Here is my devil’s advocate proposal for MaidSafe’s marketing slogan: “The $afe network is open source, but you have to pay forever to use it.”
My point is that the product needs to be good enough to start with in order to make marketing of it successful.
Or every account creation costs ~50 dollars and safenet is perceived more like an exclusive club 
people want to feels special… (personal prejudice )
Ps: but to be honest paying 50 bucks to have access to the network of the free forever wouldn’t be that bad of a deal in my eyes…
Pps: and even with account creation being expensive they could participate in consuming free knowledge and surf the safenet… Okay but they couldn’t participate in creating new knowledge… I just reconsidered… Not sure if that thought makes too much sense…
I like the idea Dragonchain is adopting, which is to have an incubator. That can help facilitate many companies to start using it and help get them the initial critical mass of users they need. The incubator doesnt have to be only or a strong hands-on incubator as much as it is raise awareness about the platform and help Startups or other companies get off the ground and start using it. MaidSAFE has big ramifications on business models and the economy has a whole. I believe it’s worth the effort to have country units act as an awareness + incubation hub as well. These can act as grounds for other enterprises and government to know the platform and get to know how to use it. These units should collaborate with one another as well to capitalize on networked growth.
That is what I had hoped for with the crowdsale, unfortunately being the first meant there were issues and we never raised what we could have. The notion was to have
It is a valid approach and with more funds I think we as maidsafe would be way down that road. If we had managed to raise the millions projects do now it would have been a no brainer. Perhaps we should give thought to raising funds in some manner to get pods up and running globally, I think it would be excellent for SAFE and MaidSafe. Needs a lot of thought mind you.
That would have been an excellent plan A, but since there were issues that were difficult to anticipate we can shoot for a Plan B that might be able to get us similar results. Having funds ready would be nice, but the main challenge is to get 2 or 3 startups working on big ideas using Maidsafe at country level, thats all that’s needed to create a stir in that country’s community of big businesses and government and get them interested (Emerging countries not developed where there is a lot of noise). Entrepreneurs and startups can do without the funding in the initial period. The hub can be responsible for liaising with investors and raising awareness with big businesses and government. So it would be a venture builder of sorts.
Yip and if these teams could raise their own funding it is nice as well. Otherwise maidsafe come across as saviours of some kind and possibility of platitudes etc. However if we let them know they have our support and we are eager to give them all the tech support we can then it may make fundraises for them easier.
Like your thinking here, nice one.
Thank you David. Exactly, each hub or pod can raise their own funding and a deep partnership with MaidSAFE core to help them with the technical, while the hub can be more focused on solving the local and big pressing issues, i.e. the business aspect. So through this model you achieve to diversify the risk by having multiple country hubs raise their own funding, and increase the potential upside by having people who are closer to the problem solve it. I think it’s more market-based.
Seems great idea given by you! Really appreciating! Thanks for sharing your idea.
Secretariat415 - you should work in marketing!