Manifesting PMF | SheFi Summit Bangkok

Transcript

welcome everyone thank you panelists uh for being here I'm very excited to be moderating today's panel on pmf and I we've been preparing and I am really excited for the panelists to share their hot takes on manifesting pmf I wish it would be as easy as just manifesting it right but before getting into it I will let each of each of you introduce yourselves um I didn't introduce myself under Denise uh I'm a Founder at uh mobile stack also coo at valora and I've been building um direct to Consumer applications for a lot uh a lot of years in in web but yeah over to you hey everyone I'm Amy vro from Austin Texas how do youall um I am at zerx project

Zer x.org where I do product marketing um but my background is a little all over the place I come from a tech Consulting to Tech sales background before web 3 and somehow we're here I love hearing everyone's stories and they're always unique uh my name is Britney Miran I'm head of Market Innovation at Harpy uh we build security tooling uh both for Consumer and Enterprise and U my background is also a little bit different I came from the smart home and Integrated Systems uh space and uh got into web 3 through eth Global hackathons and I've been on the hary team for two years part of shi7 and happy to be here with you today uh Nina here from Arbitron Foundation had of Partnerships I've been with the ecosystem for over 3 years now

uh I am a chemical engineer from University of waterl uh before I joined crypto I also was heavily involved in an organization called ladies who Tech so definitely continue that Spirit into my crypto Journey awesome thank you so much um okay I have a couple of questions prepared to warm up um you all in the audience should also warm up because I will make sure there's some time for questions and I would love to hear from you all what you want want to hear from them okay let's warm up um with a very high level one so pmf or product Market fit um often feels very elusive especially in web 3 in your Journeys you can individually answer this one where um were there any unexpected signals that made you realize you found it or

success stories that really surprised you in that Journey um I think in the Journey of RB trom um Layer Two in the beginning was a very widely discussed um concept but when we what what made us really real that we have par Market F that we become the default defi chain that any defi projects would want to launch on at one point I think um I think any D5 Founders that are not considering arbitrum as one of the chain supports not serious about their defi Journey um and then at the same times we realize that when they approach us all the questions they ask all the things they request from us we already have them in our hand so that's when we realize okay we actually Pro provided a product that really solve people's need

and um they are also adding into a vibrant ecosystem that um is uh buil on top of our technology I think for us um one of the big indicators was actually events like this um in the beginning it was you know a challenge we're explaining a lot of times like why do you need security why is it important how do you do it you know what am I looking at what am I doing here and then when our product had evolved and the tools that we created had evolved to a point that people were now coming up to us at the booth and saying oh I tried this out I I saved my assets I'd accidentally signed a transaction or I didn't realize something was going on I got an email in my inbox when people started to come to

us and approach us telling us about how our product had changed their day or their experience like that was a very distinct moment um when we felt like we could we had found our spot so I think with with ZX um for those of you who don't know I well I haven't been in crypto since 2016 our Founders have been building zerx through iterations since uh 2016 and I think there are a couple cool stories that I've heard from other members of the team who have been around a longer that uh are kind of fun for this type of product Market vit uh panel one is so for those of you who don't know um ZX is a DEX aggregator but surface through an API so you can embed

swaps into any application either front end or back end um for front end being like a swap in a wallet or back end being like um you deposit any token into dydx and it converts it to usdc um at some point uh through the evolution of zerox they wanted to show what you could do with these API the types of things that you could build and they created a a demo environment for that but because everything is on chain it's not like a clo system that you only turn on for a demo and what our team found was that even in between those demo moments people were actually using this trading tool and that's Macha XYZ so I think that's a kind of unique uh

story about pmf that's Bo they knew that they had found something interesting um and I think more recently for us uh this past year we've really started experimenting with um how to generate Revenue so that was a really scary moment for us we've gone through two iterations now of different models to try one being subscriptions and now we've moved into um something a just a little bit simpler um with fees per Swap and so those were both scary moments for us because that's really where the rubber meets the road in terms of pmf hot take there is there really pmf if we're not making any money as a business exactly yeah that is sort of my hot take um is I feel that in Tech in general but

especially on web 3 oftentimes what people are talking about is just trying to get users onto your app and I think that's great and I think if you build something that people are using that is a signal but at the end of the day if you're trying to create a business if people aren't willing to pay for that service then I think you're kind of fooling yourself around how strong your product Market fit is cool thank you um okay the next question is the million dooll question that yeah I don't know I have to ask it though how is pmf different in web 3 you all have experience in web 2 how is it different in web 3 to web 2 is is it different is it just the same how do you all think about that um so I think in

web 3 A lot of times you sort of have to I don't obviously not everybody can be the par Paradigm shifter but you kind of have to believe you are the Paradigm shifter when you go to market because it's a very young industry users typically don't know what they are they should be expecting and you are you should be out there educating them uh and you probably won't see product marketed for for a very long time like if you think about Uber Uber didn't profit for a very long time before I know no when they in incentivized users so I think that's one thing um that's very different and second um a lot of the project they uh launch a token and then they sort of give up on making

Revenue with their product uh I think this is also another sign and this industry is on this very early stage uh thereus ARB Trum right now I think we generated 143 million transaction fees so far in the past three years uh we also have multiple you know orbit chains that will be feeding back to the Dow treasury so there different ways we're experimenting uh product Market fit and I completely agree with you that eventually I think the whole industry should move towards um the direction where token is not the only source of renue uh which should really providing uh product that people are willing to pay uh to use I think that's the ultimate goal I think that was really well said um I would add to that mostly I think where in web 2 pmf can be

somewhat stagnant it's it's almost like you you achieve it and then you maintain it um where in web3 it's a little bit more of a dynamic goal um you can hit pmf and then the ecosystem changes or the technology changes or how people are using or accessing or storing their tokens changes um so in web 3 I think it's it's a moving Target and we have to be a little bit more on our toes more consistently so that uh we don't lose pmf which I think is a little bit harder to do uh in to quite as quickly wow Brett I was going to say the exact same thing yeah I think in web 3 things just move so quickly so you can find pmf and then 6 months later the Teck has completely changed maybe the thing that

you built is just completely irrelevant or you've slipped um but I guess maybe if I wanted to pick a second thing that is different I think it's not necessarily pmf but around that um because everything happens on chain eventually and every action on chain costs some money to the user I think there's just different dynamics that you have to think about that don't exist in web 2 um and at least for me I I really believe that you have to be thinking about how you're going to make money or how people are going to pay you and if that is worth if us just see value in that and so because of that onchain

Dynamic of every action costing something you have to think about that in a different way in some sense I think you have to be providing more value and just users are more aware of costs there's more of a sensitivity to not wanting to pay rent seeking middlemen which I think is very fair but yeah the value becomes more important we have hot take number two pmf is not a stagnant thing in we three I like it um so following on your uh Heart Take Britney uh anyone can answer obviously um pmf is not a smooth sailing not a smooth path can you share a Moment In your experience maybe at your current organizations or working on other products or or uh offerings that uh was

things changed really drastically thought you had pmf but like we said things change you get like I don't know user feedback or something that signals that you no longer have it um yeah can you share some of the challenges how you react and how you like you know pull yourself together and go out again to find it um this is from a past life um and actually to counter my very own point a web two momentary loss of pmf um so I I used to work in Integrated Systems and uh we were both a hardware layer and a software layer and um our our Hardware layer was a component within another and at some point we had identified an industry that we weren't

strong in we had found a partner in that industry we had uh inserted our Hardware into their product and we were convinced we had pmf right just instant branding the right company and everything like that um but in that moment we realized we had a pretty narrow lenses and we mastered pmf with their specific customers but we really had left a gap in the whole rest of the industry and with their competitors um and that partnership was some something that I I sort of came into and it was a very exclusive partnership so we had to figure out how to create pmf in an industry with an exclusive partner that had a lot of rights to use our product um and I think that's just sort of a a

hint on why it's so important to a be very very specific in how you work with different organizations and the limitations that that may or not may may or may not include um and then also just being aware that uh you may need to be dynamic in the future and it can be hard if you have paperwork stopping you from doing that cool uh one of example I can share in the arbitrum ecosystem is relationship is arbitrum Nova and the orbit tax deack so for those that do know that orbit from Nova is a any trust chain that um pretty much reduce the transaction cost uh by andal 50 times compared to arbitrum one U whereas arbitr from orbit is the text deck that allows anybody to spin up their only

layer two layer three chain ecosystem so back then we were on know we see a lot of competitor with like very cheap transactions even cheaper than arbit from one that would before EIP uh 4844 launch um so we launched arbit from Nova with any any trust technology but quickly um the industry interest pivot into launching their own chain every D5 product wants their own chain every gaming prodct wants their own chain um but what we did was that we took anyr technology that was build for Nova and then we build it into the oritex Dex so oritex is actually based on the same technology of orbit from Nova and then we allowed people to build their own chain with arbitr TX deack so that was one of the things that we we we did hit hit on the right direction launch the

product at the right time but then we quickly pivoted took it you know took the community's feedback and launched different product that um that will will be helping them uh moving forward I can just give a quick hit one on this one I think it's to hot take number two with the slipping pmf um one thing that we saw last year at zerx is that we're back in this game of new Chains new l2s launching and the way that our Tech stock was built made it really hard for us to add new chain support quickly and that's something we kept hearing from our customers and integrators over and over again and uh it did require a full Tech stack rebuild but we went through that um and I think it's one of those

things where you find pmf but you can't you can't rest on those Laurels you need to keep adding to your product and innovating and that was a really painful lesson for us but on the on the bright side where it used to take maybe a month to add uh support for a new chain down to days or I mean sometimes even one day so yeah that's fun yeah fun times to even more fun times yeah I just want to add to that too um you know you're not alone in that I think that's something that in crypto we have to do all the time at Harpy we did the exact same thing we we noticed that it was extremely hard for us to add chains and at some point we're like okay we're going to do this we're going to invest the time to rebuild our own stack

but then it you know the the payoff the ROI and perpetuity is so worth it so thanks for inspiration yeah thank you has one to that at uh valora took us a whole year to add a second chain valora was born with in solell ecosystem was single chain for a long time in 2023 we finally launched uh on ethereum support ethereum support and it took us a whole year and then after that we were just able to like add support for other evm chains in like literally like two days it was just like crazy um yeah a lot of work fun times but then once you get through it it's just so much more fun after yeah um cool all right uh for this next part I have a question that I prepare for each of you because your

user bases your audiences are also different and I think what's particularly interesting is that many of your projects kind of like speak to multiple audiences so maybe let's start with arbitrum soina um as the success of arbitrum has grown um how do you reflect on your own pmf um in terms of like how does the success of the projects on arbitrum how do you think of that in terms of pmf for arbitrum itself yeah absolutely so arbitrum is a bit unique because we are actually ecosystem um what we often say is our success is not our success your success is our success so everybody who builds on orbit have to be successful for us to be successful um so one of the one of the sign I think is

that as I mentioned our transaction fee is currently sitting at 143 million I think that's a huge uh recognition from people who actually to use orbitron as their primary layer of transaction um and second is that we arbitrum is getting stronger every time there's a successful defi projects bringing in more users bringing in more adding towards the defi Lego um in in on ARB ecosystem so I think the real product Market we see is that we see the nexx Unis swap we see the NEX Paradigm shifting D5 projects um growing from the arbitrum ecosystem that's where we think oh that's we provided something that allowed this to happen we enabled Builders to build the things uh they

that actually bring value to the retail users um so we really look forward to see more success stories in our bom ecosystem I think that's the uh best evidence of our product Market fit thank you all right for um har for Brit um security is critical uh for your product um what signals do you look for uh to respond to resing security demands in terms of like adjusting those your product Market fit or your vision of product maret fit to those signals I lost you just like on the last part of that sentence you give me that let me let me read it again um um where security is critical how do you approach building trust with early users what signals do you look for to respond to

Rising security demands um I mean for us privacy and and not collecting the data of our users is a pretty huge aspect um we try and do everything we can to be as hands off as we can so that we're just truly a security tool you know we stay out of browser extensions and things like that as well um and I think just overall um making sure that everything's very easy to use very simple to engage with uh that user on boarding is easy um and then also transparent so that we're not collecting more information than we need to do what we need to do that we're not collecting sensitive information uh when it's not required and that uh even the more advanced tools we have that do require things like openen approvals we

do our best to make sure that we can explain very specifically what's happening in that transaction um and I do find that the more information we can give uh specifically in layman's terms we have a very technical team and at first we were giving very complex answers to what we were doing and how we were doing that and we found out that actually was like a bit scary to our users uh they didn't care how cool and awesome our Tech was it seemed a little bit overwhelming and like well if I can't understand it it might not be safe for me to be using um so the the best like sort of path pmf for us was really simplifying what we do make it a little bit less scary um I I kind of hate this term but it comes up all the time with

security like security is not sexy I really try and move it into like a different like lyic like uh reptilian part of your brain like let's move from that sort of uh reptilian part to like fight ORF flight how do we make it simple and critical like how do we alert you that something is time- sensitive and important to address without making it look so scary that you really can't handle what's going on and you should probably back off all right the last question is for Amy um zerx CS to a lot of audiences users um developers other projects as well um how do you think about prioritizing the needs of your different audiences and thinking about product m fit yeah so I think there's two categories within that um that we've

divided internally with their team so uh we have the matcha team we we're all one company but the matcha team because they're working on this direct consumer app they sort of operate in their own separate space on the zerox side I think it's become more complicated over time as we've matured and the space has matured and our customers have matured and it it maybe three years ago or eight years ago you could just Market to developers as an API tool you just need one developer to say that's cool let me integrate it but to fast forward from 16 to today we and the space have grown up we're more mature companies and

businesses and we're we're trying to get to that place at least and that means that you can't just Market to a developer anymore right like no developer on our team alone is making any decision alone I'm not making any decisions alone on tools that I use and on the on the marketing side and so the way that we think about it is that we're trying to create a platform for serious businesses right people that are serious about building the space and that means that you have to understand how this tool impacts the business end to end so yes like developers are still very important we love you guys but also how about the head of Finance who is signing off on every purchase and also has to manage um the the accounting of fees

that you're collecting right so and product people they're they want to understand with within an application what are what are the metrics around that trade or like what chains are my users making trades on and so we try to think about within a business if you are a serious business who are all the types of people that might need to interact with this API in some way it's not enough anymore that you can send a swap there are so many other parts of it you the finance person who just wants to consolidate fees into one or two stable assets and the product people want insights into what users are doing on chain and so yeah we just try to think about things more holistically now

there's um question to an egg problem what do you do first find like product Market fit with your audience in terms of like insights or do you build a product and then like go find like an audience for it like a first audience did I understand your question correctly okay I've got a thought on this um I think it is I I don't know that they're super separate would say that you should start talking to whoever you think is going to be your audience first so I don't know that it's necessarily you pick the audience or you build first I would say maybe have an idea but then go talk to the people that might use that and try to shorten the cycle between what it is that you're building and

testing to see if you have pmf so it could just be like with our Founders um zero X apis were born because they were talking to all of the other people that they knew in the space that were building things and they realized wow everyone is building their own um trading app or their own decks and liquidity is fragmenting everywhere so it it was through those conversations that they figured out a product that they thought could be valuable so I would say just start talking people first I was just going to add as soon as Jenna was talking the first thing is is chicken egg I think it really is very specific to the project where where you at and your growth cycle also how you came to be you like for us we came out of winning e Denver as a hackathon so it

was just a tool so we had to go find the audience that could actually leverage this tool and build a product that they were happy to use and then once we found the audience that was happy to use it we had to go back and also identify the tool and how we could expand that to be more comprehensive in their needs so I think it's very much chicken egg and I think it really depends on your product the Inception and where you are in growth I actually would like to take it one step further from Lio viners like in like obviously you should talk to people but you can also start building like as you said like you you came out from a hackathon like in web 3 so many opportunities there Grand programs hackathon there are incubators you can start something small and start building

as a way you can talk to people pivot you know just having that very initial stage of like easy simple maybe very sketchy MVP is already it explains a lot and when the users see it they can actually give you more constructive feedback rather than just the idea a Dack um I think that's also one advantage of the know repap 3 computers really have of like starting something quick and small all right well thank you so much we are at time hot take number three there's no way around chcken an egg but it can go both ways all right thank you