I was reading Maggie Hsu piece on Go-to-Market in Web3: New Mindsets, Tactics, Metrics because I was looking for new frameworks for how to be an effective Web3 CMO.
As I’ve shared before (and will share again), one of the biggest growth areas that I foresee is in bringing the best of a Web2 CMO to Web3, but not bringing everything because there are parts of the job that are fundamentally different.
Much of what Maggie wrote reminded me of my book (naturally), the Decentralized Marketing Organization, because the arrival of tokens as a mechanism for driving alignment among early “customers” or, in Web3, community members, is a pretty significant game changer.
I thought she offered a lot of good advice for how to assess the value of a community/network and what metrics matter the most (which is important for someone who has OKReligion, as I do).
However, the part that I thought was interesting, or at least caught my attention, was that she kept referring to “DeFi applications.”
Now, the reason that this is interesting is because, at Radix, we are wholly focused on being a DeFi platform where there are millions of DeFi dapps sitting on top of it.
It’s even more interesting because one of the great opportunities (and challenges) associated with being a start-up is to define, and then lead, a new category.
This is the essence of the “category design” that has received a lot of attention, most notably through the book, Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets .
Sprinklr, has created the CXM or Customer Experience Management category. At Gtmhub, we spent a lot of time thinking “beyond OKRs” to things like “Business Orchestration Systems,” and though we were close, I’m not sure we ever nailed it. It’s a multi-year process.
Radix has the same opportunity, to become a category defining player, as the only purpose-built Layer 1 technology for DeFi. All of the other layer 1s are “general purpose” which is fine, but it leaves out some of the things that will make DeFi hum at scale.
The question, of course, is “what’s the category then?”
Which led me to the title of this post…maybe the category we are creating is “DeFi-as-a-service.”
If you’re a DeFi developer and you want to “plug into the DeFi cloud” in the same way that any developer would plug into the AWS or Azure cloud, you spin up an instance and you have access to a range of capabilities pre-installed.
One thing I am going to think about is whether or not the fact that the Radix platform, with its broad range of DeFi capabilities, such as smart contracts, developer royalties, blueprints, components, and a finance engine, comprise “DeFi-as-a-service” and, if it does, is that a category (though I’m not the first to think of it) that is worth trying to own.
Regardless, DeFi-as-a-service or “Web3 Fintech” is going to be a thing. A Big thing.
