AKA our ideal customer profile - or ICP.
We build for collectors who love trading in online social media groups instead of established marketplaces and the trusted administrators that run these groups. Specifically, we bias towards passionate, high-volume traders and trusted, involved group mods who want to prevent fraud. We want to build a better world for collectors and group mods who love trading, but hate dealing with whack-a-mole fraud.
Our ideal customers will love Oath because it prevents fraudsters from creating new user accounts, tackling the root cause of repeat scammers and making their moderation work count.
We also believe our ideal customers will have the greatest insights and opinions on building the best trading experience.
Our current ideal customer profile
ă…¤ | High-Volume Collectors | Mods of Trading Groups
(50K+ Users) |
Description | Passionate collectors whose primary hobby involves trading and collecting certain items. These traders are high-volume, very active, and are respected within the community for their integrity and reputation | Passionate collectors who have invested significant time in building and maintaining a trading community. These collectors are involved, innovative, entrepreneurial, and take pride in running their groups to aid the community. |
Criteria | - 10+ trades per month
- Well-known in group
- Active posters “top contributor” | - Lead groups of 50K+ users
- Active and involved, dealing with scammers
- Well respected and known |
Why they matter? | - Extremely knowledgeable, helps build better product
- Key trusted opinion leaders
- Interact with many users leading to greater adoption | - Extremely knowledgeable, helps build better product
- Key trusted opinion leaders
- Can initiate adoption by vouching for the product |
Our High-Expectation Customers
“The high-expectation customer, or HXC, is the most discerning person within your target demographic. It’s someone who will acknowledge—and enjoy—your product or service for its greatest benefit,” That discernment is key, because this customer is also someone who can help startups spread the word.
The HXC needs to be a person who others aspire to emulate because they see them as clever, judicious and insightful.
The high-expectation customer is a good consumer. They’re someone who can be trusted to know the market and make good decisions. They look things up. They research things. And they have ideas for new types of products or services that can help them save money, gain time, get healthier or make their team more productive. If your product exceeds their expectations, it can meet everyone else’s.”
Semi-Professional Collector
Mark is an avid trader and collector of watches. He has been in the hobby ever since he was a child when his dad gifted him his first Timex. Growing up, Mark would collect different bands and brands, wearing his collection proudly around school. As he progressed through school, he started earning more money through early jobs and began to start collecting more rare watches online. Now as a real adult with a family, Mark has much more disposable income and enjoys trading the watches and finding new ones on the internet. Watches bring him the same joy he felt as a kid where he and his dad would spend hours talking about the latest buzz.
Over time, Mark has amassed an extensive collection and begins to realize he can make significant additional income by indulging more in his passion. He begins to scour the edges of the internet for great deals, to negotiate, fix them up, and re-sell them for a profit.
Mark grew up on the internet, started in places like Craigslist, tried out sites like eBay, and specialty watch sites. But Mark has a special disdain for marketplace sites like eBay which take ~20% of revenue making it hard to flip and find good deals. That’s why Mark finds most of his trading in niche collector groups on sites like Facebook, Reddit, Discord, and other specialized communities. He knows that he’ll find much better deals here that don’t include eBay or other marketplace’s 20% fee. He knows there are greater risks of fraud and scams but uses payment protection tools like PayPal Goods and Services to protect himself. Mark is very savvy, has been in the business for a long time, and knows all the tell-tale signs of fraud. Before he trades with someone, he examines their profile looking for images, names, and inconsistencies. That being said, every once in a while he still transacts with a scammer and goes through the grueling process of Goods and Service’s refund process. He does not enjoy this, but knows its better than always paying 20% elsewhere.
Mark also is a private, intelligent, and skeptical person. He knows about the wrongdoings of social media tech companies exploiting and selling user data and hates that. He sees using these platforms as a necessary evil to indulge in his passion, but does not trust technology companies.
Mark has a fantastic reputation in the communities where he trades. He posts often, comments often, and makes great deals. He tries to optimize everything in his process, saving money, time, and tying to enjoy his hobby side hustle passion to the max.
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The “Semi-professional collector”
- has a deep passion for their collectibles
- makes significant side-income from trading
- is savvy, intelligent, and discerning
- performs many different transactions per week
- already has a fantastic reputation within the community
- always does their research on others before trading
- always uses protected payment methods
- is skeptical of technology companies and user data privacy practices
Trading Group Moderator
Yi-An is an avid trader and collector of Lego items. After engaging in a trading group online and being one of the top voices and proponents of stopping scammers, he was asked to become a group moderator to help out.
Yi-An spends a significant amount of time, energy, and passion into keeping people safe in the group. However, no matter how much of his free time he spends reviewing profiles that come into the group (hours each week). No matter how many times he tells people to use PayPal Goods and Services (multiple pinned comments). And no matter how many calls or messages he gets, it is simply a whack-a-mole problem that he has to live with running the online trading group.
It is hard work to manage the group, coordinating work and responsibilities between all the moderators. His job is extremely important, yet often thankless. He simply does it because he loves the lego community and is trying to build a better world for himself and others. The work is hard to assign to others and collaborate with. The handled information is generally sensitive and he is skeptical to outsiders.
Yi-An wishes the job was made easier and could take up less time. He also holds a deep passion for keeping people safe and privacy. Yi-An is vocal, kind, and a great moderator.
FAQs
Why not open up Oath to all online buyers/sellers but only collectors?
Collectors are passionate, joy-focused, and extremely knowledgeable about the online trading process. By focusing on collectors, we are looking for the most useful, informed feedback to improve the online trading experience on Oath. Furthermore, because collectors buy and sell items online more often than regular individuals, we have more data points to build and improve upon.
Long-term, we’d like to open Oath up to all online buyers/sellers, but not before we create the best existing product for collectors.