I would like to nominate myself for ICC. I’ll point to my call in the leadership forum yesterday and the product strategy I posted as an indicator of how I can help drive overall growth at Index Coop. I also previously worked in the Growth nest so I have an understanding how we can harmonize efforts between the two groups.
The three strategic objectives I would like the ICC to focus on would include:
- Diversify our product portfolio based on market research and customer segmentation [Product focused].
a. Focusing on our technology capabilities. Being platform agnostic could allow us to launch products that align more closely with our product roadmap. This would be considered on a per-product basis.
b. Creating a multi-chain strategy that doesn’t spread us too thin, but also allows us to make some calculated bets. - Continue to expand our existing products on-chain through partnerships and integrations. [Marketing focused]
- Expand our product portfolio off-chain/on a CEX. [IB focused]
We’re at an inflection point in many parts of the business. Understand and digging into these will allow IC to head for exponential growth.
- Product Market Fit, as @JosephKnecht pointed out is critical at this stage. We’ve seen tapered demand for our products, so my first initiative as Product lead was to focus on Market Research. This has helped us identify which customers to target and which products they want. Likewise, what core competencies does Index Coop offer that we can leverage to dominate the space. These should be at the front of any strategic investments we make. I view these core competencies as:
a. Marketing and distribution. I’m sure this is no surprise to anyone considering it’s why IC was created
b. Product curation. Over the last year and a half we’ve learned more about building structured products than anyone else in the space. Let’s use this to curate products for our partners.
c. Engineering. In partnership with Set we know how the intricacies of building products, going through rebalancing, etc. I think we still have room to level up in this competency. - Partners - the type of partners we work with and how we work with them has changed massively in the last few months. I’ve worked with a number of our largest partners and will be focusing on creating a standard partnership onboarding process over Season 1. A copy of our standard partnership agreement for branding partners can be found here.
- Capital - IC is hemorrhaging funds at a frightening rate. Launching and growing products is expensive which will ultimately slow our growth if we continue on this path. The advantage, is that it forces us to be more creative in how we launch products. Our competitors, who have less cash, are bootstrapping launches by doing things such as auctions (at a 20% discount which would be $200k on a $1M product launch) and bribes (paying streaming fees out to LPs, which means no revenue to the organization). We’ve already seen a few creative ideas from IC, such as an NFT raffle to $JPG LPs and focusing on products like icETH and FIXED which require $100k vs $1M for sectoral products. My goal is to continue fostering creativity and innovative solutions so we can focus on profitability.
I look forward to the possibility of joining the Council.