Market-Product Fit
= this concept to explain the dynamics of the Crypto Economy has been updated to that of: Market-Protocol Fit
Description
Toby Shorin, Laura Lotti, Sam Hart:
"The projects with the greatest value and utility today—i.e. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a few other products of the ICO era—did not follow the traditional product development trajectory at all. These success stories started with the open source ethos and underwent a different journey: they began with a broad distribution of tokens, followed by permissionless product innovation which activated them in useful ways.
In Headless Brands, we called this market-product fit, a dynamic in which token holders generate many competing narratives and use cases, which they explore simultaneously. From our last essay:
How do projects, headless or not, find product-market fit in the Web 3 era? Well, in some senses they don't. In a highly decentralized system, these operations invert such that the community finds product solutions themselves: "market-product fit." Cryptoeconomic protocols are market frameworks looking for potential product applications. The work of exploring parallel narratives, discovering emergent use cases, and testing solutions is distributed among members of the wider ecosystem such that the rising tide lifts all boats.
To update our terminology, market-protocol fit is the most accurate language for this phenomenon. By distinguishing this market-first pattern from the startup playbook, we can clarify our thinking about the token protocol life cycle."