Three Golden Guidelines for Decentralised Applications of the Future
The three golden guidelines for making a successful decentralised application:
- Find the right market fit for your product/app
- Have sufficient community participation and engagement in your project decisions
- Have sufficient community ownership in your project via your token
Web2 companies have great market fit for their products in todays world. Some web2 projects also have sufficient community participation, and generally these projects are more likely to boldly explore web3 by finding ways to have community ownership of at least some of their existing or future products via some form of a token launch.
Why are these things important?
Finding the right market fit is important because if you do not have a product solves certain problem, you don’t have users who will use your product and hence you will never have a business model.
Having sufficient community participation and engagement is important because it is vital for the core team, active-users and passive-users to work together to find common goals and achieve them. A collaborative relationship between all three of them is at the heart of a successful web3 project.
Having sufficient community ownership (decentralisation) via a crypto token is important because that is the biggest differentiating factor between a web2 and a web3 project. Anyone who is building solutions for web3 and truly believes in the ethos of web3 will agree that powerful web2 companies have been profiting at the expense of users’ privacy or wellbeing. You might not need the whole world to be a part of your project, but just enough members to successfully call it a global and community-driven one.
It is important to tackle these problems one at a time, doing everything at once night increase the risk of failure. For example, having a community ownership without having a proper market fit first might result in higher percentage of passive and dead community members. Or having little community participation before the market fit might result in vague goals.
In the end, there is no universally right answer, every project owner must solve this puzzle on his own or by taking external support. Thankfully, web3 has a lot of that!
