How NOT to be in the “90%”

“90% of ICOs Will Fail” ~ Vitalik Buterin (Ethereum Founder)

Every day we see new startups being launched in the Blockchain space. But, there are a very few that actually take off. When I read this article, I have realized that many startups fail because their product isn’t good enough to stand out in the market. There can be many reasons for this. Of all the reasons, the most important one is “Inadequate research” on the product development. A product is successful only if it is unique and can appeal to a wide range of consumers. To achieve the same, one must have a good research strategy.

In this article, I will be laying out the Research Framework that a startup/company should follow to sustain itself in the market.

Step 1: Create alerts to get the updates from the internet.

There are billions of websites on the internet and it is practically impossible to navigate through all of them.

“The Best Place to Hide a Dead Body is Page Two of Google.”

I had to include the above joke to indicate that there are many websites on the world wide web that might have some valuable information that would help us develop our product, but we simply are not aware of them. To utilize the internet to its maximum potential, I would suggest a web surveillance tool such as Google Alerts. This is required to stay updated with the current market scenario. For example: If the MVP of the startup relies on distributed cloud/file storage system. One can have alerts on the latest trends in “Cloud computing” platform.

Step 2: Check news alerts regularly.

Creating alerts is only half battle won. One must have a team to monitor these contents and see how a new information can be applied to their product.

Step 3: Observe the article and visit the company’s website/GitHub repository.

Continuing from Step 2, If we find that there is a new method/protocol which can be used for our product. Then we can visit the protocol’s website and even their GitHub repository.

Let me continue the cloud computing example that I had quoted in Step 1. Let us say that we have incorporated InterPlanetary File System(IPFS, released in 2014) protocol in our product. Only if we keep alerts on this technology will we ever know that Alibaba Group has released a new file system by name PolarFS recently this year. If we go through the PolarFS paper then we can adopt some features of it in our product, further optimizing and improving it.

For a company to sustain, it is very important to stay abreast with the market needs. The following quote was my motivation behind writing this article.

“Competition Is One Click Away.”~ Larry Page, CEO of Alphabet Inc

Thank you for reading my article.

If you have any questions, please feel free to send me an email. You can also contact me via Linkedin. You can also follow me on Twitter.

In order to get started with Blockchain read my article published on Hackernoon