Lessons from a Founder: Building a Seamless Web3 Onboarding Experience
SSA Fireside Chat Recap with Nitya Subramanian
During our recent fireside chat, we had the pleasure of speaking with Nitya Subramanian, founder of Para, a wallet and authentication provider focused on interoperability and composability in Web3. Nitya’s journey—from engineering and AI to fintech and eventually crypto—has been driven by a passion for making financial systems more open and accessible.
Our conversation explored the challenges of building consumer crypto products, the importance of seamless onboarding, and how Para is tackling fragmentation in the Web3 ecosystem.
Key Insights:
Onboarding is Everything
Users don’t want to manage private keys or download new wallets just to try your product. Seamless onboarding—abstracting complexity while maintaining security—is critical for adoption. At Para, this meant ensuring that wallets created through its SDK could be used anywhere that supports WalletConnect, allowing users to carry their assets and credentials seamlessly across apps.
Brand Evolves Slower Than Product
Products iterate rapidly, but brand identity should be forward-looking. A strong brand strategy helps anchor long-term vision while allowing the product to evolve dynamically. Para learned this firsthand during its rebrand from Capsule—the shift wasn’t just a name change but a strategic move to better align with its long-term goals.
Interoperability > Walled Gardens
Web3 thrives on open ecosystems. Users should be able to carry their identities and assets across applications without friction. Builders who prioritize interoperability over closed systems will drive broader adoption. Para embraced this by ensuring its wallets weren’t locked into a single app, avoiding fragmentation of Web3 identity.
Balancing Building and Marketing
Growth doesn’t happen in isolation. Founders should balance deep product work with strategic promotion—expanding in concentric circles by reaching adjacent user groups first. Nitya highlighted how Para navigated this balance by alternating between heads-down product sprints and focused marketing pushes to ensure momentum on both fronts.
Data vs. Intuition: Know When to Use Each
Early-stage products often rely on qualitative feedback from users rather than hard data. But as adoption scales, structured insights become critical for refining and optimizing the product experience. Para started with user interviews in its early days when data was scarce, then transitioned to more structured analysis as usage grew, enabling better product decisions over time.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, as Web3 applications evolve, seamless user experiences will be the key to mainstream adoption. And If you’re building in the web3 social space, now is the time to think about interoperability. How can your users seamlessly move between applications? How can you reduce friction in onboarding? These are the questions Para is addressing—and their solutions might just change how we experience Web3!