"Half of my advertising isn't working. Problem is, I don't know which half".
P.T. Barnum
NFT projects rely on Twitter and Discord for engagement. Which means they know nothing about their customers.
"spin you're old school. It's different now. In NFTs we don't need to know anything about our customers. It's just about...".
The price?
Harvard Business School teaches that if price is your only niche, you don't have a niche.
Peter F. Drucker was a "management consultant, educator, and author, whose writings contributed to the philosophical and practical foundations of the modern business corporation".
In his seminal book The Practice of Management Drucker asks the enterprise to ask themselves these two questions each day:
who are our customers?
what is our business?
He wrote that these two questions drive the business each day. Understanding the answers to the two questions are directly proportional to the success or failure of the business.
Ash Maurya is "the creator of the one-page business modeling tool “Lean Canvas” and the author of Running Lean. He serves as a mentor to several accelerators including TechStars, Accelerace, Slingshot, and guest lecturers at several universities including MIT, Harvard, and UT Austin".
Ash talks about "outlearning the competition", which is a today version of what Drucker wrote. Ash writes that knowing your customers better than your competition is key to success.
NFT projects don't know anything about their customers. Therefore, they don't who their customers are. If their customers leave they have no idea why. They have no idea why their customers came to them in first place other than...
the price?
"None of this matters anymore, spin. NFTs are a new world. Throw out all your old books and whatever Harvard teaches. Ash only has 40k Twitter followers. Look at the floor! Hype! Moon!".
If NFT projects don't know anything about their customers, they don't, fundamental rules of business are being shattered. And even though no NFT project lead will publicly admit that NFTs are only about price, the environment they operate in says otherwise. Not knowing the answer to who are our customers, means not knowing the answer to what is our business. So all that's left to drive revenue each day is...price.
If you're piling up ETH, I guess nothing I just wrote matters to you. If you're one of the projects that isn't piling up ETH, the majority aren't, do you know who your customers are? If not, start there.
Projects whose operational strategy amounts to throwing out the old rules of business either aren't in it for the long run, or they aren't serious.
Here's to hoping project leads are reading the aforementioned books. They're learning from great businesses such as Patagonia, and studying how The Grateful Dead built their community. They want to know who their customers are, so they can learn more about their business. They're here for the long run.
How will we know? By watching their feet.
