Areas MaidSafe Needs To Improve On?

I don’t mean to be a pessimist, but with a background in Economics and thousands invested in Maid, I can’t help but take off my rose-coloured glasses and analyse all possibilities.

I will begin by saying I am absolutely thrilled and intrigued by what MaidSafe is promising to deliver. I also read David Irvine’s posts and his responses are part of the reason I choose to remain invested in Maid - he is very confident in the results of the project and extremely articulate in conveying given confidence. However, I still can’t help but wonder.

1. Accountability in terms of Time Frame: I understand that a good project may require a lot of time… but it is certainly helpful to give investors a time frame of when we will go into different phases, no? I am not asking for a stop watch as was done by Verge who then failed to deliver on Wraith on time and extremely upset their investors, but a time frame like we see Ada for example setting objectives in terms of quarters in a year. Time frames might even help increase Market Cap and leverage the growth of the value of the tokens…

2. Maid has been in the game for 10 years? The technology of 2007 is nothing compared to what technology of 2017 is like. I frankly think that pitching Maid in this way is actually to its detriment. My question is, is the research that was conducted for example in 2007/8 of any relevance to MaidSafe technology today? If no, then maybe time is really of the essence? (which I think it is)

3. Marketing: While my background is in Economics, my profession at the moment is in Marketing. I can not help but cringe when I go on MaidSafe Social Media Platforms for example and they are extremely dead. We live in a day and age whereby for any business, an online presence is mandatory - of course unless you’re the guy selling hotdogs across the road, then everyone who needs to know you probably already does. We need an ACTIVE online presence. When will there be Marketing efforts? Because at the moment, there certainly are none… We have no content even on Youtube, the last video about MaidSafe was posted 2 months ago, and before that, 5 months ago… What is being done about Marketing?

I am here to play devil’s advocate… These answers do not have to be answered, but I feel they should be reflected upon. I am excited to see MaidSafe perform extremely well hopefully sooner than later. I am even willing to jump help with Marketing efforts for free if need be to get the word of mouth out there. I have a lot of faith in Safe and cannot wait to enjoy the fruits of my initial investment some years from now!

Winfred

10 Likes

Don’t worry, its a discussion forum so all angles considered. I think the title could be seen as a bit preachy/school teacher like, but maybe that is just me as an insider who thinks that.

I can answer this part easiest, the rest is more for discussion but this part the answer is the work from before 2006 till now is all 100% relevant and necessary.

And for this part

The answer was a resounding yes and time is really still of the essence, It drives us in house every day.

In terms of the Time Frames part we do not need to improve on time scales at all. If we knew something and did not tell folk then I would see it as an issue. We have iterative releases and weekly updates to let folk see where we are on the path and what speed etc. Nobody knows and we cannot get better at timescales as there is none. Nobody (and I mean nobody) can tell how long to launch. As we are closer we could guess better, but its only a guess. The guys would feel like we are lying if we set timescales to launch etc. In terms pf phases then we do have phases and are working through them continuously. I think we could communicate all this much better, but that may be your point 3.

On point 3 its a thing we are looking at, but latest maidsafe created video release dates won’t do it for me, Tesla with huge budget and launched products do a couple every month, how many before they launched? Its not that simple. In any case as the opposite of devils advocate I would just say we have recently took on a full time Marketing person, have a PR company on retainer and spent today reviewing the near term marketing plan. Its a lot more than videos and importantly will engage and collaborate with the community much more.

Hope that helps.

29 Likes

It’ll be nice to see regular or occasional videos or media contents about team’s progress which can be posted in YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and other social media. I noticed some projects (golem for example) do that and it’s good marketing/publicity IMO. It spreads the world and intrigues people who don’t have time to do in depth research. We now have safe websites in alpha network. Why not create a cool safe demo website and use it in a marketing video? No need to create unnecessary hype like other projects. Things like this will bring more people to safe.

There were not many companies that went all-in in electric car like Tesla whereas nowadays there are too many projects claiming to decentralized the Internet (or everything!). So it’s hard to figure out which project is legit and worth the wait. A little push (in marketing or publicity) from the team will help a lot.

8 Likes

We can’t estimate a set release date for the SAFE network. However what we CAN do is set up a system of regular educational documentation, blogs and tutorials. Where is the SAFE network version of Day 9 video tutorials and newbie help? (For those who don’t know what I’m talking about Day 9 is a Starcraft II vlogger who specializes in putting out tutorials and replays especially for newbs so they can improve their skills.) Putting out such educational material on a regular basis (weekly or daily) would also be a good way to keep the Maidsafe site ACTIVE and keep people coming back to it regularly for dev updates. They’d come for the tutorials and FWOOSH they’d see a new coding upgrade! Or BOOM Alpha 3 gets released! Or ZING they have a new video by David Irvine to watch! Something along those lines.

Also another way we can market SAFE is by connecting it to current events like the net neutrality issue that’s going down or global censorship issues. Write a few articles and publish them. Get people to connect the dots. People wonder why the SAFE network is relevant? Well they need to be shown. And as new code is developed new articles can be written to better expound on these implications. As more people read such articles more people will become interested in the SAFE network and hopefully buy more maidsafecoin and become developers.

7 Likes

You spoke my mind :slightly_smiling_face: We badly need the marketing team to step up and be more active.

2 Likes

SAFE isn’t just about tech updates. It’s also about learning how to use those updates and connecting all that new tech to real life and making it relevant to real people’s lives. If you can’t do all that it won’t take off to become the decentralized internet we want it to be.

2 Likes

It is not uncommon to have full time social media experts on a team these days. These people are there to get the message out and create and maintain a buzz.

The last two businesses I worked for had regular output through social media channels. At least one item a day, appropriately back linking to draw people in to the project.

The items do not need to be glitzy, high production videos. They don’t even need to be maidsafe or safe net news; they need to just be interesting and topical. This associates and align the project with its target audience, helping people to understand what it is and what its goals are.

I think it is also important to give the team’s voice. They may be experts in their field and a simple internal interview/AMA format - even just text - brings this to life. It demonstrates the broad depth of ability the team is bringing to the table.

We should also be making the most of genuine news. This could be internal or external to the maidsafe team. Simple forum, safe wallet, decorum wallet, etc, have all had test releases to play with, but nothing outside of a forum post has been visible. Likewise for the great docs forum members have produced or even interesting forum threads foe debate.

While we can argue it is up to contributors to get the word out, pulling these strings together to create a narrative is really something someone at maidsafe should be doing, IMO. This enables the narrative to be measured and structured, pulling in a good mixture of content.

We need to break out of this microcosm if people are going to care about maidsafe and safe net. People need to hear about it to understand what it is and what progress is being made. Many other businesses and projects are far, far better at doing this and it doesn’t take deep pockets of marketing money to do it; one person can, with some support by the rest of the team.

11 Likes

I understand the maidsafe position on this, but it isn’t without consequence. People have literally no time scale to plan around. Whether this is developing apps, farming hardware, or even just investing, this makes life difficult. Commercially, it may be turning away people who would otherwise be much more involved and interested in the project direction.

On the flip side, bad or unrealistic time scales are harmful, as are unnecessarily pessimistic ones. Pure guesses are only going to lead to disappointment or (worse) malinvestment, which is unhelpful.

IMO, a balance needs to be struck and I’m no sure that is being done right now. Having a roadmap is useful, but people need to know how well it is being tracked against. It is fine to have a long term view without precise dates, but giving something is useful… even if it is just an estimated year of delivery.

In the closer term, say the next 1-3 months, detail should be known. I suspect it is internally, as otherwise planning sprints, stories and test releases would be difficult. I am sure some of this is visible in JIRA too, but a high (epic) level view on the components being worked on and their status would be a big help. Knowing that 60% vs 10% of the features needed for the next test or alpha is really useful detail, even if time estimates remain internal/unspecified.

I know I have posted a few slightly negative comments recently and I hope they are being taken constructively. Like many others here, I am passionate about this project and want it to succeed for many reasons. No one backing the team wants to see maidsafe nailed over missed time scales, but patience is easier to maintain when there is a bit more to go on.

Naturally, you are free to disagree and this is only my opinion. I am sure this has been thought about long and hard internally too, but this Is my perpective from the outside looking in.

10 Likes

Could small scale timescales be set up? Like say for immediate goals the team has? It’s hard to predict long term goals because you don’t know when a new bug will pop up or when a new release from Rust will happen and you’ll need to refactor everything again but what about something small and immediate? Like in the last update they said they were discussing stuff so how long will those talks take? Then from there when will the coding happen and approximately how long will that take? If you’re setting up a meeting o discuss something you generally allocate a set amount of time to discuss something and pass a resolution. I’m not saying it all has to be discussed in an hour or a day but just a general plan of saying “We will talk about this problem for x time and then plan to code for y time and if something happens that cause it to take longer we’ll let you know.” Does that sound reasonable?

3 Likes

The problem is (A) this ‘official’ SAFEnetwork forum and (B) the fact that people are able to ‘buy in’ with MAID. Those two combined are really powerful tools (to keep people invested and interested f.i.), but they can also be very cumbersome for both parties. (The parties being Maidsafe and us regular folk)

People like to wonder. We think we want to know everything, but we don’t. The whole point of the forum is to get people (emotionally) involved (which works great most of the time), but IMHO as far as wondering about developmentstatus, this forum with it’s the weekly development updates (not so much the lack of timescales) is also it’s achillesheel.

When I buy a pair of socks from a given webshop, I want to know on beforehand when the socks are delivered at my doorstep. When they don’t give a timeframe on beforehand and I still decide to buy the socks, I could ask for a timeframe via email, but I shouldn’t expect an answer that satisfies. That’s the risk I willingly took when I bought the socks from that webshop. (Weekly progressreports on my socks would only trigger questions about delivery)

In the case of SAFE, you know (or should know) that when you’re buying Maidsafecoin, that there are no real timescales. When you ask for timescales on this forum, you therefore should’nt expect an answer that satisfies. But the fact that there’s a weekly update on development and you’re able to ask anything freely anyway, makes the inevitable question about timescales and the inevitable answer cumbersome for the asker, the developers and the rest of the forum.

So the real question is: how to stop people from asking about timescales? I don’t know. I guess you can’t when people can’t accept the fact that there will be no real timescales. Maybe a dedicated ‘locked’ topic like the Maidsafecoin price topic could help?

2 Likes

So what are you buying when you buy MAID now. You are buying either a coin to sell later or you are buying MAID so you have future resource allocation.

You are not buying into the software or the company developing it. So I feel you are not right about buying in…

1 Like

I’m not actually saying they are buying in, but many people feel that way. They feel like they’ve invested, while they haven’t really…

3 Likes

Ah sorry, i read it wrong then

2 Likes

^^ this hits the nail right on the head.
A balance has not been struck.

In all fairness when I see how (a few) throw their toys when timeframes are exceeded, its nearly understandable but Im certain detrimental.

1 Like

I think prediction markets will be useful for these type of things. The project/company doesn’t have to set any timeframe, but the ‘knowledge of the crowd’ (possibly including insiders) may be able to give fairly good insights.

1 Like

The reason we are where we are “without balance” in your view, ie MaidSafe not giving timescales, is because it was tried and despite their best efforts MaidSafe realised they were too unreliable to be worth publicising.

Far from helping, unreliable estimates:

  • mislead developers, causing them to risk resources, incur costs, and waste valuable time
  • mislead investors
  • cause disappointment and bad feeling among the community
  • create unhelpful pressure on MaidSafe developers, potentially causing them to cut corners, make mistakes, or become demotivated and less productive, and even leave the team
  • give those who want to undermine the project ammunition

I’m pretty sure most of the above has happened, though I’m not going to try and justify any of it. If you disagree, you are welcome to your opinion, but much of what I’ve listed there is self evident to those who have been here since the time MaidSafe were trying to give timescales.

I share everyone’s frustration on this issue, but it doesn’t matter how much you want some indication of time frame, providing one that isn’t reasonably reliable only harms the project.

At some point this will be possible, but only MaidSafe can judge how much to say and when.

8 Likes

I dont disagree but I do see how it can adversly affect the project.
I also underatand why it stopped, that does not mean a better solution is not available.
Nobody is asking for dates but ballpark with the right to shift said ballpark as needed is something?

I get its all a guess… and pointless. So I concede :joy:

3 Likes

Something I think could be useful would be a summary of all the developer updates over the last two or three years so people could get an idea of the real progress being made and also see the direction of travel more easily. Together with a clear picture of what the end result (production ready network) will look like that could at least fill some of the perceptual gaps.

4 Likes

Certainly not face book. A great presence on face book? And change the world or because you’re a business?

1 Like

Two years ago all the alt action was on Poloniex and Bittrex. Now it is spread across a lot of exchanges. We were in the top 10 back then, now we’re not even in the top 40.

If we want to see MAID value increase and people take notice you have to put it under their noses.

MAID needs to be listed in places like Bitfinex and the big Korean exchanges. It needs to be traded for a variety of fiat pairs and it needs to be supported by more major wallets (even though MAID will be displaced by SafeCoin eventually).

Other than that it’s not just what you know, it’s who you know. MaidSafe need to network better and leverage more social capital imo. It sounds like they have gone through the same kinds of thought processes though. SOLID and Google and are two exciting names to hear dropped casually, it would be great if some relationships and enthusiasm could develop there.

Never underestimate the laziness of the crowd though. If you don’t get MAID under their noses at all the big exchanges and in all the big wallets then you can only expect a discerning and motivated few to search it out.

4 Likes