Rethinking FIO's Market Adoption Strategy

Flipping the current Market Adoption Strategy on its head

What if… instead of the Wallets & Exchanges driving FIO’s adoption, the end users were driving the demand? What if our restraints were not seen as what is holding us back, but instead seen as our greatest leverage?

People rarely do anything unless there is a clear benefit to them to do so. The most straightforward way to motivate someone to take a specific action is to financially incentivize them to do so. However, this is extremely expensive to do (particularly for FIO to overcome the educational hurdle), not reliably sustainable and is extrinsically motivated. Not only that, but it makes performing a certain task (i.e. registering an address) transactional, meaning there is little real meaning to the action.

We can, and should always, continue to evangelize and tell the FIO story about the benefits of having and using a FIO Address, but the tougher reality is that unless someone feels the pain of not using FIO, or feels the joy of using FIO, FIO will continue to mean very little to them. Electing to take a specific action because it stems from a feeling-center would be an example of intrinsic motivation and the opposite of transactional – it now means something to the person emotionally.

However, if we are to agree that these theories are rooted in truth and thus continue to think critically about them in relation to FIO, we would then further agree that FIO has nominal influence over the ability to help the market feel either the pain of not using FIO and/or the joy of using FIO.

Leveraging intrinsic motivation and capitalizing on cultural trends

Today, digital assets, such as NFT’s and custom skins in MMO games are extraordinarily popular, making these markets alone a multi-billion dollar market and set to nearly double in four more short years. But, why are people around the world spending billions of dollars on things they will never be able to hold, touch and see in the “real world”? Sure, fancy marketing gimmicks don’t hurt, but beneath even that what is driving the explosive value is little more than social and psychological value – meaning users perceive that having an association with these things will improve their online social status.

These digital items have varying levels of exclusivity to them and thus perceived social and psychological value. This is in stark contrast to FIO’s current market adoption strategy in which FIO is pleading with users to register an address. We do this because we believe in it so much that we are willing to do nearly anything to get as many people as possible to experience FIO. The intention is noble but the results deserve to be evaluated.

User-driven Market Adoption

In order for FIO to successfully flip its current market adoption strategy on its head, we will need to “turn off the free address faucet” and build in exclusivity. If a user wants to be able to register their own FIO Address, they will need to join a waitlist. Robinhood and Clubhouse are great examples of this strategy’s success for driving user-generated demand. In FIO’s case, the closer to the top of the waitlist, the better the user’s chances are of being able to register the username they prefer most.

Pulling from the Clubhouse model, my vision is to create a mechanism that allows users to jump to the front of the line by being invited by one of their friends. For this to work best, users should be automatically equipped with a small fixed number of invites (1 or 2) for them to dole out on social media and text message to get their friends to the front of the line and “in the club” with them also. Once a user is officially part of the #FIOfam (meaning they have registered their own address), then they will earn more invites based on their engagement with the protocol.

In this scenario, I envision FIO to run this through the DApp and by allowing users to register a username at a single and specific domain, @crypto. In the DApp environment, there should be a simple interface that lets the user have their own public or private profile and displays information such as the date they registered and the number of users they successfully recruited to register an address, and this could also yield exciting marketing opportunities for friendly competition and really cool giveaways. In this environment the user must also be able to easily buy more addresses and perhaps gift addresses (via purchasing for another person) down the road.

Once this spark begins to catch fire (most likely 3-6 months), FIO could work with different token projects to allow them to be able to have their biggest fans have a vanity wallet handle using their token shortcode. For example: kaitie@ADA, kaitie@LINK, kaitie@DOT, etc.

In this scenario, FIO is now placing these top crypto projects into a position to also drive integration demand onto the exchanges and wallets whereas this is currently not a part of the market adoption and business development strategy at all.

As the market begins to adopt FIO at a much greater pace, users will be putting pressure and demand onto their wallets and exchanges to integrate FIO so they can use it. Remember, the more they use it, the more they climb the crypto social status ladder.

Further consideration

FIO can include FIO Address Wrapping into the developer roadmap so that users who are eager to get to the front of the line to grab the “best” usernames, will be able to sell them on the open market and transfer them if they choose to.