This was one of the hardest pieces to write, and the one I am least satisfied with. After reading this, read a therapeutic rant about personas. But in the spirit of starting with the conclusion, here we go:
- The Expert:
- Background: Early adopter of cryptocurrencies.
- Characteristics: Knowledgeable about DeFi concepts and comfortable with managing digital assets. Owns a significant amount of crypto in both absolute terms and relative to their overall net worth.
- Motivations: Excited by the idea of financial sovereignty. Actively seeks high-yield opportunities through yield farming and liquidity provision. Balances that urge with continual risk assessment. Enjoys exploring promising DeFi projects but has been around long enough to value security over trying every new thing.
- The TradFi convert:
- Background: A traditional finance enthusiast looking to diversify investments.
- Characteristics: Experience in traditional financial markets. Seeking to understand DeFi as an alternative.
- Motivations: Interested in DeFi as a way to generate passive income. Owns a lot of crypto but barely does anything with it. Nervous about DeFi. The sort of person who bought Microsoft stock in the 90s but was too scared to go online shopping.
- The NFT enjoooyer:
- Background: Collector at heart, often artistic and creative themselves.
- Characteristics: Spends all day in Discord. Largely disinterested in DeFi. Individualists who nevertheless value communities.
- Motivations: Highly subjective. May actively flip some NFTs for profits, and hold others for their aesthetic value. Surprisingly, the NFT crowd is actually quite separate from the DeFi crowd. There is overlap, but you will often find people who express a strong preference for one domain over the other.
- The Grinder:
- Background: Less capital available, but loves the opportunities DeFi presents.
- Characteristics: A ‘very online person’. Prefers smartphone over desktop. Constantly seeking.
- Motivations: Wants as much return as possible in as short a time as possible. Little regard for risk. Will farm airdrops, hassle communities for “gems”, and buy memecoins if they think there’s a chance of a 100x. Strongly prefers cheaper chains over Ethereum due to transaction costs.
These are some very broad strokes, but will hopefully ring true to anyone who has worked in web3, or spent time in a DeFi telegram group. Each one is more like a category than a true persona, and so each would have to be broken down further depending on your user base.
Proto-personas are based on assumptions to validate.
Accurate personas are created from new research on specific users.