Case Study

Following the go to market strategy that we had developed for Ocean Protocol, I began testing the assumptions that we had generated to see if we could in fact find product-market fit for Ocean Protocol’s Data Tokens.

Like any two-sided marketplace, we needed to find users for both the demand and supply side. After identifying data scientists and engineers interested in Web3 as the likely candidates for the supply side I began building a prototype to test this hypothesis. 

I built an MVP consisting of a simple wordpress website and a supporting blog post which I would sponsor, targeting data professionals interested in Web3. I validated this user group through qualitative feedback and over 100 members joining my newly formed discord community.

The next step was to get the community working on simple data projects. To achieve this I set up data bounties using the bare minimum resources i.e. google sheets and manual outreach. I received valuable feedback from users throughout this process and managed to successfully complete data projects and list data assets on Ocean Market, however we failed to attract any paying customers.

I reviewed the progress made and looked to identify the most likely buyers of data assets, settling on the RTFKT NFT community due to their familiarity with Web3 and potential value they could gain from acquiring the data assets. 

I assembled a small team of contributors within the community to build an on-chain analytics dashboard to test this theory. We took on-chain data relating to the RTFKT NFT collections to create Data Assets which were available for purchase from Ocean Market and used to unlock insights on our Dashboard. 

By the time we had shipped the proof-of-concept the price of Bitcoin had experienced a sharp decline taking a lot of enthusiasm, users and funding away from the space. I was unable to validate the demand for our Data Tokens among the RTFKT community however a number of significant insights were gained which were subsequently incorporated into Ocean Protocol’s offering.

Data Challenges, similar to the data bounties were introduced, attracting data professionals to address the supply side of the equation to build data assets for Web3 native audiences. While I cannot outrightly claim this was as a result of the prototyping and testing I had done, at the time of writing and over a year later, the top 6 most sold data assets on Ocean Market are all Web3 and Crypto related Data Assets, providing additional evidence to support the assumptions and market segmentation work that was done.