Random thoughts on users and time to value

I know that we tend to find ways to fit our world to our personal narrative, but I find that it isn't hard to see a great many overlaps that connect my walking world to my Hive world.

I was having a discussion about user adoption at work today from a perspective that is reminiscent of Hive early adoption - where the first users in "do it rough" with very little resources, but a lot of opportunity to give direction to the future through the way they use the platform. In this case, the early customer feedback informed the company on what was working and what wasn't and they were able to get experiences tailored more specifically to their needs. However, as time goes on - this tailoring is reduced and it becomes a little more "packaged" for new customers.

This is a good thing for both sides, as it allows streamlining of creative processes and can deliver a more stable product with faster implementation. Also, due to the mass of experience learned from the pool of customers, the packaged options are still able to satisfy use cases to a high degree, meaning very little customization. This means that the Time to Value can effectively be reduced and a client can get start generating returns faster.

Because the product is essentially business infrastructure, there isn't the competitive advantage for companies to compete against each other with it, other than the ability to improve their flow of information and communication. but to do this, requires enduser adoption, where users actually use the tools to their advantage. It is this enduser adoption process that can vary a great deal between companies, where some are far more informed and skilled in this area, meaning that they can not only implement more smoothly, but get a greater degree of efficient participation.

This is of course a challenge on Hive as not only is it decentralized which causes a "who's job is it" problem, it also caters for a very wide array of users who are interested in a wide range of functions. The unifying factor for most of course is the monetary potential, which is why it is the tokenomics that get the lion's share of the attention resources. But for the individual applications, they also have to consider that their experiences are enduser friendly, enjoyable, compelling, attractive and the kind of place that users will want to spend their time using.

This is more of a challenge than it may be for unmonetized platforms as while there is plenty of value to be had, the groups are differentiated between investor, vendor and users. On Hive, many people are all three, most are at least two of these groups. The challenge is that it isn't easy to harmonize and satisfy the needs of each group into a single solution, where users will enjoy themselves for example playing a game and still feel they are earning the value they want from spending their time there.

If you think about this problem from a company implementing a new piece of software for example, the desires of the company may be to generate or save money, but the end users will be looking for ease of usage and facilitation of their job. The advantage the company has in this regard is that because they are paying the employees a salary, it isn't an opt-in system at the end user level. However, to get the value from the software, efficient usage generally requires investing into getting endusers trained and skilled in the software.

Again, on Hive this is a challenge due to the decentralization as there is no clear line on how to approach pretty much any aspect of the platform. Some people will say that for example, automation will get a better return than manual curation, but that will only be better when it comes to percentage return on curation. But, curation isn't the only factor that is important and for most users, the stake held makes the act of optimization expensive at the potentially very high cost of not building strong relationships.

In many ways, approaching Hive usage is kind of like picking a sporting team that can best play against other groups, except picked players have no obligation to play, or play the desired way. While Hive is a community, it is a community of many communities with each member having their own unique needs and approaches to the platform. again, this makes it all quite complex in terms of how best to design the playing field, which is why the value of Hive is in the ecosystem, but that value is going to be driven by building applications that are attractive to individual users for specific purposes - as it brings the "same kind" of people together to play and interact to form sub-communities.

What I think should and will happen in the future is that the applications will splinter themselves so that they can create independent applications (SMTs and Communities) for greater control over their onboarding and ramping up process. Leveraging Hive as the base layer infrastructure means that they can tap into a "productized" package of resources to use and keep the cost of development down through customization, rather than complete ground-up builds. However, what they are going to have to do is start taking more responsibility for their own enduser training needs, rather than relying on the "central" community to deliver - because their experience should be unique for their user base, not generic - they need to differentiate themselves through experience, but bring in the familiarity and benefits of being part of the Hive family of communities.

I will get back to this later, but I am interested to hear what kinds of experiences people have as developers, endusers and enduser enablers that could be brought onto Hive to help grow the ecosystem and push it out in more refined and tailored ways, while still keeping it simple and packaged for fast implementation and Time to Value for all parties involved.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]