Weekly Update #8
🛣 rubber meets the road
Last update, my two goals were (1) coming up with SaaS ideas in the Solana ecosystem and (2) writing 3 blogposts (which I did). I have a few more blogposts in the works as well. I enjoy writing a lot despite how time consuming it is.
For Goal #1, to evaluate my SaaS ideas, I used these 5 criteria:
Target audience not consumers, but businesses or investors.
No regulatory issues
Medium-to-large earning potential / market size
Skills match
Fun / learning potential
Let’s first talk about a couple of ideas I’m not going to work on:
Education - there’s a big market here because Solana is growing and the resources out there for learning how to interact with the Solana blockchain and write Solana programs are severely lacking. But unfortunately, customers in this case are consumers (does poorly on evaluation criteria #1 selling to consumers).
Using Solana Pay to enable payments for SaaS services with Solana (related ideas: subscriptions, payroll with Solana pay, paying foreign contractors with Solana-based stable-coins, etc.) - I think these ideas have a lot of potential given that Solana is probably the most reliable low-fee network out there. But these are rather complex projects that I would be better suited to work on once I understand Solana more (no match on criteria #4 skills match). Also potentially tricky on #2 regulatory issues.
What I am going to work on instead is blockchain analytics. This is a rather large area.
There's aggregate analysis and individual transaction analysis. Aggregate analysis has a lot of players. Dune Analytics, the biggest data analytics company in blockchain, announced the addition of Solana data last week.
The second bucket is individual transaction analysis: stuff you'd do on Solana Explorer or Solscan. You'd use this type of analysis to analyze the flow of funds across multiple accounts (sleuthing). Maybe you’d like to figure out that Melania Trump bought her own NFT. 🤡🤡
The latter, individual transaction analysis, is what I'm going to start with.
With analytics, the buyer is typically enterprises or if they are individuals, they are highly motivated individuals with money to spend (investors). No issues on the regulatory front. It's certainly fun and has lots of learning potential because I'll learn a lot about how different Defi protocols work when looking through transactions. In short, it checks all the boxes of my evaluation criteria.
I'm not worried about the competition because the space is large with many possible customer segments:
NFT investors interested in trending NFTs (could be a daily roll-up subscription)
NFT portfolio tracker like Solfolio
Reporters and Internet sleuths
Traders interested in researching trading strategies
Product analytics for teams building DeFi and other Web3 apps to understand how their protocols gets used.
I wrote up a quick Lean Canvas for the idea, which was very helpful.
My goals for the next 2 weeks are:
🗣 [Marketing] Put up a landing page and a Twitter account - start getting followers
🪓 [Product] Build a simple tool to visually inspect flow of money from 1 to N accounts - visually as in nodes and edges
🎥 Write 2 more blogposts and experiment with making a YouTube video out of one of them
The tailwind blog post was super helpful. I hadn't installed the tailwind plugin for VSCode and now I will :)
Excited to see progress on the analytics tool!