The Nomics Update

Hey, this is Clay. Welcome to another episode of The Nomics Update. Today I'm going to talk about color capitulation. So for some time now, we've really been proud of our branding. When we first started, we hired a fancy branding agency, and they're called Fuzzco. They've worked with MailChimp and other folks, pretty fancy team, and we developed this dynamic brand together, [00:00:30] and the way the brand works, I'm sure you've seen on the website, is that the colors change on the website based on the state of the market. So if the market's way down, the accent color across our homepage is red. If it's way up, then it's green, but when you traverse the spectrum from -2 percent down to +2 [00:01:00] percent up or greater, you are traversing this color continuum from red to green or from green to red.

So if the market's in the middle, if there's virtually no change on a given day, then essentially, the website is purple, because that's roughly the middle point between red and green. So a lot of people don't like purple. It's kind of weird, it's becoming a more trendy [00:01:30] startup color, but the main thing that the people don't like is seeing a bunch of currencies in purple. People tend to really like these binary signals. So if it's up, even if it's up by only .01 percent, they want it green, and if it's down, even if it's down by .05 percent, they want it red. So I fought this for a while. I thought our branding scheme was cool. But [00:02:00] over and over again, I heard people say like, "Why is it when I change from the month view to the year view, the color scheme changes?"

Well, the reason why the color scheme changes when you go from the month view to, let's say, a year view is because the market's up over the last year. Well, it was as of a few days ago. But the market's down if you take the month view. [00:02:30] Oh no, it's actually up six percent. Anyway, all kinds of people telling us they didn't like the colors. And the thing about a good product company, I think, is that you just don't fight with your customers. If you hear something enough, you just have to do it. So we're capitulating, we thought we were so smart and so clever with this design, but we're not. [00:03:00] We're not smarter than you, we're not smarter than our customers. So we are going to essentially make everything either green or red, which essentially means we're just tightening the band.

So basically, the color spectrum from red to green is going to dynamically update from .2., from .2.5 [00:03:30] percent to point, I'm sorry, from .2.5, my God, I can't say this right. From .25 percent to -.25 percent, it's gonna traverse. So anyway, almost everything is going to be basic red or green. And if we have to tighten that color, that band as well, we will, and then almost everything will be red and green, which will be kind of sad, but we'll understand. [00:04:00] Anyway, thanks to everyone who so passionately argued for this. Eric Meltzer hated our colors for a while there. Ben Davenport, ex-CTO of BitGo and founder of that company and a really cool guy, someone who we like to learn from, sent in this feedback as well. And then just a whole slew of other people I won't name drop here, but [00:04:30] suffice to say, we heard the message loud and clear. We're going to do it. You hate the colors. Okay. Thanks for the feedback. Bye.

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: http://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Hey! This is Clay. Welcome to the next episode of the Nomics Update. I'm coming at you live from New York late at night. Man, I just want to get in the habit of putting these updates out every day so I'm doing this even though I'm pretty tired.

I guess I wanted to talk a little bit about our pricing plan for the API. I think you're going to find that things are going to [00:00:30] change here pretty quickly. You're kind of in an awkward place with pricing for the API where on one hand, you have a free plan and then on the other hand, you've got this $500 a month plan. What we found is that almost everyone purchasing the $500 a month plan is a developer CTO. Because they're a developer, [00:01:00] they could investigate the API, use it, they know that it's good and because they're a C level person in their company, they have clearance to make the purchase, right, at that price point. Really, we need something in between.

I think you're probably going to see us deprecate some of the things in the free plan where we're going above and beyond everyone in terms of what we're giving away for free [00:01:30] and you're probably going to see some of the things available at the $500 a month plan available at lower price points. Just a heads up that that's coming. Hopefully, we won't get too much hate mail around this. I think we're going to do this in a cool way that ultimately is kind of mindful of all the dependencies that exist and I think it's better to do this [00:02:00] earlier in the development of the company rather than later. Anyway, just know that we want to make a lot of those paid features available to more folks going forward.

All right, hope you've enjoyed this podcast. I'll see you tomorrow for the next Nomics Update. Bye.

Website: https://nomics.com

Crypto Market Data API: http://nomicsapi.com

Personal Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClayCollins

Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/NomicsFinance

Nomics.com now provides pages with analytics on individual cryptocurrency exchanges (like Binance, Poloniex, Coinbase Pro, etc.). See here for an example: https://nomics.com/exchanges/binance

We just launched a new index page that features total crypto market volume over time, # of trades executed across various exchanges, and much more. See: https://nomics.com/exchanges

Clay discusses marketing tactics & go to market strategies for cryptocurrency exchange growth. He also discusses an upcoming audio documentary about cryptoasset exchanges. Please contact Clay if you're an exchange operator willing to talk on the record about tactics you've used to grow your exchange and the results they've produced.