Who we're building for

Understanding your customers is the first step toward serving them well. When you feel their desires and feel their pain, you discover which problems are important to solve. Crucially, you learn which problems must be solved first and which can wait.

"That's why so many successful startups make something the founders needed," as Paul Graham noted. Empathy comes easily when you've experienced the frustration firsthand. (Of course, addressing your own issues is not the only effective way to build, but it has this built-in advantage.)

Good design is form-context fit. For startups, this means product-market fit. In order to build a great product, we must have clarity about the market we're trying to fit — our ideal customers. Everything we ship, everything we communicate, every decision we make should reflect their needs. This level of focus is deceptively difficult to establish and maintain.

Understanding customers means being able to describe who they are, plainly and specifically. Splits has employed the "Ideal Customer Profile" framework to define this in writing, which keeps our whole team on the same page and moving in the same direction.

We're making it public so you know we're building for you. If you have these problems, you should know that our product was created to make your life better. And if you care about these problems, we want to work with you.

What is an onchain startup?#

Our ideal customer is the onchain startup. This is a small, fast-moving team (typically less than 10 people) that operates within the Ethereum ecosystem. Their top pain points include:

• Sharing money within the team and managing assets (e.g. permissioning who can access what money under which conditions)
• Feeling safe about their money and future revenue
• Knowing where all their money is and always being able to easily access it
• Making payments regularly and compliantly (e.g. contractors, grantees, etc)
• Earning competitive interest on their money
• Using onchain funds offchain, and vice versa
• Compliance, accounting, and taxes

Philosophically, onchain startups are teams of frontier builders. They understand that onchain building blocks push civilization forward, and they want to explore the edge of what's possible. They learn and collaborate with excellent peers, leveling up together.

Worth noting: onchain startups are not our only customers. Some customers use our products for personal purposes, and a few larger companies have integrated us into their stack. Anyone who finds our products useful is welcome, but we remain oriented toward building for our ideal customer.

If we can create an excellent experience for the narrow group of onchain startups, we earn the right to scale with them over time and serve different customer types as we grow.

Why are onchain startups important?#

In other words, why are we passionate about building for this ICP in particular? Why do we think our product matters, in the grand scheme of things? Because we truly believe that. We believe our product matters because we believe our ICP matters.

Onchain startups matter because they're the ones pushing the frontier. Like us, they're using Ethereum to experiment with new types of products and businesses that were previously not possible. Experimentation is upstream of innovation, the force that makes the world better.

That belief guides how we talk about our work publicly. When Abram presented at ETH NYC, he explained what "institutional-grade banking that's instantly available to everyone in the world" means:

Instantly available means there's no red tape, no application process, nobody saying "you're worthy of using this piece of software." You can get set up in under a minute.

Everyone in the world means where you live or where you were born shouldn't impact your ability to use the global financial system. You should have the same access as everyone else.

Ethereum is a new level playing field with built-in property rights. It's fast, global, and efficient, making it a fundamentally better foundation for business. It's hard to overstate how important this is. The American dream without borders: equal opportunity on a global scale.

Business is the growth engine of the economy and the ultimate driver of improving living standards globally. When things become faster, cheaper, and more accessible, experimentation follows. We saw this with the internet, and we're seeing it play out again with Ethereum. Just as before, builders at the edge are leading this change.

At Splits we're building institutional-grade banking that's instantly available to everyone in the world. Built on Ethereum. No account minimums, paperwork, or legal entity needed. Sign up today.

The header photo dates from the 1880s, captured by Louis Lafon, depicting "the construction of a building that integrated modern techniques of iron and steel-frame construction with traditional materials like brick masonry. In addition to showing the progress of construction, the image offers a striking tableau of modern labor."