Teardown · October 2023 · Web3 infrastructure
Built as a case study exercise using public information. Not a client engagement.
WalletConnect: one SDK, three audiences, and a competitor set that includes Firebase
The situation
Web3Inbox let wallets and decentralised apps message their users. The developer integrates it, the wallet hosts it, and the end user is the one who actually experiences it.
Three parties, one product, and each of them measures success differently. The developer wants easy integration. The wallet wants users to stay inside the wallet. The user wants their notifications to stop being scattered across a dozen apps.
3
Audiences, one SDK
9
Competitor categories
10
ICPs narrowed
The analysis in three numbers.
What I built
Ten candidate ICPs narrowed across wallets, dapps, DeFi platforms, DAOs, NFT marketplaces and crypto gaming. Needs, pain points and solution mapped separately for dapps, wallets and end users: three parallel value propositions from one feature set. A developer persona. And worked examples using Aave, Uniswap, OpenSea and MetaMask so the abstraction had something to stand on.
The competitive landscape ran nine categories: web3-native messaging and notification tools like Push Protocol and Notifi, but also Intercom, Zendesk, OneSignal, Pusher and Firebase.
The judgment call
Putting Firebase in the competitive set.
Web3 companies benchmark against web3 companies. It feels rigorous and it's usually wrong, because the developer deciding whether to integrate your SDK is not choosing between you and Push Protocol. They're choosing between you and the notification stack they already know how to use.
Naming Firebase as a competitor changes what the messaging has to do. It stops being why us over the other web3 tool and becomes why this instead of the thing that already works, which is a harder argument and the only one that matters.
The corollary is that the differentiator can't be decentralisation, because Firebase doesn't lose on decentralisation. It has to be the wallet-native delivery that Firebase structurally can't reach.
What I'd do differently
Ten ICPs is a research output, not a go-to-market. I'd force a ranking, probably wallets first, since they're the distribution chokepoint and every dapp integration is worth more once the wallets are already there.