10 years ago, whenever social networks or other services were growing fast with deep habitual usage, people were skeptical and said “how will you make money at scale?” Social networks made no money, many other services lost money per transaction or for growth

I wrote this post saying this was the wrong question. The only right question is will the usage and habits grow to a point where the scale is so large that you will be profitable medium.com/i-m-h-o/how-will-they-make-money-is-the-wrong-question-a5890c2c2cc0

And we’ve seen it. Look at the scale of Snap, Instagram, Roblox, Doordash, Airbnb and many more now

Fast forward to today. We have a different kind of hype. In areas around crypto, NFTs, etc the money is growing much much faster than the usage. Especially any more mainstream usage.

I feel like the critical question we should all be asking needs to be flipped. It isn’t “how will you make money?” But instead “how will you grow to have meaningful mainstream adoption?”

We’ve all seen hype cycles and new technologies before. Some don’t go mainstream and stick for many many years if ever.

The value of crypto and NFTs isn’t “decentralization”. That is certainly an important part of the infrastructure. But the value needs to come from the use cases.

To me the biggest new values in NFTs are authenticated ownership and the access that can provide. @skominers and team have tried to capture this here: hbr.org/2021/11/how-nfts-create-value (though you still have to wade through some of the hype to see it :) )

So instead of asking “how will you make money?” Or with NFTs “how much money are you making right now buying and selling into the hype?”, please ask “how does this lead to deep habitual usage?”