Your market category sets expectations ⋅ EV #014

What is your product?
A funding platform?
A groupware?
A fitness wearable?
An AI-agents marketplace?
A summit? Or rather, a festival?

If you are launching your product in the existing market category, some of your early adopters might have used similar solutions in the past. You can argue that your product is "like nothing before" in your category, but that doesn't matter now.

What matters is our past experiences. We remember what happened before to us and what we heard from people around us. The more solutions are available in the same category, the more complex and stable the collective experience is.

Once you tell people that your product is a tokenization platform, a wallet or a wellness wearable, in a nanosecond, they will build an "expectations cathedral" for your product before actually trying it out. Because they tried out other tokenization platforms, other wallets or other wellness wearables.

And what do people feel when expectations are not met? Something between "Ha! Okay" and "Never again". Depending on how open-minded your audience is, on the context and the investment they have made by the moment of this discovery.

If you want to guide your potential users through the first "Yes!", you need to know these expectations. And for this, you need to know your market category.

If you ever attended my Brand Lab, you'll hear two examples illustrating this situation — one drama and one sweet story. The drama of the first NFT Summit in NY requires more time to tell. Let’s backlog it for later issues.

On today’s menu, we have a sweet story: IPFS Camp.

IPFS Camp is a three-day gathering for builders and users of IPFS. When I told my friend, who works in tech but not in Web3, that I was giving a workshop at IPFS Camp last year, he asked: "Nice! Where are you camping?"
"In a 5-star hotel in the heart of Brussels…"

His response? Raised eyebrow, and “Sweet! That’s how people camp these days?”

Ask yourself today:
What IS your product?

In the next issue, we will put your answer into action on your website.

See you on Wednesday,
Ira

P.S. Want to go one step further? Ask Claude "Hey, I'm building [your market category here]. What do people typically think or expect from my product? And list me the sources where you got the data for your answers".
We will use this data when talking about landing pages later this year.