# Building for the next billion: product validation tactics by Georgia Rakusen | Devcon SEA

- Speakers: Georgia Rakusen
- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 07:21
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-3QR6yZ076s0
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QR6yZ076s0

## Description

The term “next billion users” gets bandied about in our industry. But change in the way we approach product development has to happen to meet these users across the chasm. 

Learn of some specific techniques for assessing product-market-fit and positioning, and how to design the ultimate test of your solution without wasting thousands of hours of development time.

Speaker(s): Georgia Rakusen
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Real World Ethereum
Keywords: 10x, Product-market fit, User Experience, experiments

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Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
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## Transcript

[Music] hi it's a really uh it's awesome to be here nice to see everybody so I'm Georgia I'm a lead researcher at metamask I'm also co-founder at open ux and I'm here today to share some Hands-On tactics on getting your product widely adopted um so throughout this presentation I'm going to pretend that I am a imaginary web three product but the story for this product is pretty common let's imagine we're just some generic defi protocol with some thousand or so daily active users and we offer reasonable in interest rates on stable coins our core audience is already adopted web 3 users but we haven't grown substantially in the last Bull Run um so we know that earning interest on savings is like a universal use case but how do we reach all those users who are not already adopted here's uh a typical adoption curve you're probably familiar this will be familiar to you so you'll have heard the term crossing the chasm uh why does a Chasm exist at all uh because the majority always has a different reason for using your product compared to your early adopters they use it in a different way and they value different things from it so to cross the chasm from early adopters to majority we need to understand these folks and what it's going to take for them to adopt my product so the first thing I'm going to do is look at outside of our own Community um and identify watering holes so these are online places where people talk about uh their problem and how they solve it with other users so I put myself in the Maj in the mind of the majority user and I'm going to come up with 10 to 15 Search terms that they might use to solve the problem of earning a decent uh interest rate on their savings so here's a few I came up with and I go online and I use these Search terms I put put myself in the shoes of this user and follow the rabbit hole so I go outside of the usual places to find this information away from crypto Twitter telegram Discord so the point is finding new users not where they currently where not there in your own Community um so yeah I'm I'm looking all around the web um these two screenshots here are from um mountain climbing and car Enthusiast forums with users talking about savings accounts in crypto so I'm looking for the language they use listening to their fears and pains how they solve their problem in real life what they value from different services and coming away from this activity I now know whether the problem is really big enough to Warrant a solution and also what novel marketing channels I could utilize if I needed to so um when it comes to pictures your landing page is doing a lot of work right my imaginary product has a landing page already it might work for early adopters but now I've learned something about the majority user how they describe their problems and pains I can create a whole new experience for them so I come up with lots of different versions of our message but tailored with this new information right not like this it's going to look something like this and I find people uh to talk to who fit my ideal user profile but they don't know what my product is and I test these um these pitches right so I'm going to try five or more versions all very rough nothing fancy and I ask them these questions on screen about about each pitch right uh in your own words what do you think this is uh what already exists that does something like this what might you be able to do differently if you had this imagine you tried it and it sucked what went wrong um and after uh asking these questions I'm listening for what questions they have what excites them uh what turns them off and coming away from this activity I now know what value proposition most resonates with the majority user and what else I need to be doing to allay their fears and uncertainties so they'll try us out my last tactic I'll share with you in this very brief talk is about testing the most important moments for users that will signify whether they will adopt your product or not so the two most important factors for adoption are the acquisition moment that's when a user chooses to try your product over others and the retention indicator that's when the user derives value from it it's the novel moment it's the wow factor when they go I made a good choice here right so I'm not going to rebuild every part of my product experience and then put it out into the world to find that it's just not needed or wanted by the majority I'm not even going to prototype every part of the flow and test it I'm just going to prototype these two most important moments and test them with real users so I mock these up really um rough in a figma flow right the acquisition flow might look like a tweet or a blog post going to a comparison site then my landing page and from this I can learn what I need to do to position my product in a way that will mean that majority users decide to choose it over the competition and in my imaginary defi product our wow moment might be when a user sees how easy it is to deposit funds or it might be uh when they realize how much daily interest they can earn um so I'll test these wow moments right and I'm doing this really Scrappy um I if the user gets excited by this even though I'm embarrassed to show them this stuff then it means that I'm onto something so coming away from this activity I now know does the way we position the product compel people to try it out and does our core value proposition our differentiator matter enough for people to use it I might not like the answer I get but much better to know that now and I can uh iterate on this and find where the real value proposition is so lastly I'll just say some of what I've shared today is humbly appropriated from Tom kerwin's Innovation tactics from pipex I recommend you check it out I'm not paid to plug this but I use it in my work and it's really really useful so de definitely check it out and come and talk to myself and other researchers design ERS and marketers at the adoption Hub uh today uh so let's up our game make tactical plays and uh think outside the box thank you thank you very much so now we'll have time for a few questions so as I said we're not going to use the app I'm going to uh throw the the mic at you uh raise your hand if you have any question questions no nobody wants uh the no no no question okay well thank you very much so give a nice round of applause to Mrs georgeen H one question well I can't see oh yeah in the middle sorry um when you were um testing on on a bunch of users where did you get the users you were testing on or the the the age-old where do you recruit users from come and talk to us at the adoption Hub there's loads of um routs for um finding users definitely pitch your research as user research not as sales um come and talk to us at the adoption Hub we can talk about that for sure thank you very much