business owners—the founders who give a damn about the people using what they built—you HAVE to be concerned about the two points above.

And both of those points are largely solved through communication.

Think about it. Every disagreement you’ve ever had, every argument with a friend or significant other, every business deal that went south—what did they have in common? My guess is the vast majority of them had communication breakdowns of some form. That’s natural. That’s part of being human.

But also part of being human is the desire to get better at the things at which we struggle. This applies doubly to businesses. If you have communication issues as a business, you should be waking up each morning desperate to fix those problems. Your business relies on this. The entire crypto ecosystem relies on this.

And yet, most founders in the space haven’t recognized this as a top of mind issue.

In my mind, there are two reasons for the complete miss on communication in the crypto space. First, there has been a lack of tooling to support Web3-specific communications. Second, mass-market communication tools have traditionally been built around the idea of hoarding data and violating privacy (intentional or not). Those are fair concerns, but they are no longer true.

You can segment the users of your products or tools into logical groups. You can understand how they use or don’t use your offerings. And, most importantly, you can communicate with them. It is possible to email the right people at the right time with the right message without knowing who they are.

We’ve written about how we’ve made this possible at SimpleID. Now, it’s time to embrace it. The global economy is already taking a hit. Some people will flock to crypto, but there likely isn’t going to be a massive surge of mainstream users coming to the market during a recession. That means, crypto competition turns into a take-away economy. This doesn’t mean take your food to go. A take-away economy is one in which the businesses that operate must take customers from other businesses in the market. The insurance industry is a good example of this. New customers to the insurance market come through in a trickle. You can’t build an insurance business around new customers only. Instead, you have to build your business around being better than the competition and taking customers from them.

That’s exactly where crypto is now. But it’s not prepared for that type of economy. You’re not prepared for that type of economy. You can be, though.

Compete on experience, customer service, and product. If you do that, you’ll have a real shot. Experience and customer service come first in that list because they are the most important ingredients. And they almost entirely rely on good communication. That means it’s not only time to start staying up at night worrying about the two points I made earlier in this article, it’s time to also start worrying about how far behind you’ll be if you are still using Discord, Twitter, and Telegram as your primary communication tools.