Practicing Customer Obsession in Crypto

By Jordan Lyall, Head of Product at Totle

Jeff Bezos is famous for his belief in customer obsession.

The reason, as he describes in a 2016 letter to his shareholders, is that “customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great.” Desire to anticipate their new wants is what drives innovation.

Customer obsession is the ethos that we embody in product development at Totle. Our core mission is to make crypto investing easy. It doesn’t matter how great we think our product is; at the end of the day, it’s our customers who tell us if our product works.

I’ve always been a little possessed with the desire to create products that people love. Prior to Totle I co-founded Hello Santa, an app that provides kids with the chance to video chat with the big, jolly man himself. Though the Totle DEX trading product is certainly geared to a different audience, the same empathy for consumers applies.

To date, most crypto trading platforms have been built by engineers, for engineers. The complicated platform interfaces betray a lack of sympathy for would-be-traders who may not have the degree or the technical know-how for comprehension. Indeed, the only way mass adoption of cryptocurrency will be achieved is if we demonstrate empathy for the average user.

Lack of usability is only addressed in one way — talk to your customers.

Talking to Users

At Totle, over-communication with consumers is the expectation. When I first joined the team, I made a point of talking to as many DEX traders as possible:

What did they like about the platforms they used? What were their pain points?

I sent out surveys and chatted with people on the phone. In many cases users provided our team with insights that we could not have easily discovered on our own.