Looking through Coinbase’s 2012 deck, I kept thinking about Hiyab, my own project outside of class. When I say I’m building for people moving goods between the U.S. and Ethiopia, it sounds like one customer group. It really isn’t. Someone sending a package to family has different problems from someone ordering from a U.S. store. That made me skeptical when Coinbase listed so many possible Bitcoin users.
Slide 6 is the one I’d steal. They show what using Bitcoin looked like before Coinbase, then show the much simpler experience they were building. I understood the problem in about two seconds. The screenshot does more work than most of the words in the deck.
Slide 9 says signups were growing 20% daily, and slide 10 says $65,000 was transacted in five weeks. That’s enough to make me curious. But were people sticking around, or just trying Bitcoin once?
The market argument felt looser. Slide 4 cites $2 million in daily Bitcoin transaction volume, and slide 5 names games, remittances, and the “developing world” among its possible early adopters. I can see why they included that list, but where’s the evidence those groups actually wanted Coinbase? We’ve talked about customer discovery in class, and I wanted to see something from actual users. Bitcoin’s overall transaction volume also says little about how much Coinbase could earn.
I’d also ask how they planned to charge and what would make people trust them with their Bitcoin. For our Sanity Check pitch, I’d be much more specific about our first customer, though. That’s probably the biggest thing this deck made me rethink.
