product wisdom from my TikTok PM days,
now translated to Perp DEX building:
- your real competitor isn't another DEX, it's every app fighting for attention.
people's attention is brutally fragmented. tiktok weren't compete with youtube, it competes with news, games, shopping app and everything. The only meaningful is people's time.
- tiktok chopped 30 min videos into 30 sec. finance will follow.
people are/will trade in motion- between commutes, waiting in line, short pauses. That's why mobile-first isn't optional. We built an intuitive native app where user can open a position in under 5 sec.
- lowering barriers > adding features.
everyone can be a TikToker, but not everyone can be a YouTuber, that's why. trading should feel the same. candles intimidate, orderbooks look like the Matrix to 95%. So i'll insist shipping: lite mode, onramp channel, education-first UX, progressive disclosure- complexity comes when you need it.
- tiktok obsesses with data (but in fact it uses less raw data than facebook).
the algorithm is just too good to quit. crypto has even better data access (fully on-chain), yet barely anyone uses it well. most DEXs track TVL and volume. almost none track button click-through rate, page stays. Treating behavioral data like a competitive moat. A/B testing everything, will share more framework on this.
- global users don't want the same thing (and rarely know what they want).
API traders, whales, degens, yield farmers- they want different things. and the loudest feature request ≠ highest ROI. that's why we're building localized communities (JP, KR, EU, US) and shipping different product versions instead of one-size-fits-all.
no crypto company is close to tiktok product maturity yet, not even close.
that's the gap we're closing.