What kind of users are we trying to attract? Are we spending money attracting people who are entirely wrong for the platform?
We need to decide.
Again, I am not singling anyone out but instead I am looking at our actions as a community.
My thoughts were sparked by the interesting article here.
the entire cost of the project was 428 and there were about 35 people signing up so the acquisition cost was $14.26/user.
This equation is missing an important metric.
What is the lifetime value of those 35 people to Hive?
I can spend $250 to acquire a hypothetical Sports Massage for Nerds client, for example, if that client typically earns me $251 over the next few months. If it costs $100 per session and clients usually do at least 3x sessions then I will be ahead on average.
If however, I spend $20 to get a registration for someone who only ever COSTS me money then we would have been better NOT spending the $20.
Does that make sense?
If we only look at the cost of acquisition we would mistakenly think that option two was the winner. We would "get more users for our expenditure", even though those users collectively only do nothing or worse do the ecosystem harm.
There is an infamous joke in business that "we lose money on every sale but we will make it up in volume".
Take an example where someone creates 1,000 bots making our apparent "acquisition costs" pennies, would we be better off before or after?
This leads me to the main point.
Performance must be measured based on what we actually WANT to happen
There is a story that programmers are taught early on about a big company, let's say IBM,that one day stupidly decides to change their staff performance metric to "lines of code".
Anyone who falls in the bottom 20% of this metric will be fired.
You can guess what happened.
Yes,the honest and most efficient programmers were gone, and the cunning but dishonest, or programmers who didn't know any better than to write flabby code, were left.
In my day job I often have to coach clients to stop appealing to people who need but can't afford their services. You can't build a business based around giving everything away!
If you want to be charitable, do that, but don't call it a business.
Hive needs more people who invest by buying and holding Hive. The content creators we attract should be people who create content that attracts those investors and holders.
Doing good works is fine, creating a nice income for people who would otherwise not have it is great. Heck, drilling for clean water for impoverished areas is lovely. Let's just not confuse that with Hive growth or desirable user acquisition.
Do the Rally Car community see the sponsored car and buy Hive? Does racing content attract people who do?
Does the average [insert nation/group/community/interest here] attendee sign up and grow the value of Hive or do they swap their gains for fiat at the first opportunity?
I'm a grower, not a shower..
Grow me the money!!
Dalz does a good job of aggregating the data to show the takers/growers in his posts. I was hoping blocktrades would have kept their return proposal vote in place so we could see just how much "taking" there has been from the DHF and the ramifications of reducing the burden for a month+.
I think it can be an expensive process generally to get people onto and using Hive. They generally need some hand-holding to get into it and then many give up as it is 'too hard' to use and earn. Anyone creating content that can make money elsewhere will probably concentrate on those other platforms. There are exceptions though. We have quite a few really good musicians who choose to use Hive. There is also things like @planetauto who post their car videos on Youtube, but also put them here and will engage with people. People need an audience and the Hive one is pretty small really. So we need a lot more users generally as well as trying to get more cool content.
The value to Hive of some current promotion efforts should be questioned and those spending the money need to justify that.
Agreed, and I think spending a tiny amount of the currently invested budget on growing the traffic to the main sites would make sense as previously discussed.
A lot of what is currently done feels like handing out branded merchandise to the homeless. Feels good, and does good for society, but is not aligned with the marketing goals. Heck, if we got some traditional PR out of it (intentionally, not accidentally) then it would be better than the random acts of kindness/slush fund the hobbies of the fund recipients.
Unfortunately, the only way for us to know if someone is worth being here is by onboarding them... You cannot know until they're here doing their things. I think quality comes from quantity. You have to throw a big net, let go the small fishes and retain the good ones.
I know there is the risk of ruining the experience by introducing some bad apples in the platform. But we know they're not going to stay.