Seven Dimension to understand Bitcoin Businessess

  1. Target Customers: Is the business serving bitcoin native folks or no coiners. Even with similar product offerings, depending on who they are serving business behave differntly. Think of Coinbase and River.

  2. Market Focus: An important dimension, as serving Retail and Institutions require different strategy and mindset. Here, we don’t need to think of only product-market fit, but founder-market fit too.

  3. Usage of Bitcoin: Transactinal or Investment. Sadly still most of the companies that are making money in the sapce are focussed on Bitcoin as an ‘investment’/asset. Think of all the big names. Comanies that are building infrastructure to take bitcoin technology at par and beyond with current infrastructure for usage is not making money and are reliant on funding.

  4. Existing use case or Novel use case: For companies, that are building for the transactional use case of bitcoin, good novel use-case would be where a digital money has inherent advantage - AI agent payment, remittance, Micropayments. Even for companies, that are working on ‘investment’ use case, it is possible to be novel. Think of decentralized lending.

  5. User experience: Complex to Simple. Most of the bitcoin business are like for the developers, by the the developers. The current user expereince is just an artifact of the fact that transactional use case has not gone mainstream. Companies like Lightspark are working towards bringing the UX as par with current infra. Companies that are working on ‘investment’ use case in some case, arguably has went past the current status quo in terms of experience.

  6. Ecosystem Integration: Isolated to Integrated. This dimension is important one because it forces us to reconcile the company’s product roadmap with the the developement of bitcoin ecosystem. A prodcut roadmap that is not in line with ecosystem growth is less likely to survive. This is particulay challenging becasue of decentralized nature of developemnt of the ecosystem.

  7. Regulatory alignment: Compliance focussed to innovation focussed