Dear Dash Community
One of my favourite things to talk about is growth and in particular growth tactics of Marketplace Businesses. What many don’t realise is that Dash is very similar to a Marketplace Business, meaning a lot of the same growth tactics apply.
Today I want to explore this subject in the hope of identifying some areas that the community and developers can focus on and help contribute to the growth of the network.
Firstly, lets identify what makes a Marketplace. Marketplaces usually have two key users. In Dash’s case this is true, we have Consumers and Merchants. These two sides are best described as Demand (Consumers) and Supply (Merchants/Apps). Lets look at some other examples. Ebay has Buyers (Demand) and Sellers (Supply). Uber has Riders (Demand) and Drivers (Supply). As you can see, we have two key users (Consumers & Merchants/Apps), just like these other marketplace businesses described above.
Now that we have identified what makes a Marketplace, lets explore a little more in-depth as to what drives a Marketplace to success.
Marketplaces are complex systems and are really difficult to bootstrap initial Demand/Supply liquidity (chicken and egg problem). However this is definitely not impossible and there are a few tactics that can really help solve this problem.
Almost all successful marketplaces initially constrain the marketplace to help crack the chicken and egg problem and drive initial demand/supply. They do this in one of two ways, either through Category (Amazon starting with Books, then expanding) or Geographically (Uber starting in San Fran, then expanding. Airbnb starting in NY, then expanding).
Constraining the marketplace is one of the most helpful things you can do and a leading success indicator for Marketplace businesses. Dash is currently doing this and is one of the only Cryptos I’ve seen on the market doing this. So where is Dash constraining you might ask? Lets explore…
- Venezuela>Caracus>Dash Mall & Parking — Geographically
- FastPass>Exchanges — Categorically
- Gaming>Ready Raider — Categorically
- Remittance>LATAM Corridors — Category/Geography
As you can see, DCG is on top of this and has identified Categories/Markets that they think are the best fits for Dash’s products/services.
Now that we have identified where Dash is constraining, lets explore the next important step that needs to be taken. The next part of the equation is understanding what side of the Marketplace is the most important side of the market to address i.e. Demand or Supply. So lets run through some examples using the first two constrained Markets that I mentioned.
- Venezuela — Demand is probably a key area of focus now. We need to drive that Demand to already existing chains of Merchants (Supply), such as Traki (retailer chain), Rattan (supermarket chain), Farmarket (pharmacy chain), Churches Chicken, Burger King, Pizza Hut etc. Dash also is integrated into the biggest POS system in Venezuela so it can easily open supply as demand increases. DashPay will be one really helpful way to help increase demand.
- FastPass — Demand (traders) is again probably the main driver here as there is already a substantial amount of supply (exchanges). DCG appears to be focused on driving demand through https://quadency.com/ an automated trading platform that drives volume to Fast Pass partners. If demand increases then DCG should be able to push more exchanges to adopt FastPass.
As you can see, there is a method here and DCG appears to be on top of these tactics, unlike most other crypto networks that sporadically try get adoption without constraining at all.
So once you have identified markets to constrain and identified a focus group i.e. Demand or Supply growth, you can then start attacking these markets to drive initial demand/supply. That’s where the community comes in, we can help drive demand/supply, we just needed to collectively identify areas to target and which side of the marketplace to target.
Once identified we can then start attacking the Demand/Supply sides. It will then become a balancing act of pulling Demand or Supply growth levers depending on what is needed more of at the time. At the same time as doing this, we need to ensure that we have quality controls in place, as to maintain the quality of the Marketplace. Quality is a critical aspect as without quality you get a bad user experience and start to lose users. So lets touch on this briefly before summarising…
Ways Marketplaces ensure quality:
1. Develop Standards + penalties so that Supply stays high quality
2. Manually onboard early Supply
3. Allow Consumers to Review Supply
4. Use search ranking to promote the best Supply
5. Have Customer service for when things go wrong
Summary
It all starts with:
- Constraining the marketplace
2. Identifying whether supply or demand is where we need to drive growth
3. Balancing demand/supply whilst maintaining quality of the marketplace.
DCG appears to be on top of these tactics but there are many things that we can do as a community to help accelerate this growth. So lets finish by exploring these…
Actionable items for the community:
- Help drive demand to FastPass by setting up a https://quadency.com/ account and enter this Dash Market Making competition https://blog.quadency.com/join-2021-liquid-crypto-trading-competition-win-dash
- Brainstorm ideas as to apps that can be built to help drive more demand to Venezuela specifically. Dashpay is a huge one but what else could help them day to day? One example is a disbursement app that allows business owners to easily pay their employees in Dash. Or a Rewards/Loyalty app that allows users to get discounts when using Dash.
- Brainstorm ideas as to how we ensure quality of the marketplace? One example is a yelp like app that allows you to find/review merchants.
- Brainstorm ideas as to how we increase merchant supply in Venezuela. One example is an online ordering solution that allows merchants to easily set up an online store and accept payments via Dash. Something like https://mobi2go.com/
That’s enough for today, I hope if you take away one thing, it’s that constraining the marketplace (then expanding) and continuously creating value for the demand and supply will take you a long way. Extreme focus around Demand and Supply applications is what I think is key.
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed the article and found it insightful.