I just wrapped up my first year at remx.xyz and took some time to reflect on the lessons I learned. Overall, it’s been a great year. I can’t believe how quick it went and how much we accomplished. Through all of that, I picked up on some key things that I hope to carry with me moving forward:
- There’s no substitution for customer research,
- Take what you need and leave the rest behind,
- Build in public, and
- Give more than you take.
There’s no substitution for customer research
One of the big lessons I re-learned this year is that there is no substitution for customer research.
Joining a really small startup, I fell into the trap of thinking we could use our experience to ship quickly and often. We told ourselves we would learn after we ship. While we learned a lot along the way and felt like we were making great progress, we didn’t get the results we were hoping for.
Then, about a month ago things changed. I had just gotten back from vacation, all fresh and ready to go, and had read a book that highlighted the importance of knowing your audience. I started advocating that we focus our efforts on a single target audience and we zeroed in on the creator community we had been building around ourselves.
Around about the same time, Mike Montgomery (our Chief Creative Officer) started talking to some of the creators on our platform and picked up on some interesting trends. We used those insights to craft a new offering for remx and expanded the circle of creators we were talking with to get their feedback. It was an eye opening experience and we all couldn’t believe we weren’t doing this as much before.
Fast forward to today where we’re getting close to launching our new offering. We’re doing it together with our creator community in the form of an early test pilot group and it’s already proving to be effective. We can’t wait to share with the world what we’ve been working on.
Take what you need and leave the rest behind
When I joined remx.xyz, we wanted to do everything the web3 way. For us, one of the things it meant was operating with crypto wallets. What it meant for our visitors was if you didn’t have a crypto wallet, you couldn’t signup to our site or pay for anything.
Thankfully, we learned that being dogmatic about web3 wasn’t helping our customers or our business and started making some changes. Using Crossmint.io, we now give people the choice of signing up with an email address and paying with a credit card.
More of our customers’ followers are going to be able to support them whether they have a crypto wallet or not. Some of them probably won’t even know they’re using web3 and that’s fine. They probably won’t even care. For those people, it’s not about the technology we use, it what we do with it.
Building in public
Marketing has been one of the most challenging parts of building remx.xyz. Getting results has taken time, consistency, and experimentation.
One of the strategies I’ve enjoyed experimenting with is “building in public”. It’s part of the web3 ethos. Coming from a web2 background, I can’t count how many times we felt uncomfortable sharing something. I remember wanting things to be perfect, well-timed, coming from the right person.
However, in each of those cases, we decided to push through the discomfort, and guess what? The world didn’t end! With this content, we were able to connect with our audience in a more authentic way and built a community around our product.
Give more than you take
One of the things I’ve loved most about working at remx.xyz is how we’re pushed to create tons of value for our community. Our CEO Nazim Ahmed often reminds us to “give more than you take” and I see it pay back all the time.
By helping others succeed, we’ve built trust with our customers and established ourselves as valuable members of their community. In addition to that, seeing our customers flourish as a result of our efforts has been very fulfilling at a personal level.
Closing thoughts
It’s been a great year filled with lots of excitement. I’m grateful for this opportunity to work with such a great team and to work on such cool stuff. We have a long way to go before we reach product market fit but we’re optimistic that taking these lessons we’ve learned, we’ll make it!