WuASM Episode 7 - "Bad Price, Good Build"

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 2:30

   he

2. 5:31

   hey good morning uh we are back with another wake up and ship more I'm your host Joe uh today we are going to do a quick episode on talking about uh price specifically and I definitely want to talk a little bit about uh in general just like what it means when like stock price token price goes up and down for your product uh obviously very bad markets the past couple days uh let's see if we go uh let's go check in on the

3. 6:04

   charts and see what they are today all right maybe not so let's actually uh talk about more about just Building Products so one of the things that comes up a lot is you know you build in a bare market and then you know you accelerate growth during a uh you know a a bull market and you know if price is going down it's going to hurt everything and uh if the stock market's a mess then your product's going to suffer and all these things so I think

4. 6:42

   there's a couple things that we should talk about when you're Building Product and you're developing anything that really should be in consideration if you're serious about your product and I want to State this from a point of like if you're building a financial related product so let's say you're building a tool for the mortgage industry and the mortgage industry is in disarray and there's no you know like the markets housing market is crashing like then sure like your product is

5. 7:14

   going to suffer your because your user base is being directly affected by that that uh situation whereas if your product has nothing related to something financial and it is just something maybe whether it's social based maybe it's um you know just anything you know whatever it might be let's say it's an app for a sporting event things like that it's if it's too directly tied to the price of something right so it's tied to you know the token price in crypto it's tied to the stock

6. 7:54

   market gooing up and down then you haven't thought through your whole product because you really shouldn't be again unless it's a financial product it really shouldn't be affected by price and so that's where I think we make the mistake sometimes especially in web 3 that we get very caught up in like oh man the markets are down the markets are up whatever else because if your product is suffering when the markets are down then what you're saying is that when the

7. 8:29

   market are up your product should be doing great and but that's not always the case right so like if I if I'm looking at my product here right and I say okay you know here's here's my product and if price is down right so if I got token price is going down and then I see my users go down well I have to think about like why is that tied together like what about is that is connected so is my app a

8. 9:00

   financial app right so like you know if it's Financial then okay that could be the reason why right because now people are scared or they're pulling out money or whatever else but for the most part if it's just you know set up this way you know where you you're seeing a lower user base because the price goes down then it's saying okay what was actually driving users to begin with because if it's not

9. 9:27

   Financial then it's got to be something else so we need to look closer at that the other part of that is is the inverse true so if right if my price is going up so we'll say say my if my price is going up you know then do my users go up and chances are that's not true and that's that's a problem and that is where I think the issue with issue with adoption in web 3 and crypto right now is really happening because I if I look closely at a lot of

10. 10:15

    products that are out there you say look you know uh my user base because you know token because the token was doing good at the bull market there's more people around more people are trying my app now the price goes down and people go away so now you're directly tied to token price you're you're directly tied to something that is not in your control you were directly tied to something that is not directly tied to your app right if you again if you do not have a financial app and you're seeing your

11. 10:48

    users go up and down simply because of the token price you've put some mechanism in incorrectly and and and and I and I mean that in a serious way of like like when you have thought through the way your product works it's either not really sticky it's really not doing something that is of value to your users because they are driven away simply by the token price then so if you

12. 11:20

    are trying to build something sustainable then you need to really consider like what does that all mean for you and for your product so that's where I think it's important to take a step back and really start to reevaluate like if the price is going down if the stock market and this is for web to as well like if you if the stock market is going down and I am now saying oh less people are going to use my product and my app

13. 11:52

    is not a financial app then I what are we doing so you have to we have to to balance a lot of this together of where where does price and your build intersect okay so one of the things that you need to start to consider and we've talked about this a little bit when we talked about you know app architecture and we talked about building an MVP we talked about like who are my users okay and a question that we didn't

14. 12:25

    really ask before is actually why are they my users and the reason why we want to ask why are they my users and this might seem like trivial right this might seem like oh well yeah they're my users because they want to use my product and so like I built this cool product I want to use it it's like great great so then if you say that and like that's your first part of it and then your second P your second sentence is oh well the Market's down and so our numbers are

15. 12:59

    down well then it says okay well what did you build and why aren't people now using it because the token price is down is people are people not using the token pric down because people are not online enough okay so if that's the case you know people are now less online for whatever reason you know I'm taking a break from being on you know social media because you know the stock market's down the price is down and and then you know so my user base is down so

16. 13:33

    then then you're telling me that your product is at the whim of large events so maybe it's not just price maybe price is the thing that's affecting it now but now large events are going to pull your user base that may not be a bad thing that may be a normal flux of users and that's okay but if it's something that is overly detrimental to your user base over time then you do have a problem and so here's where I look at some of the

17. 14:04

    stuff so the next step of evaluation really becomes down to is like for how long do my users come and go okay so that's the part there how long do they if something let's say again something negative happens something bad happens uh do my users go away away for a day do my users go away for two days are they gone for a week or are they gone forever and you need to be able to evaluate that you need to be able to look at your numbers and say it's not enough for you and again this is not I

18. 14:46

    want to I want to separate this from like investor talk because investor talk is something a little bit different like I'm going to sell my product to an investor I'm talking to investors yeah sure like they're going to like want to know some answers around like why your num is different now like and you can talk about numbers and you can BS some stuff whatever that's separate what I'm talking about here is just for your own

19. 15:09

    building right like we're just focused on like you as the developer you as the entrepreneur like do you understand your actual product and the part here that I'm really trying to emphasize to you is that when something negative happens and your user base is affected by that then do you understand the reasoning why and do you understand how long that's going to affect you and the reason is because in the beginning beginning sure you can weather the storm of ups and downs

20. 15:40

    because you're just building you're new you're in an earlier spot you that's accept that's there's an acceptable amount of influx and outflux I guess of of users in a certain stage there becomes another time where it's like okay we're a little bit more serious we're a little further down the road now like what happens so you want to evaluate how long and so that comes down to again you know uh it is goes back to

21. 16:12

    obviously the why and you know like so it's for not just how long but like why are they gone for that long and then like the like million dooll question here is do they come back and that's important to look at too is if they are gone for a little while if they and then they do come back you know then it's important to then understand Catalyst or the mechanism here for like why they came back and if you can start to

22. 16:52

    better uh evaluate for yourself why did someone come back why did they actually you know take that time off because negative event happens right price goes down stock market crashes not even crashes again like let's look at this past weekend right like you know really bad you know if you were in the financial markets right like the the stock drops on a lot of different things stock price drops on a lot of different things the larger markets as a whole drop over the weekend you know uh the

23. 17:26

    token price you know really goes down quite a bit leading into Monday uh it's recovered a bit now it's Tuesday sure okay so like you see that uh you know did that again and the question is here because we're talking about building is like my users went away so like sure like maybe they took a break yesterday you know because it was just stressful whatever it might be you know are they coming back today uh how long are they going to be gone uh are

24. 17:59

    they gone forever you know is that kind of thing and you know when I answer the question of do they come back like you know am I tracking when users come back so that's where it's important to understand you know if you don't you have app like where they're not signing in let's say so they don't actually have user accounts so you can't just like look at like oh last time it's someone

25. 18:22

    signed in you need to be able to have some reference of you know who who your users are right so this is where again you know and even in web 3 and in crypto so let's say you don't have a regular database you're just using onchain stuff like you have to look and see okay are there transactions happening did someone who did a transaction previously on my app are they coming back and doing another

26. 18:48

    transaction on my app you know how long is that time in between do I actually start to understand better of all that stuff and so we need to start putting some of those mechanisms to do that all right so let's talk about that a little bit here okay so no matter what I'm doing at any time I'm going to have my users right so here's my user base okay this this number is going to vary so we're going

27. 19:22

    to have right we're going to have total and we're going to have active and a misconception here is that um like this means actually something different for every app so when you are comparing apps or someone says like here's my active numbers uh the next question should always be of like what does active mean to you what does active mean in your product because when someone says like oh here is a let's use like

28. 19:53

    Twitter X for example okay because that's that's a good one that has always for now since the beginning of it had a problem with understanding of like what is an actual active user when they say like I we have you a certain amount of uh monthly active users what does that mean so someone might say an active user is someone who actually goes on the platform you know writes a tweet or post

29. 20:17

    now and post it and that's that's act act activity but what about somebody who doesn't want to actually post anything and they just want to go and read and so so they are actively on Twitter spending a certain amount of time looking at other people's feeds and but not actually posting is that an active user what kind of user is that that user for probably you know Twitter X's sake is going to be like yeah that's just as valuable because they're seeing the ads

30. 20:48

    and that's ad Revenue so right so like what is an active user mean so you need to be able to actually Define this and so what does that mean and then you also then your total is going to be probably you know usually again like signups or whatever but again it let's say you use a mechanism where you don't actually store like logins because it's a web 3 based app and you're just worried about it's just connecting to a contract so you're not actually having a let's say like a proper login mechanism that you're

31. 21:18

    tracking the logins well then I need to I need to be able to like group this and it's probably something like you know uh number of users uh you know like with like you know like you know greater than like one transaction you know it's a w there you go uh and so you know and they say okay so my total users is you know let's say a thousand active users though are people who have at least one transaction let's say a week right and so this is oh

32. 21:58

    this the other part of this too is right like I need to Define actually a time frame okay and that's how I start to determine my active and so I need to be able to figure that out because again if you have an event like this weekend where there is a major selloff and the token price is dropping it's again it's not a good answer to say no one's using my app because the price is down and then because the next question should be from any advisor that you work with

33. 22:28

    anyone else who's on your team anyone else who's just trying to give you advice would be oh you oh you lost a bunch of users because the token price is down is it a financial app is it a token based app like is it reliant on that you say oh no it's not it's not it's uh you know it's a you know let's say it's a it's a fantasy sports app right so people are uh making their their fantasy team whatever else you say oh okay you know we'll use the baseball you know American so we'll say that's a

34. 23:00

    popular sport in America right so people are doing Fantasy Baseball okay great well did baseball stop no okay is there games tonight still yep okay so why your numbers went down because the token price went down but there's still games happening right so like you need to make the logic make sense and that's the part where you know I I really want to Advocate that like you as the Builder

35. 23:31

    and you as the developer like you need to ask yourself these questions you need to go through this you need to have this dialogue with better with somebody but if not with somebody like with yourself and so we talked a little bit before too again on previous episode of like you thinking through all of your stuff like when I was showing like building out some of the charting and some of the

36. 23:54

    flowcharts again the reason why I do a lot of that is to Think Through the process this is the same idea here the same idea of like maybe you want to be to blog a little bit and even if you don't post it right even if you just want to write out your thought process to have to go through that exercise is super helpful so you need to ask yourself these questions of like again what and what you know what is the time frame here and then like like

37. 24:22

    why just as I was writing before is like why are they active and when you know and when's important too because and and I I was I'm going to point this out especially for web 3 with web 3 like you have obviously a much more it's much more naturally a global product most of the time not all the time but most of the time you much more naturally have a a a global product and so by understanding when you start to

38. 24:55

    understand who your potential audience is for example again and and I'm just going to use because of my own time zone but right so if during the like American business hours my app is very busy and then you know during my night time and overnight my I see like the transaction numbers are very low I know that my web 3 app is probably most likely being used by people in maybe North and South America you

39. 25:29

    know that kind of region of work where it's daytime people are using it if I'm seeing the inverse then maybe I expect to make other other assumptions the other side of this is too is again this is assuming like I'm not tracking anything else I'm just using transaction data but it can then inform again a little bit of like what should I be doing and like when should I be be focusing on uh other things like I still have to ship an update sometime when do

40. 26:01

    I ship updates you know when do I you know try to you know added new features who my new features for so I need to actually know like when they're active uh this also the when also might inform the why okay so we we want to always make sure that we're paying attention to that then it really comes down to if I get a sense of my total I get a sense of my active I get a sense of what's driving all of this I can I can

41. 26:34

    then hopefully start to break down you know the major question is am this is the thing am I affected by CH and if the answer is yes should um if the answer is yes then and I again I am not a financial app then I need to make changes so I then need to start designing in a way and so we go here so I need to start thinking about then of my feuture set okay you know what about and have again just it's the same thing that we've been doing here of like looking at of like

42. 27:21

    why you know what's the why and what is it like what is in my feature set here that is driving that is being affected so much by price like what is it that uh am I getting caught up in that is leading to you know again less users or less activity during price drops what about that is likely tied to it and then you can start to work backwards and hopefully start to solve for some that uh I also want to point out here that uh I think it's really really critical that when you are

43. 28:00

    starting to design your product that you are really thinking about again uh how often is my product going to be used by someone so here's the I guess the the way to start to look at some of the stuff because every day while that sounds awesome and that's what you want if like you're a social media company is maybe not like relevant to to most apps you know it's nice it's great to say like oh yeah every day you know our active user base is this and

44. 28:37

    you know daily active users is this number and whatever um that's a hard and I'll say that that's a really hard metric you know I mean how many you know there are certain things that sure you use every single day but for your particular product to become part of someone's life every day uh is tricky and is probably one of the harder thresholds to get through so I don't love that approach but I do need to have a standard of like

45. 29:07

    what is my normal time frame for activity and maybe it's three days maybe it's a week maybe it's a month uh and that's okay whatever it might be so and sometimes it maybe it is event-based okay and and the reason I say event based is that there you know there's going to be times where like you're going to if you have a product that is focused on uh particular uh specific events not like uh again not like you know external events like again like prob H price but like you know U here

46. 29:47

    I'll use my own product so Shard dog right so like we're based on essentially you know somebody a project an event a person uh using our product prodct for a particular reason so those are essentially like events and we look at active users per event and we look at you know what are some of that crossover um and not everyone is going to go from like one event to the next because it's not always going to be the same audience specifically so like we start to look at um again you know how

47. 30:25

    many times do people claim something that do does it lead to something else and things like that and so we know like our active users are more about like have you claimed you claimed one did you go eventually claim a second one um you know how soon after that uh we start to look at like what did you claim you know and so you know did you claim just nft projects did you claim just inperson events uh and so it's more about that so like our active users are a little bit

48. 30:58

    different but we also then value by active users of like does a project come back to us a second time do they uses again for something things like that and so you have to just Define what that actually means and it's not always it's not always like uh again it's not always per day it's not always per week so that's part of that so now if you look at all of these numbers together if I look at again here's my active stuff right here's I'm looking at the why and the when I'm

49. 31:32

    seeing what part of my feature set is affected by that that timeline you know what actually goes into the why the what why and when of all of that hopefully as I start to design new feature set I'm actually able to get a better sense of like is this feature set going to be relevant for what I'm trying to do and if not then I need to adjust accordingly because as we talked about before and and I'm going to I want to stick to this

50. 32:01

    here is that you know once you you hit you hit a threshold of like I'm no longer experimenting I'm putting a project product into the wild I want users to use it I now need to be much more conscious about the decisions I make regarding my featur set I need to be careful about you know uh scope creep I need to be careful about you know having products that become bloated I need to be careful about products that have

51. 32:33

    features that nobody's using and that is taking up my time and my productivity and that's not returning results so once I'm able to evaluate those pieces and I take that I can then start to look at again what are my active users what are they being affected by okay and then for my feature set what then can come come after that so hopefully uh again hopefully this is you know again this past events this past

52. 33:06

    weekend is reminding you a little bit about for your product of am I affected by price and if you again if you are affected by Price you need to really evaluate carefully of like what is your product doing and especially especially if your app is not Financial related if it is is not related to something that is a financial transaction and again you give people the benefit of doubt maybe people were offline a little bit Monday need a break

53. 33:36

    you know too much news whatever their finances are being affected separately outside of your app so sure and then maybe even like you say today but now like if things kind of level off a little bit okay it's not just constant chaos and so you can't just keep saying well people are just offline or whatever um you need to look at like what has led to my dip right what has led to you know this stuff now because because now it's not just price right now something else is going on like price might have been the Catalyst

54. 34:11

    maybe something else so I I really want to emphasize as a as a builder as an entrepreneur that anytime something comes up again so doesn't matter if the price go down and your users go down if this is the connection or if the price goes up and your users go up you need to start to look at again like who are your users and why and and why are they affected so much by this and why are

55. 34:35

    they so affected by this and and once you can answer that then I think it's going to really change how you start to plan and build out your feature set and it's a it's something that I really encourage uh everyone to take that time to do so you know as we wrap here um and I wanted to make sure I kept this one short uh because I think this is something that you should hopefully step away from and take a little time to evaluate again have this conversation with your your teammates if you don't

56. 35:11

    have a team if you're a solo Dev this is a good opportunity to actually go and you know write it out you know chart it out uh take the time and you know really evaluate of what's what's happening because I guarantee once if you have not done this yet and then you look at your backlog of features it's going to change your perspective on those features you know this has to go hand inand with that backlog so you want to look at you want to tie in again let's let's look at this

57. 35:43

    part here all right all of this my time frame of you know what's an active user who are they in my total you know all of this really is going to affect your backlog you know what is my feature set you know what is my backlog and from there like that's really going to be the the critical part of all of this so uh I understand if you know you're having a hard time you know numbers are down maybe your your own

58. 36:21

    financial situation is down uh you know and that's uh just going to happen and I just want to encourage you that if you are building and you are working on a product uh to not be discouraged by that to think about being as best as possible you know uh you know Financial proof okay because again while the inverse seems great of like oh yeah when everything's going up my users shoot up and that's an amazing thing and I'm going to get all these numbers

59. 36:58

    that's awesome if that's timed with like hey here's my exit and I'm going to cash out and sure you know good on you uh you timed it great and you know I I I hope you enjoy your success the odds are that that's not going to be you that's stacked highly against you and it now just tells you that you are at the whim of everything's great now numbers are going up my users are going up up that

60. 37:28

    as soon as that stops as soon as that number changes soon as the market goes down that you are going your numbers are going to crash out and that's that's where you now are no longer sustainable that is where you have maybe fallen into a pit where you don't understand that your product is no longer about the feature set it's about a price that you have no control over so please be considerate of that uh please think about features that uh are somewhat price resistent if you are

61. 38:02

    building a financial product uh do think about what are the contingencies what is the plan for when the market is bad uh how much do this affect us can we build in a feature set that allows people to still feel like they want to use our app during this downtime that's going to vary um you know your mileage on that may differ but I do want to make sure that uh you're considerate of all of

62. 38:33

    that okay uh please as always uh I want to make sure that you know people are coming in asking questions if you're watching this on replay uh you can always ask questions during um you know and again this is something that I think these discussions are important to have uh every situation is going to be unique and different so just don't look at don't compare yourself to another product or project make sure that you

63. 38:57

    are evaluating yourself and what you are building specifically uh and if you don't have someone if you're a solo entrepreneur if you are Solo Dev and you don't have someone to bounce some of the stuff off on um I highly encourage you just you know talking to people who are within your network uh if you don't want to share things that you feel are proprietary um you can just talk about things more in general and you can talk about things that are a little bit higher level and just have this

64. 39:22

    conversation so you get some of the stuff out of your head and you can really better understand what's actually happening um so I hope this is helpful uh I want to continue to have these discussions because I think this is important for developers as you're growing as both as a developer and as an entrepreneur that you are being cognizant of all of these different things uh it's something that you know uh I am not I have not perfected by any means it's something that I'm still

65. 39:48

    always trying to evaluate and trying to better understand for my own products uh something that in the past uh where I have worked on products even even when that are Financial based um that you have to really think through of how do we make sure that our product feature set is relatable regardless of price and regardless of stock market and everything else so uh again uh please

66. 40:14

    ask questions please join the telegram group uh if you think it's going to be helpful uh I really appreciate that um otherwise uh again until later this week uh this has been wake up and ship more and I will see you soon keep building thanks all

67. 41:22

    n nah