I know marketing isn’t a top priority right now, the real goal is creating a mind-blowing product. But we have a lot of enthusiastic pioneers from all over the world on this forum that would love to promote the product as volunteers, but they just need some guidance. It would be easy to reach every corner of the globe, we just need to be a little organized. Is there a place to get some high-level marketing guidance right now? The guidance would be like an organized template that would outline the high level steps to present the product, possibly including arranging meetups, distributing materials, and whatever else there is. If this kind of guidance doesn’t exist, somebody can create it. It’s not going to be me, I’m not a marketing expert. After it gets created, our enthusiastic volunteers from all over the globe can put it into action. So the goal is to get the top level genius marketing guidance so it can be implemented.
It should be and will be. Apparently, and if I’m reading @nicklambert correctly, a large portion of this current fund raise will go to marketing efforts.
I hope they engage some top talent to kick this off. They need and deserve it.
We’re still developing a lot of this. Our initial focus will be to create materials for developers (you will start to see this happening in the coming weeks) while working with @lightyear and others to develop our outreach strategy - what events to attend, what do we present, how do we present it, how do we drive more meet ups…etc…Once we have iterated through this a couple of times we will be well placed to know what works and we can then look to roll this out further.
We need bridges over chasms
Marketing (strategy) should be top priority. While several members of Safenetwork community focus/tackle product development: usability, security, scalability, stability… of a product, there are several other chasms to cross in next months or years, starting with:
- Market requirements
- Marketing and Sales
- Support for customers etc.
Our community is still a group of early adopters and tech-enthusiasts, while mainstream is still unaware of this product and its potential.
This enthusiastic fan of Maidsafe spends most of the time in East Java with trips to Malaysia. Happy to start passing out some promotional material, tee shirts etc. Later a template pack for the Indonesian market would be great. 
Yes, we do need more mass marketing, no question. However, we currently also don’t have much a “product” for the masses just yet. With that I mean that while the platform stabilizises, it misses the applications on top to make it a viable thing non-techies can use.
That’s why our immediate “marketing” efforts will towards growing the developer community of SAFE and help them build awesome (independent) applications. I have my own set of goals for the next year on this, and we are discussing a range of ideas of how to implement this – also to enable more volunteers to help on these efforts. But as I am only working part-time at the moment, while finishing up/handing over an old project, I have to ask for a little patience from you at the moment. I hope you understand.
Great to hear you will spearhead this marketing campaign and IMO you have identified the critical component to Maid’s success. Applications that non-techies can use.
While your focus will be to seek out app developers to learn about and exploit the virtues of the Safenetwork, the established Team - who possess the understanding necessary to identify the networks greatest strengths - could help identify the app most likely - initially - to be the biggest draw for the non-techie audience.
What will be the single most popular application that the Safenetwork can offer non-techies to start the momentum to critical mass?
What single application will garner headlines worldwide from mainstream tech publications with threats to potentially unseat and upset profitable and centralized corporations?
We have 2 non-techie markets that need 2 separate marketing strategies/product offerings and support mechanisms.
Consumer Markets - individuals
Enterprise Markets - businesses, horizontal markets
The “killer apps” may or may not be different for those markets but the teams building and supporting those apps should be different. - Consumer Support Team + Enterprise Support Team
An example would be storage. Dropbox / GDrive
The Consumer market for storage will typically consist of a single user storing personal images, videos, personal documents, etc.
The Enterprise market will typically consist of a company securely storing images, videos, financial records, inventory control, corp records, etc with the added advantage it will introduce its employees to the safenetwork. Adding a single Enterprise client with 500 employees will potentially add 500 Consumer clients with little effort. One horizontal could be healthcare. I wont say easy target but with hospitals in the news recently with ransomware, they are all ears when it comes to listening to all options when it comes to securing documents/medical records.
How do we first identify and then effectively market the big non-techie app?
There’s totally no hurry, obviously the goal now is to get out a great product. Without a spectacular product the marketing is useless. But we have so many people talking on this forum about how great the product is, there might be a way to harness this enthusiasm to reach a lot more people all over the world with a minimum of effort and money.
Rolling out a well planned marketing strategy can happen in a day or two. Preparation of same can take 6 months or more. Its never too soon to start laying the foundation.
I agree with you. But the reach of this forum is so limited. How would you propose?