The convenience-seeking market is the largest addressable market in finance. It is also a market many believe decentralized finance projects are failing to build for.
As the name implies, this is a market that seeks convenience in products or services.
They don't want to "learn new things," they just want to solve their existing problems in the most convenient ways. This means that what you're offering needs to not to feel "new" and requires fresh knowledge to use.
Evidently, DeFi solutions do not fit this description for the most part. To use the average DApp, you need new knowledge, and worse, it is technology knowledge.
The average person doesn't want to learn about computers because they don't want to feel dumb when they don't "get it" and at the same time, it's just a lot of work.
Selling DeFi dumber
The truth is, if you had to learn how your mobile phone works, fundamentally, to use it, you probably wouldn't have wanted one. The average person doesn't know why any of the things it does, works, they just know it works.
It's high tech, but sold dumber.
We already know what DeFi offers. Cheap fees, cross-border transactions, instant payments with fraud proofs, total ownership and control, etc.
These are all cool, but none can be sold if onboarding includes significant friction.
Systems targeting the convenience-seeking market need to optimize for less cognitive load.
Users have to think less about what they need to do or understand fundamentally and more about the value they'd instantly get.
If a user dropped all their banking services today and moved to decentralized solutions, what would be the instant benefits and how does it compare to the previous system?
Some hard questions to ask include but not limited to: how do people earn their income? How do people handle their income (savings or investments)? And how do people spend their income?
These three are probably the most important questions because it covers the complete lifecycle of an individual's money, from when it comes in to when it goes out.
How do you sell a stablecoin payment to an employer? And how do you sell it to the employee?
"Get paid today, not in 5 days"
"5 days is payment conflicts waiting to happen, choose instant settlement"
This is a line of messaging that would make an employer and employee consider choosing a decentralized stablecoin for payments. Not because they know the underlying consensus mechanisms governing the chain or how blocks are mined, no no, just simply that what would cost 120 hours at minimum, will now be settled in seconds.
That's a level of efficiency the market needs.
Solutions need to be sold dumber and optimized accordingly. Anyone will be willing to slowly move into a self-custody system if their first impression of it is saving as much as 5 days, which can sometimes turn into 14 days or more.
For DeFi to compete for the convenience-seeking market, it needs to position itself as a "it just works" solution, not one that tries to tell users how the government and the banks are evil at first engagement.