So at the ETH launch party there was still a chance mere humans could get close to vitalik and ask him a question. I asked him so what is the plan to market this to the mainstream? Sure us super-nerds love you but how are you gonna brand this so the cool kids do to? His answer was basically just like well this is so awesome they will just hear about it though the grapevine and adopt. I don’t think that has happened and this is why ETH is kinda stalling out and not growing any more. It because that small market of super-nerds is saturated and they are not penetrating into the larger general population market. I hope this project will be different somehow, and I know lots of people are like I know if I just HODL MAID til final it will be mad profits, and I am sure there will be some to be had as we saturate a niche of really tech savy people, but right now I see a significant risk it will just be like a small cult thing in the grand scheme for a long time if there is no specific plan on how to break out from that.
This is what companies like Apple do so well. They don’t just put out a smartphone and be like oh don’t worry nerds have lots of friends (error!) and will tell them. They put out the tech ya, but I would say they spend equal effort getting adoption to spread further then those that automatically see a use case based on the thing itself. I guess what I want to stress here is ETH could have been the next apple, maybe they still can, but they totally botched the migration from people really into that niche to name brand your mom knows.
It already is. And that is why Maidsafe has a marketing department. SAFE will be appropriately marketed. Meaning that the particular stage the project is at will be always considered when considering what marketing to do.
The updates even have a section on marketing and keep an eye on it and see changes as the project develops.
I doubt it. Even with all the marketing. As many said it was a project looking for a problem to solve. Apple was producing computers people were wanting so it had a market to market to. SAFE already have a market to market to so the quicker it launches the better.
That’s what I am wondering about here. Like in the early stages the best ways to promote ETH was to have meetups and put out deep explainers. That’s about where we are now, and it’s appropriate. The question I have is will it scale up to creating a brand and showing more simple folk how this helps them, and reach out in a way they don’t have to “do research” to find this benefit? I mean in rare cases you build it and they come, but lots of good ideas get forgotten for centuries because they just did not do the jesus thing and turn the cult into a religion.
Show us the Ethereum products that are meaningful to everyone. Show us the steps a person will have to take to understand what each of those products does, to adopt it, to use it, and explain what the value of doing so is to them.
Those are genuine questions because while I do follow Vitalik on twitter (and he listed a bunch of ETH apps in a short thread a couple of days ago) I’m not aware of anything that appeals to me, let alone will appeal to most people. So I don’t anticipate using Ethereum for anything.
Do you expect to use it for anything other than trading and investment?
Compare this with SAFE. There are many easy to name, easily understood, easy to use products that will be applicable to everyone who is online, and will be easy to adopt. There are barriers too, and it will be important to help people understand the value of getting over them, but if you look around the case for privacy, security and access is being made daily wherever you look.
And as @neo points out Maidsafe are on the case, putting together the team, strategy, messages and getting out there now.
I came to Maidsafe / SAFE because I was interested in Ethereum and investigating it. I looked at both. I couldn’t see much value in Ethereum, and still don’t. The value in SAFE Network is clearly enormous IMO.
Maybe the difference is we really have an easier to see use case for the masses and that will make all the difference in getting to mass adoption. Still what I wanted to point out here is not that ETH is the best, but rather the attitude the creators had that their thing was the best and everyone was going to just notice. I do think I see a bit of that here. I think even with many solid use cases there is still that jump from problem to solution not everyone is just going to be smart enough to make and need like flashy youtube ads to make the leap.