The most common critique of web3 is that we don’t have useful products today. While the argument misses a whole set of things about how technology happens and how innovation works, it raises the question is there a universe where we would’ve had useful products today? and I think the answer is yes! and a huge part of the reason we don’t is the way we’re developing protocols. This blog post is written with the goal of defining a new way of building protocols, a product-driven one.

A simple definition of a product-driven protocol, is a protocol that’s built in the same way products get built. You launch fast, iterate fast both enabled by being sufficiently decentralized, with an extra step to achieve developers-protocol fit along the way. Another would be “A protocol that solves X while delivering shippable intermediaries”. I think the biggest advantage of buidling a product-driven protocol is, as Dan Romero put it, “you’re in control of your own destiny” as the core product that you're building will determine if your protocol succeed or not.The most common critique of web3 is that we don’t have useful products today. While the argument misses a whole set of things about how technology happens and how innovation works, it raises the question is there a universe where we would’ve had useful products today? and I think the answer is yes! and a huge part of the reason we don’t is the way we’re developing protocols. This blog post is written with the goal of defining a new way of building protocols, a product-driven one.

A simple definition of a product-driven protocol, is a protocol that’s built in the same way products get built. You launch fast, iterate fast both enabled by being sufficiently decentralized, with an extra step to achieve developers-protocol fit along the way. Another would be “A protocol that solves X while delivering shippable intermediaries”. I think the biggest advantage of buidling a product-driven protocol is, as Dan Romero put it, “you’re in control of your own destiny” as the core product that you're building will determine if your protocol succeed or not.