Note: This proposal was edited on 24th February 2024 to reduce its scope and to simplify it. Please see the summary of changes here.
TLDR - Summary
Strategizer is a new project that assists the Hive community to direct its own decision making & marketing by enabling access to high quality data and actionable insights. We intend to apply tried and tested digital marketing strategies to Hive in order to accelerate growth and to overcome challenges that have arisen due to Hive’s decentralized structure.
The main goal of this introductory proposal is to lay the foundation for ongoing improvements to the way Hive interacts with and responds to the wider world. This includes collecting insights from existing and potential users, market analysis, User Experience (UX) research & beyond.
Continual improvement on all levels requires that we first understand what is needed and why. Marketing is much more than advertising and should extend into the development of products/services to ensure that we all understand why Hive is collectively performing as it is at any given moment. Effective marketing and growth begins with detailed research.
Every avalanche begins with a single snowflake. ❄️
Introduction
We propose a process of market research, analysis and reporting in order to improve Hive’s digital marketing footprint. We will begin with market research and move on to data driven suggestion, primarily for improved growth strategy that benefits the entire eco-system. This will include the creation of reports that provide relevant market insights and actionable intelligence for the Hive community, assisting stakeholders to make better informed decisions.
Increased community awareness of Hive’s market positioning, performance, opportunities and threats should optimize the use of DHF funding, plus improve the rate of Hive’s growth. The benefits of decentralization are strengthened when everyone involved is empowered with accurate information.
Hive's quest to increase its share of the social networking market is opposed by vast, centralized corporations who are adept at manipulating markets and audiences. Hive and its dApps have not been able to powerfully compete due, in part, to the inherent benefits that centralization offers organizations in key areas.
While decentralization remains the only way to overcome some challenges - at which Hive’s historic competitors completely fail (e.g. freedom of speech) - significant changes are needed. In particular, Hive needs to learn to compete in the online information space with corporations that leverage their centralized structure to efficiently respond to the demands of their users and to market changes.
Despite conceptually being an ideal on-ramp for Web 3 and crypto in general, Hive only has around 3000 active (posting) accounts at present. It is clear that assistance is needed in order to reach a point of ignition that can substantially accelerate Hive’s growth. Regardless of your vision for Hive's evolution, one constant remains - Hive needs growth and new users in order to become more useful.
At a time when unemployment is rising, Artificial Intelligence threatens the work force and when Web 2.0 social media platforms continue to upset their users with censorship and exploitation of their private data, Hive should be thriving. However, Hive’s network growth has stalled, it has poor search engine presence, is almost never mentioned by journalists/influencers when they cover decentralized social networking and is almost non-existent on relevant pages on Wikipedia.
Hive's competition grows almost daily too. Several open protocols for decentralized social networking now exist and, additionally, strong competition has emerged from a Sequoia Capital backed ‘Decentralized Social Network’ called ‘DeSo’. Deso has slick marketing and could be said to be misleading the public by claiming that they invented decentralized social media. Despite being relatively new, they are already outperforming Hive in the Coin Market Cap tables (their market cap is currently more than twice that of Hive).
Being complacent here is a mistake, history shows that without a well executed, thorough and optimized marketing strategy it is common for the better products/projects to be overpowered by competitors who are more organized and who strategize more effectively.
Resolving this complex digital marketing challenge requires a multi-faceted approach, which itself depends on access to meaningful market data, user feedback and other relevant information. Actionable intelligence must be consistently and clearly communicated to Hive stakeholders in order to influence decision making in ways that can point Hive on a trajectory back towards the kind of growth and success that was seen during the promising early growth period of Hive’s predecessor, Steem.
Hive needs reliable translation of market activity and user sentiment into coherent strategy that meets the real needs of target audiences. This requires the application of professional marketing processes. This proposal sets out an initial plan to establish pathways towards success by producing highly relevant analysis and reporting, which the entire community can use as they see fit.
We foresee this proposal benefiting all aspects of decision making in the Hive community:
- App creators will be helped to shape their products and allocate resources in more optimal ways.
- Core Hive developers will be similarly helped when deciding which changes to include into the core blockchain.
- The entire community will be assisted as they market and co-create Hive as a whole.
We will also produce suggestions for marketing strategies that can form a basis of follow-on projects that accelerate Hive's growth and public visibility.
We aim to shine the light of understanding into areas that can only be explored through the application of integrated market research, user feedback and systems analysis.
Bridging The Gap Between Hive & the Global Audience
The Hive community relies on proven systems that generate the consensus that enables decentralization at the technological level. While this provides the basis for a system of pooled hardware resources, we understand that there is space for the creation of new approaches which assist community members as they themselves reach consensus on matters of governance, design and growth marketing.
Reaching understanding of and consensus about the more human-centric aspects of Hive’s evolution has often been hampered by a lack of reliable, shared data resources. Discussion of the state of Hive and any visions for Hive’s future will be greatly aided by access to trusted maps that show the social marketing landscape that Hive exists within and that help to highlight the available paths forwards towards greater success.
Understanding an ever changing social media landscape on a global level requires collaboration and access to shared resources that help projects to connect with their target audiences. The more that Hive’s community understands the decentralized social networking marketplace and Hive's potential new users, the more chance there is of optimized problem solving and sustained growth (backed by data, rather than continued reliance on what is often little more than personal opinion).
Decentralization implies a range of projects will naturally spring up on Hive and while it is not essential for everyone to agree on every topic, the more aligned the community can be on key areas, the more effectively it can take action to achieve goals on a large scale. If holders of so many diverse viewpoints are to reach a consensus on complex topics, they need to be on the same page as much as possible, which requires that they all have access to a shared pool of high quality information.
Data Driven Growth Strategy
The marketing and growth of Hive has so far not been scaled up, partially due to a lack of consensus among key stakeholders as to the most appropriate strategy for success in attracting potential new users, on-boarding them and to then motivate them to evangelize Hive to others.
Some voices claim that marketing Hive should not be attempted without technical hurdles surrounding on-boarding/retention being overcome, while others see opportunities being missed and a failure to take the initiative to help the community to profit from them. Growing/marketing Hive and improving Hive’s technology do not need to be separate processes - in fact, they need to feed into each other. This is how most successful technological businesses sustain growth and respond to their audiences.
The early success of Steem has already proven that decentralized social networking is capable of drawing in creative people to further develop the vision. Perceived shortfalls in website tech and other areas can be compensated for by the presence of structures in the community that can clearly be seen to be effective at creatively solving problems and that are moving Hive forward towards success.
Improvement of the website tech itself can be sped up through improved data availability, user feedback, system monitoring and communication/co-operation within the community. By taking steps to empower Hive’s stakeholders to solve Hive’s problems, we begin to close the gap between Hive and its competitors in multiple ways simultaneously.
Through an initial process of research, followed by the creation of data driven growth strategies, we foresee the potential for Hive to be rejuvenated and for the passion of community members to be effectively channeled towards our collective and mutual benefit.
Proposal Goals & Tasks
Achieving impressive growth goals for Hive in the long term requires a significant outlay and potentially years of work for numerous people. Steemit Inc. was burning through their funds at a high rate, yet without fully cracking the code for sustainable community growth - so it is understandable that the Hive community seeks to be careful with DHF funds. At the same time, moving too slowly could be just as fatal.
This proposal is intended to demonstrate and test the efficacy of our approach. The concepts can then later be scaled up (and potentially automated) via further proposals to the DHF once this proposal is shown to have been valuable to the community. This initial proposal is only for research and strategy, not for implementation of any potentially more costly marketing activities, such as advertising campaigns.
The tasks outlined below are aimed at establishing a baseline for market research and analysis that is oriented towards improving the overall performance of Hive.
Note: While we are open to advice from the Hive community and are flexible - once funded, the final decision on which tasks will be completed, how they will be completed and by who will rest with the team responsible for this proposal.
Key Areas of Focus
- Design & implement research surveys aimed at existing Hive community members:
Meeting the needs of the community requires gathering the views of the community in the form of usable data. Recording the observations of Hive users with regard to their experience on Hive and also their insights into other people’s perception of Hive is highly valuable.
PeakD’s ‘Open Polls’ project provides an excellent tool for us to use to collect such internal data from the Hive community. If possible we will integrate Open Polls into our research, however, other survey tools are available too.
- Design & implement market research surveys targeting the general public:
Gathering unbiased data from target audiences outside of Hive will yield important insights that can be used to guide decision making. We will subscribe to and use existing online survey tools to facilitate this.
- Investigate solutions for improved user feedback:
There is no way at present for the Hive community to easily provide feedback on Hive as a whole, or to view and track outstanding issues. We also have no way of monitoring the degree to which the community views these issues as problems. Capturing and reporting on this data is potentially a valuable way to improve public sentiment towards Hive, to empower community members and to help direct funding.
Individual apps may listen in discord servers and have GitHub issue pages, but these are not generally publicly visible or sufficiently easily referenced to enable real community awareness.
- Differentiate Hive in the global marketplace:
Identify the right approaches to use when describing Hive to target audiences. Many questions must be answered in order to appreciate how to optimally position Hive as a brand.
For example, do different types of audiences favor ideological aspects of Hive over specific design features of Apps?
This helps us all when using language to describe Hive in marketing materials, in conversation and beyond.
Timeline & Priorities
This work is predicted to be undertaken over a 3 month period, with team members working flexible hours, as needed.
The tasks have been grouped and prioritized to ensure that we first collect data from within Hive, then external to Hive from potential target audiences.
We will then analyze the results, publish reports and also generate new DHF proposals that either ourselves or other teams can make use of in order to implement suggested changes based on the data.
We will generally prioritize general reporting that benefits everyone on Hive, but also aim to produce data and reports that are specifically relevant to key Hive projects who respond to requests to participate in the process.
The following stages of work are planned:
1. Hive Census
Building community spirit requires that we go beyond just stake weighted voting as a way to assess the community’s preferences. To reach true consensus as a community we need to measure more than just wealth on Hive, we need to collect the views of people and to then make the results visible.
Gather information about Hive users:
Their preferences, pain points and why they like/dislike aspects of Hive. What do they want to see change on Hive? What is missing?
Learn about non-Hive users in Hive users’ extended networks:
Gathering targeted data from the internet can be costly and unreliable. We can leverage Hive's community to do some of the data collecting by providing insights about their own friends/connections and their sentiments towards Hive.
Consult with dApp owners/operators:
Tailor research to meet dApp operator's specific needs, plus to collect their own insights.
Segment the data into business users vs normal users:
Gather data from business users about their perception of what they need to see in order to want to invest and build more on Hive.
2. Global Market Research
Gather off-chain and general audience data, prioritizing crypto oriented social media spaces, but also reaching out to the uninitiated.
- Relevant market insights:
Gathering macro data to help us understand the big picture, plus insights into the smaller details. Aiming to identify key target audiences, plus highlight and explain psychological, economic and other factors that drive their behaviours.
- Pre-packaged market research data:
Potential purchase of commercial grade research reports on relevant topics that help us to navigate the wider social media landscape.
- Input from Hive’s Key Stakeholders:
Liaise with dApp creators and other decision makers to tailor the market research in ways they find useful.
3. Analysis & Reporting
Transparent collation and presentation of key data for consumption by community members.
- Intel Reports:
Publish key findings/insights in clear, unbiased and useful ways. Optimized for each category of Hive user and with focused areas for specific dApps.
- Community Feedback:
Publishing our findings of the views of the Hive community in order to more efficiently direct resources towards the improvements that people need/want.
- Independent Analysis:
If necessary, we will hire an external expert in order to provide analysis that is less likely to generate complaints of bias than might be the case if all analysis is generated by us as existing users of Hive.
4. Insights & Suggestions
Data driven suggestions for the Hive community to consider, aiming to improve key performance metrics for both Hive and its various projects.
Marketing Strategy:
Sharing the lessons learned through the research/analysis with the aim of better promoting Hive and capitalizing on identified opportunities.
New DHF Proposals (Bounty Proposals):
Rather than purely relying on the hit/miss approach of community members suggesting their own ideas for funding, we can highlight optimal marketing/development tasks based on our data. We will publish ‘suggested work requests’ as blogs with the intention that developers and others are inspired by them to adapt our ideas into their own proposals, gain funding and help Hive to grow.
Automation/Continuation of Market Research:
Finally, we will discuss the options for extending the work of this current proposal beyond its limited scope. Should this proposal be well received and achieve its goals, we can produce further proposals in order to provide insights to the Hive community on into the future.
Our Team
The highlighted tasks can be completed by our initial two person team:
We both have a wide range of experience in relevant fields, including digital marketing, community growth, systems design, software development and business operations.
@Ura-Soul
- A computer programmer for over 40 years. Has held a degree in Applied Computing (Business merged with System Engineering) for over 20 years.
- 15+ years experience of developing web solutions for clients.
- 3 years of running a digital marketing business, specializing in growth of decentralized projects. Developed and implemented growth strategies for a variety of online/crypto projects, plus ‘bricks and mortar’ businesses.
- 7 years on Hive. Involved in numerous projects, including 1 year of marketing systems development for Splinterlands.
- Skilled in business and systems analysis/design, SEO, digital marketing strategy design, multimedia production and various other areas that bridge creativity and engineering.
@AshleyMosaic
- 7+ years experience leading influencer marketing campaigns, increasing brand visibility and engagement. 8+ years professional blockchain experience.
- Designed and implemented comprehensive business strategies, resulting in measurable growth in community engagement and platform traffic.
- Spearheaded digital event planning and execution, enhancing brand image and user interaction within online communities.
- Successfully built and scaled several digital communities, with one surpassing organic monthly reach of 30M users.
- Conducted in-depth market analysis to identify trends and opportunities, informing data-driven decision-making for product and campaign development.
- Pioneered community development initiatives, building and nurturing active online communities through targeted engagement tactics and influencer relations.
- A futurist, specializing in the intersection of human potential, societal progress, and emerging technology.
Budgeting
In addition to our own labor, working solidly on this throughout the project’s time period - we are also budgeting for the following:
- Surveys:
Subscription to a professional online survey system, such as Survey Monkey, to enable the collection of market data, feedback and insights from a variety of sources.
- Audiences:
We have the option to purchase survey responses from demographically targeted audiences via sites like Survey Monkey. This will be a fallback option if our other strategies to gather data do not yield sufficient audience participation.
- Analyst:
Several days of work from an independent market research analyst, tasked with overseeing the data, results and conclusions. This is both to optimize the value of the data and to also overcome any claims of bias in the data.
We have estimated that to complete the tasks that we would ideally carry out for this proposal, we will need around 107 full days of work (8 hours per day) - split between the two of us.
At a standard daily rate (per person) of $504, this works out to a labor cost of $53,948 over the estimated 3 month period.
We are also allowing for:
- $2000 to pay for online survey and other research tools.
- $840+ to cover the cost of an independent data analyst.
- We also have the option to purchase an independent market research report on decentralized social media networks from marketresearch.com for $3808 (after a 15% discount). This may not be needed and will be considered only after we have completed our own research.
A daily HBD payout of $630 per day, for 3 months, will cover the predicted costs needed to achieve the goals of this proposal.
Note: The original estimate when the proposal was created was $670 per day, but it has since been scaled down. To avoid paying a second DHF fee we can just return any excess funds received at the end of the funding period.
For reference, the two main marketing projects that have so far been funded by the DHF are Leo Finance Marketing and the Ignite Visibility proposals. These two projects both spent money on external advertising. Leo Finance is ongoing and Ignite has completed.
The amounts which these projects asked for as follows:
- Leo Finance: $495 per day, over 15 months.
- Ignite: $1620 per day, over 4 months.
@strategizer aims to create materials and data that are usable by anyone wanting to build on, use or promote Hive. So while it will not immediately generate traffic in the way that advertising can do, we expect this proposal to create a measurable benefit for Hive that continues on in the months after it completes.
In the event that the proposal is only partially funded, we will do our best to publish whatever useful information we have to the community, as soon as possible after the funding stops.
Note: Any rewards from @strategizer posts will be retained as Hive Power in order to upvote users who engage with the work and to further the success of the project. In the event that the project winds down and is no longer supported by the community, we will either continue to use these funds to upvote or delegate to Hive marketing projects or may power them down, using them for other purposes at our own discretion.
Conclusion
We are excited at the prospect of helping Hive to evolve towards a position that enables all of its facets to shine. Please consider voting for our proposal to optimize and propel the Hive Blockchain into a new period of growth and success!
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please send them our way and we'll reply asap.
To our mutual success,
The @Strategizer Team
Vote For This Proposal
Vote On PeakD
Vote on Ecency
Vote With HiveSigner
This is a pure strategy proposal, not an execution proposal. This should be made clear. But that is not to say that strategy is not valuable on its own.
Decentralized social blogging solutions are not our competitors. Before we get started we need to identify who the real competitors are. Hive was originally based on code that came from a chain that was designed to support one social function. That was 4 years ago. Now, Hive is the chain to build on due to its data storage ability, social settings, zero fees, OBI, layers, and so on. Our real competitors are other blockchains that offer great building opportunities.
SEO: Do you mean to go through the dapps and offer them SEO insight? If so, some of these dapps have proposals that include budgets which are presumably for this. How can we evaluate the service to each dapp so we can equalize the budgets in an accountable manner? (Meaning, the same service isn't paid for twice). Each dapp should consent likely. It would be good to gauge consent rates early.
Polling: The biggest challenge in getting the sentiments on Hive experiences, communities and the DHF will be the fact that people who are prominent in contributing feedback will keep doing that and everyone else who quietly creates content will not be reached. The majority of all users will need to be polled. This challenge has to be considered as without a high % sample size of active users, there is no point in getting feedback as we all already know what select people who on their own initiative put in feedback will say. The methodology of obtaining feedback in a way that its inclusive of as many active users as possible is required.
Listings should not be a part of any of this discussion. Those are business relationships and they are done a specific way. There is no need to take what can be a good approach to planning and shoot it in the foot with involving listings.
👆 YES!
We need to build a Field of Dreams specifically for builders of Fields of Dreams.
We need to make Hive the go-to platform for existing and aspiring #web3 developers.
To accomplish that, we need very clear and easily-accessible tools, libraries, tutorials, tutorial videos, and perhaps even our own IDE and dev help desk.
Also just gonna drop this here: https://www.focus.xyz/
$78M worth of $DESO token reserved so far. Whitepaper's plan for onboarding web2 is fascinating (get your web2 socials evaluated and paid out in staked $FOCUS immediately upon association, earn a % of referred accounts that join).
One of those fun "But Hive..." claims, re: their veryvery innovative 1/10,000th of a penny transactions:
One takeaway: fast and feeless is still a marketable term, assuming this project did its research.
Another: Maybe this is a flash in the pan dApp or rug, sure. But if it ain't stuff like this will eclipse us fast.
Would be interesting to compare wallet holdings vs:
1
$DESO= ~108$HIVEright now.So how many wallets hold more than 108 $HIVE?
Would be curious to see.
I'm voting for the proposal because I think we need more people involved in this and such research will be beneficial for the whole ecosystem. However, I cannot agree with everything in the post as I feel there are a couple of invalid statements and planned actions that do not bring much value, like research for DHF feedback. I do not believe it will change anything in how and who votes for the proposals. I can write more later on if necessary.
Thanks for your vote and comments!
The DHF part is really a secondary add-on that fits the goal we have of optimizing Hive to become more attractive to end-users, developers and investors. Ultimately, the DHF is the most effective tool we have to enhance and grow Hive overall and other similar projects make their DAO the focal point of their entire project. It seems logical to me to investigate how this key selling point of the Hive system can be improved. I know for 100% certain that poor tracking/accountability is a major turn off to investors when it comes to spending of funds (including DAOs).
However, I also set the intention that this project would be as data driven as possible, rather than driven by my own opinion (or any individual's opinion) - so which specific tasks would be undertaken, including any related to the DHF, will be finalised once the initial data collection and analysis is done. That way, any actions that we plan that go beyond market research will be backed by real world data.
Optimising the DHF is not an easy thing to do, which is why this proposal really only makes mention of it in terms of research and we would not be putting a lot of time into that area regardless of what the data says.
I'm stuck and can't decide.
"Hive Census." Please correct me if I'm wrong or explain the procedure. I envision a questionnaire sitting in a quiet corner of the chain somewhere collecting dust and very few actually taking the time to fill it out accurately and honestly. Majority won't even know it exists and if they do find it or it finds them, statistically speaking, when presented with these surveys, 70% of people ignore them. AI gave me that "fact" and from my personal experience I can tell you I ignore them 100% of the time. For instance, if Peakd provided me with a popup (similar to claiming rewards in the bottom right corner) "Please fill out this survey," I'd most likely click the x to get rid of the "annoying" popup.
I've a few more concerns but I didn't come here to rip this apart or complain.
In a response here you said:
Perhaps once I see more of them actually supporting this proposal, I'll feel comfortable backing them up with a vote of my own. For now I'm sitting on the fence seeing a high price tag, wondering who would actually buy this or needs this.
This seems to target the entirety of Hive. Consumers of games as example would have different wants and needs than consumers of social platforms, and those here for financial aspects would see things differently as well. So I'm not sure how it all gels.
Thanks for your comments and questions.
The response rate of surveys varies with the context and audiences involved to some extent. In this case there is a need to take a multi-dimensional approach to gaining people's attention and motivating them to respond. This is a little different to a typical situation where a business wants to gather information in order to improve its ability to extract even more money from its customers!
This is an area that will be somewhat experimental, but we envision a combination of outreach to communities, including posting off-chain into relevant Discord servers, and the correct motivational/educational language may be sufficient to generate enough responses. I think people's opinions on Hive are one of the most commonly expressed themes on this network, so I know that many people are already motivated to respond 😄.
We also have the option of motivating verified respondents with small upvotes from a large account, but that is not ideal due to the increased motive that smaller users will then have to reply with multiple accounts and to skew the data. Ultimately, we can't KYC every respondent and we have to accept that as with all such surveys there will be a degree of manipulation and inaccuracy involved. We have plans on how to minimize this concern but we are also flexible and open to input from the community as we continue.
It's likely that we will be involved in the next town hall to discuss the proposal, so that will be an opportunity for people to give their thoughts on this area and what is or is not acceptable to them in terms of how best to proceed. I think that our existing plans will generate useful data but it's certainly possible that our approach can be improved by input from Hive's many geniuses!
The various categories of dApps on Hive will need to be taken into consideration, yes. Some areas of research will focus on topics that apply to everyone and some will be category specific.
In terms of dApp operators voting for the proposal, I can see 7 of them already in the voting list and I have received feedback already from others that they support the proposal, so I hope to see their votes soon too. By all means wait before voting, the project is due to go live on Monday, so I will be very active between now and then to gain as much support as possible.
This is one of the best DHF Proposals I have seen. If I don't see @strategizer get funding, I may have to even rethink my investment in HIVE. Currently most of my portfolio is on HIVE or projects that are built on top of HIVE. If the community is not ready to help HIVE grow, what are we even doing!
Best of Luck! I will try to promote this with the limited reach I have.
We agree 100%. Thanks so much for your support, we appreciate it and you!
I'm extremely happy to see proposal like yours go live. I'm eagerly awaiting to see it at funded over the next few days. There are only 12 voters so far. I will write more about the project to see if I can get more eyeballs.
Thanks so much!
You deserve it!
This proposal is one I am happy to vote for. Let's finally start this amazing chain growing!
Awesome, thankyou - let's go!
I have given you my opinion on this before if I recall correctly.
You can do this, and its all well thought out and well meaning but...
No info provided through this guarantees any action by those that should utilize this information.
What you are essentially doing with this is trying to teach, those that dont yet know how to crawl, how to fly an airplane.
Ill be completely honest. I prefer "yelling" at our frontend devs for not doing the bare minimum, free stuff, over putting this type of effort behind a proposal like this.
@crimsonclad set a good precedent on how things should be done lately with Hiveblocks on Twitter.
Making dapp founders look bad in comparison to what an unpaid volunteer that runs no Hive dapps is doing, I always consider a better encouragement than a well researched strategy recommendation.
One has the power of emotional and ego appeal. A marketing strategy recommendation they can just ignore.
Just my thoughts. I wish you all the luck though.
The shame game is a dead end IMO.
The fact of the matter is that most devs do not know marketing. Similar to how most marketers don't know development. You can yell at a bunch of entrepreneurial marketers all you want about refactoring a database, and it will never get done. Conversely, shout all you want at devs to get their marketing going, and it's not going to happen.
Sure, you get some unicorns out there who can do both. It's RARE and it's energy sapping to be burning both ends like that.
Rather than rely on unicorns, any competent centralized org would have their dev team do dev stuff and their marketing team do marketing stuff, with a management layer to coordinate the output.
Obviously Hive isn't that, so we need to come up with our own approach. I see this @strategizer proposal as a way for the marketing minds of Hive to rally around something they can start to add value to, rather that standing around hoping that devs will do it/lead it. Once pieces of this start to crystallize, folks that are unicorns, folks that know how to communicate between dev/marketing, or even devs who know some marketing but won't spend cycles on the 'tough stuff' can begin to use the output.
The information is still critical though. A further step, I agree, is a plan to action it. (Aka hire pilots.) Just because there's a risk that the info won't be leveraged to it max potential isn't an excuse to not do it at all.
Thankyou for the intelligent rebuttal! 😁
We agree completely, it is unreasonable to expect teams that are not optimized for marketing and often limited for resources to be able to excel at both marketing and development of cutting edge technology.
Some of the proposals for dApps that are already funded do direct some funds towards marketing, so we need to take steps to try to prevent duplication of effort. However, I am not aware of any of the projects intending to carry out the kind of research that we intend for Strategizer, so they should all be able to benefit in ways that help them to optimize their existing plans.
Cheers!
I suspect most "marketing plans" are "let's put some words out there on X and see what happens (if we remember)" or "make Hive posts." The latter is cool if your Total Addressable Market is Hive users. That's not a really sustainable TAM though, especially if nothing is being done to grow Hive itself.
The former is just... not typically effective. Unless you're hammering it all day, every day, doing non-scalable work like crim or anomadsoul do to get into Spaces, learning the algo, networking, designing smart conversion funnels ('cause all Twitter is TOFU marketing, and all apps (including dApps) need the full funnel)... and we know that is pulling teeth to get projects to begrudgingly author one half-decent tweet a week (which is like going to the gym for 5 minutes a week and hoping to see results).
Me neither! I've earmarked and advocated for market research for WOO (I believe @bookerman is happy to share our general content marketing plan publicly, if anyone is interested. I'll check with him again to be sure if anyone requests though), but it's not cheap and we're pretty bootstrapped as it is.
Thanks for your comment. I can see where you are coming from, but at the same time I think it's a bit harsh to suggest that dApp operators are incapable of understanding how to run their project in ways that lead to growth - even with significant help.
If Hive's whales mostly want businesses to grow on Hive and to bring money in to the system instead of it constantly leaving, then there's no way around the fact that the projects need to become as directed towards growth as possible - which requires access to good data.
The proposal here is intended to advise everyone on Hive, including the people who vote for proposals, so that there is some way to understand whether projects are heading in helpful directions.
It's definitely true that dApps can all ignore everything that is discovered/shared, but I'd be pretty surprised if they did that. I spoke to several of the big dApp operators before writing the proposal and they all said essentially the same thing, that they really need something like this proposal in order to help their own strategy.
As with the Ignite proposal and other marketing proposals, there is no way to know whether the results will be powerful or not, without going ahead and trying it. I had expected that Ignite would produce research and reports of the kind I am suggesting here, but (partially) since they didn't we are still mostly in the dark as to how to navigate this situation.
We are due - this year (allegedly) - to see substantial improvements to Hive's feature set, so now is the perfect time to be laying a foundation for growth based on real world data. :)
So happy to see a comprehensive marketing proposal that begins with research. I'll watch the conversation here with great interest—lots of overlap with things I have cooking on various fronts. Proposal merrily supported!
Thankyou, yes, maybe we can collaborate to some extent to achieve shared goals. :)
For sure. With your proposal now published I can definitely see some linkage between UNHIDE and Strategizer. When I start shopping my project around to others, I intend also to let them know / remind them about this action oriented proposal.
Let me know your preferred way to get in touch / collaborate. I feel like we both may need a little while for the dust to settle and gather community feedback—but in a few weeks it'd be great to touch base and see where it all stands!
Excellent, yes, it's best to let this proposal go through it's process first. I'm available on a few chat systems, you can just direct message me (ura) in the developer Hive chat and we can go from there. :)
Do we have a means to find samples of past users of Hive/Steem who have left over the years for surveys? Or even people who landed on sign up pages but did not complete the process. IMO that is a crucial element, because only surveying those who successfully signed up and then have stuck around is going to have major survivorship bias (which I find to be a big limitation in my own ability to analyse these issues primarily based on the data on the chain itself).
An alternative approach to surveys if we can't find sufficient people for samples (eg. if one person in 10,000 is even aware of Hive/Steem at all) would be some kind of focus testing, eg. getting people to attempt to sign up and use Hive and see what their experience is.
On the matter of social media vs blockchain platform, it is a fact that at one point in the past Steem was indeed quite successful as a social platform, with steemit.com reaching the top 100 websites in South Korea by traffic. We can't even say with reasonable certainty - why was it initially successful and why did that success so quickly disappear?
Here in the Philippines, we have a huge community of Hive users for both on content posting and gaming.
What we really wished for is to help us facilitate the inclusion of Hive and HBD to some of our local crypto-exchanges.
So that, a solid use cases can be easily comprehensible among Filipinos who are already in crypto but not yet on Hive.
The Hive communities in the Philippines is poised to be a leader in the number of users in Hive.
We badly need it in the most possible time.
-guruvaj
a member of the dbuzz and hiveph community
We are told that exchanges often require a legal entity to sign a contract when adding crypto tokens and Hive does not have such a legal entity or figurehead to sign such an agreement. However, that doesn't seem to have been a problem for Bitcoin - which is one of the only other truly decentralised projects that (afaik) lacks such a legal entity.
We have a contact within a large exchange and are waiting comment on this exact issue.
It is a point of argument that can be used by Hive “proponents” to these crypto e changes.
I am not party to this endeavor, but as a community onboarder on the DBuzz app, Hive will be far more attractive to common folks to try on if they have clear exit strategies of their activities on Hive.
So far, “peer to peer” trading of Hive/HBD is being done among various community groups within DBuzz and HivePh (and Spl) communities.
This is absolutely an argument that works with exchanges- many of them are very interested in the idea of us and are appreciative of everything about hive. The problem is, that doesn't negate their need to do the things that come with touching traditional finance and government regulation. We are actively working with one of the biggest exchanges in the Philippines right now who are very pleased and look forward to listing hive, but the process is dragging very very slowly because of how difficult the legal situation is to handle. We are working our way through it, but it usually means a lot of individual legal opinions and also the need for community members to take on culpability tasks with these exchanges, and for them to work with their own legal teams to change their policies to work around us.
Thanks Crim❤️
Being a decentralized blockchain has its difficulties in this manner, and I really feel bad that our regulatory authorities here in the Philippines and its laws are “not forward looking” to cater to Web3 platforms yet.
You mentioned that Bitcoin essentially got listed because it was first and the regulation didn't exist at that time. So I take it that the regulations aren't retroactive and Bitcoin is 'too big to fail' in that sense?
I can't speak for them, but I suspect it's a bit on the nose. The reality is, Bitcoin literally created the need for exchanges and the regulatory due diligence landscape has changed so extremely in the past few years that every month that goes by may or may not change things substantially in our favour. I suspect that as long as they pay their pound of flesh to the Gov, there's no need to go back the decade and a half and fill in "Satoshi" on the "legal entity" line. That's a guess though. As saying above to @guruvaj, right now Coins.PH and I are banging our heads together on how to help them enter into a contract with a trustless DAO for culpability reasons. As such, on most of our listings and almost every single CEX NDA, I am personally fully doxxed. I very, very, very much do not like that at all, but there is no one else who will and as such, it's something that I do my best to go over with my personal lawyer to protect myself as best I can and keep us moving forward on these things.
DEX options really are the future we need to pursue- lol.
Can't the DHF pay for a Directors & Officers (D&O) type insurance policy for you, similar to what corporations do with their directors, CEOs and top management teams?
NOTE: If the DHF funds this, make sure the policy includes "tail coverage". The tail means that any actions taken by you while the policy was in effect will be covered by the policy even if the policy itself is allowed to lapse.
I can really feel your predicament about this, we hope we can push it more as a community.
And we really love you for the efforts that you are doing❤️❤️❤️
I don't know much about the legal rules surrounding relationships between exchanges and token operators, but at least in Britain there are a few ways to define the situation which bypass much of the issues (note: not legal advice). There is an allowance for organisations to be defined as a club for legal purposes. A community of people joining together to achieve their goals.
It seems that the issue of them requiring someone to be named and held responsible in the event of bad behaviour is a bit pointless anyway, since the scale of the community and the potential problems that the exchange might experience are much larger than one person will typically be able to be sued for anyway. I would hope that these places wouldn't end up trying to put you in jail personally if an exchange claimed that Hive's technology had somehow defrauded them!
Seems these folks need a good hard drink of that Satoshi spirit! 😁
Yes, having Hive listed on as many exchanges as possible ideal from the perspective of decentralisation and for marketing purposes. Steps are underway to increase the ability to trade Hive outside of centralised exchanges, but if we can help to make onboarding of Hive onto CEXs then we will do.
Lastly, excited to see how the Philippines places from your data gathering efforts, since, my country tends to be a lead in social media use.
Our team is only fluent in English, so we may need help from community members to translate text if we are to reach non English speaking regions. I see, though that the Philippines has English as an official language, so we can definitely include that region in appropriate ways.
Analysing the nationalities and languages of Hive users will be part of our first stage, the census.
Salamat po. ❤️🇵🇭❤️
👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
You can tell your local exchanges that they can run their own hive node and have direct access to the chain.
Just send them to the discord: https://discord.gg/FuNWCTW6EH
People can direct them from there.
I'd push access to hbd as a hook.
We need more warm bodies to push this further.
Voted with my proxy.
Thankyou!
Indeed, tldr. 🫢
so great post with so many details i belivied no dubt
keep this way have a nice day!
!BBH
@strategizer! Your Content Is Awesome so I just sent 1 $BBH (Bitcoin Backed Hive) to your account on behalf of @pirulito.zoado. (2/5)