2) Quality projects go under the radar for far longer than they should as the best investments get hidden behind rubbish that uses ICO money to advertise to the average investor through popular websites — This results in a critical point where the quality project floats by without recognition until a major breakthrough occurs and everyone suddenly discovers it.

If there’s one thing I’ve seen correlate throughout the entire market is that quality projects take their sweet time to develop and master their niche, product and concept. Often these gem investments as I like to call them don’t market until far later in the project life cycle, when they know that their product is worthy of sharing with others. The main problem that ends up happening is that the quick cash grab projects often market straight out of the gate, with little facts and product to stand on and more empty promises than actual development. This of course is great for their funding but when they hit road blocks they crumble and innocent investors lose it all.

Quality projects are often cautious with too much marketing, as they know that they need the product down to a T before it’s worth while in attracting users not only to invest but utilise the product that has been developed. A big trend that we’ve seen happen over the past few years with the best projects is that they float by for a very long time at a tiny market cap only to absolutely blow up over the course of a few days when a big piece of news comes out about it. Most of these gems were pretty visible with enough time invested in reading the white paper, getting to know the market niche and even doing cautious research on the team developing the product. For me this was clearly evident with Ethereum, Antshares (Neo), OmiseGo and a bunch of others. They all had their promising use cases and technology being developed from day one, but they just didn’t have that substantial push to make them mainstream. The water shed moment occurs when a very bullish piece of news comes out and blows the gates wide open, in Ethereum’s case the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance combined with the ICO mania was that watershed moment, with Antshares this was the rebranding to Neo as well as talks with Chinese officials and a very bullish market looking for a promising Chinese project.

An example of a project with no development, only false promises

The Rule — End User’s Should Know Nothing

The end user is the final piece in the puzzle, they’re the ones who will be utilising the application and the ones who truly matter. Any application being developed whether using blockchain or not, is being developed for an end user, a target market. It’s up to the developers then to create an application or ecosystem that perfectly aligns with the end user, it should keep them in mind at all times. The applications that will win out the war in this crypto world will be those who have optimised their end service to be as simple as possible for their target market, the end user should not ever need to know what drives the application. As investors we should keep that in mind as the one rule to follow, find projects where the developers presume the end user of an application know nothing but also don’t want to know anything. All the end user wants to do is use the service for what it is intended for, without hassle, without knowledge and without experience of previously using the application.

Sounds familiar…

We can compare this to today’s software applications by running it through a quick check list, lets use Facebook as the example. Does the user need to know about HTTPS, TCP/IP, VOIP and a myriad of other back end technologies that it is built on in order to use the application? The answer is a resounding no, it performs its job of allowing user’s to post their statuses, message each other and do other tasks without assuming any knowledge of technology, communications and business logic. Facebook knows that the user is there for one reason only, to message, to post, to have fun with others in their network. If they assumed user’s have knowledge of technology and if they forced users to know back end services you can guarantee that it wouldn’t have become popular, because someone else would have streamlined their service and offered a better end product and that’s what any client facing software should be targeted to, the niche it impacts and the end user’s skill level.

Applying this to the blockchain industry

As an investor, it is important then to choose the applications that fit the description I’ve mentioned above, they should be perfect for the end audience, a great example of this is GUTS — which targets the ticketing industry and aims to end ticket touting by using a smart ticketing system that is already in use throughout the Netherlands. It’s a great investment because of how it impacts the target audience, they’ve developed the system so anyone can buy a ticket and they don’t need to know anything about the blockchain to use the application. It’s a perfect demonstration of using a technology but not shoving it in the end user’s face, because, at the end of the day, the user wants to go to a show, not get lectured on blockchain or spend twenty minutes getting accustomed to the application because of the learning curve.

The best investments will be those who can attract their niche the best, give them the best end user experience and perform all of this seamlessly, without giving the user a migraine from the experience. This is something every investor should remember, but it’s also important to remember this doesn’t mean showing technology is bad, it just means each application should fit the desires of the end user.

GUTS targets anyone and everyone, therefore the application needs to work to suit any skill level and whilst they have the option of the end user seeing their ticket on the blockchain it isn’t mandatory, those with tech experience can dabble and those who don’t can use the application the way it is intended to be used. Of course if the end user is a developer then the application should have more technology in the fore front and so forth. So as an investor, if you follow this rule, you’re far more likely to succeed in picking successful products and in the cryptocurrency world, it feels like people forget that there are others out there who have no idea about blockchains, let alone how they work. If you find the projects who know full well how to cater to their clients, they’ll be far more likely to have success!