Why ‘Be Your Own Bank’ is Bad Marketing

TL:DR; As big a fan of crypto as I am, the message that many in the crypto world use “be your own bank” falls victim to one of the biggest mistakes people make in marketing. You are not your target audience.

If you visit the websites of many crypto wallet providers or read the blogs/sites of others in crypto, one of the oft heard refrains is “be your own bank.”

Conceptually, it makes sense as a value proposition, particularly for people who live in countries where the government and/or banking systems cannot really be trusted.

Even in the US, accounts can get frozen and you can lose access, as ironically happened to this guy who ironically had written an anti-Bitcoin screed last year.

Ouch.

Many of the earliest Bitcoin proponents advocated this approach because of a distrust of centralized authority.

That’s all well and good, but I think that the “be your own bank” idea is flawed.

Not conceptually, but as a marketing message.

I AM my own bank right now and I’ll tell you…it’s really freaking hard.

It requires a boatload of responsibility, security considerations, contingency planning, back ups, protocols, documentation and more.

Being a bank is difficult. Really difficult.

It’s like saying “be your own structural engineer.”

No one wants to do that. There would be even more collapsed bridges if we all had to build our own.

Expertise matters.

But that’s only if we think about banks as we have traditionally thought about them

Eventually, this will get sorted out with multi-signature wallets and “dead man switches” like the kind that Keep Network is building.

But I think there’s a really good lesson here.

While YOU may think that a message is really great (Be Your Own Bank!) the question to consider is, will your target audience?

But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The value proposition for a censorship-resistant, immutable, global store of value/currency is definitely there.

How you convince people of its value…that’s the marketing challenge.

The key to remember: You are not your target audience.