A Proposed Product Philosophy

Great post @puniaviision,

Thank you.

While I want to briefly agree with @Thomas_Hepner re the current Blackrock/Vanguard elevator pitch being a useful communication tool, I really want to doubleclick on who we’re trying to help and how. I like this guiding narrative you offer:

“We consider deeply the eventual end users: a middle aged factory worker saving for retirement, a father investing in a college fund, and the young woman daring to make a bet against the status quo. If we do our jobs right, we will greatly accelerate the pace at which DeFi is adopted and make a dent in the financial future of our world.”

This resonates with me deeply - I work for a monster TradFi org atm which does effectively add value to this audience (not all do!). What excites me about the Coop - and DPI as its first product - is it does serve your aforementioned audience. While DPI isn’t super easy to buy at this time, a very normal man/woman/other can in theory buy DPI and simply hold for years it to gain efficient and elegant exposure to DeFi (and much more potentially in time, utility, yield, etc). I think DPI’s is pretty close to perfect product-audience fit for this audience.

I also really like @BigSky7 's vision statement: “I see Index becoming a platform that enables non-technical investors to access the same returns as highly technical crypto insiders.”. Your aforementioned audience isn’t technical, would love access to the returns that deep crypto natives source, but also won’t trust products it cannot at least conceptually get its head round.

I think remembering this audience and how they think is key - if this is indeed the Coop’s agreed audience! - and needs to be borne in mind when new product proposals are coming through and build resources are being allocated.

For example, while I look forward to hopefully soon using your AMM product and FLI, these products - while extremely innovative and intelligently conceived - feel like new tools for sophisticated, crypto-natives well ahead of the curve (and potentially already well-advanced in crypto wealth accumulation). On the other hand, DPI, CGCI and Metaverse feel like products the more numerous folks on Main St would either be more likely to use, period, or be more likely to use earlier in their crypto journey.

I am excited about all the product proposals coming through and would also hope to see 10 new products supported by the end of the year. I just think it’s important that at least more than one of these future 10 products (DPI) really appeals to the Main St audience you describe. I think CGCI, DPI, and Metaverse could strongly appeal to this audience, and hopefully more product proposals will too.

Again, great post and, at a minimum this will stimulate debate as to who our audience is.

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