^ This guy gets it, hire him
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Awesome post and you nailed it, if we were talking about a Fortune 100 co. But we are not. We are talking about MaidSafe (MS), a fledgling startup that has kind of losts its way. Unlike Fortune 100 companies, MS is not in a mature market, doesnt yet have an identifiable product and doesnt quite know where to position itself.
Coke uses metrics from a long established history of performance - in their case more than 100 years- to “market” expansion and new products, so, as you point out, some fancy pie charts are necessary with the history and boring details that Investors, Banks and regulators need to see and those details are written in a language that appeals to that audience.
But Maidsafe doesnt have financial performance info to share, nor is it relying on its past or future ability to make money to bring attention to its technology. Maidsafe doesnt know who their “customers” are, what they are really selling and have a foggy core value proposition.
Have a look at the MS fund raising investor page at BNK to the Future, its pure dog-n-pony. Its a fund raising campaign in crypto land, commonly called a “prospectus” in Fortune 100 land. Fortune 100 companies are compelled by law to provide certain information to investors - details not necessarily of interest to the companies customers - or crucial to the success of the product. This is a different game.
I agree with your points but they do not apply here, yet. You cannot manage the strategic positioning of a startup the same way you do a Fortune 100 company. Especially a startup pushing such a radical concept.
Again, great post.
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Around April next year there is a new season of Silicon Valley coming. Depending on the state of the SAFE Network at that time, it could be a good idea to prepare some press release etc to ride the hype wave. The SAFE Network is Pied Piper.
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Because you need to clear you mind OFF the “Maids”
There is some derailing here I think. There are 2 (poss 3) considerations
- Marketing campaign for the SAFE network
- Marketing campaign for MaidSafe
(3. Marketing campaign per app)
I do not see these as the same thing, but complimentary. TBL could market the Internet for all it’s worth or Robert Khan and Vint Cerf could market tcp/ip, but that is not the point. They depended on the app devs doing that for them and it worked well. 3-Comm did not to shabbily out of it, but a company like that with intimate knowledge would.
So we have many potential apps, the Googles, Apples etc. of the SAFE network.
We have a network that needs developers to develop apps, but that’s not enough, they need to create great experiences and market themselves with varying degrees of need, based on market pull/tech push etc. (Angry birds / Some other android phone type thing). They also need to do things that cannot be done in today’s tech world, even if that is competing globally and cheaply or creating new innovative ways to use secure anonymous (autonomous) networks etc.
The SAFE network itself is a different beast, it has the ability, unlike the Internet to reward early adopters via speculation and rewards for early participation. rewards they can spend, but these rewards make these people really work harder to make it successful. So it is a mix of a network and a community driven and supported product itself.
Then you have MaidSafe, now who knows what they are working on wrt to marketing the upcoming releases/launch? It’s probably something they discuss and plan behind closed doors, do we as a community care? Well yes, but by association.
So the thread seems to have started promoting SAFE (network and apps I imagine) and moved to suggesting how MaidSafe the company market themselves. For this reason I feel this thread is confused and covering too many topics.
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It was wide open but I assume the SAFENET
So i gather the marketing launch of the “Safenet” is being planned internally and thats cool. No need for this thread.
Yeah, Im very confused but that could just be me.
Ill sit this out till I see the material you guys are working on. I know its gonna kick ass.
GL
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I dislike that I agree with so much of what you say David, it makes me feel like a sycophant and I’d rather be my own man 
.
Seems simple enough to me, people focus on what they are good at and what they know, and they must do it for their own reason and in their own way…
Whether we are an investor, developer or political idealist, we should all just be talking about SAFE more. We probably all need to make more of an effort to talk about SAFE in our respective circles (rather than just within our little safe-forum clique) and let Maidsafe focus on their in-house marketing challenges. It doesn’t help that most of us are privacy lovers and don’t use social media very much.
This thread started well by seeking to organise, motivate and link-up skills. That was the right direction imo. Our disagreements and different approaches should be an edge, not a stumbling block. We should probably just focus on making the things that we think will help, then allow others to critique, steer and edit them. The forum would be a useful place for people to post up articles, blog and external forum posts etc before they publish. That way the community and Maidsafe themselves can add their 2 cents if they want. We do need to make sure we’re credible, consistent and accurate, but we are also singing different tunes for different crowds. We need to stick to our own genres, but it would be great to get each other’s help with tweaking and editing, or organising and motivating so we cover all the bases between us.
Why don’t we just do our own stuff and organise it in our own groups, then post it here to be poked at a bit by anyone who wants their voice to be heard before it gets published?
If anyone wants my help I can try my hand at editing, you can PM me any time and I’ll get around to whatever it is you want me to edit within a day or two.
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It seems to me this route (app marketing) will be the most important of the three efforts, especially if a “killer” app appears. No need to explain the intricacies of the network or the entity MaidSafe, just provide potential users with an easy way to experience the killer app.
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Once the killer app has widespread adoption, the channel for other apps will be expanded and we could witness a floodgate. “A” begets “B”, which begets “C”, . . .
The trick is to get the channel open, that is, get the browser (or whatever the launchpad will be called) installed and used on a large scale. The trailblazing killer app would provide the Superhighway of Safe.
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I agree the apps are an important force to market this, but think there are several different killer Apps already, as well as one that we have not imagined yet.
Here are a few, each playing strongly with different needs/groups:
- Safecoin
- Single login, universal cloud and access anywhere applications
- Uncensorable/un-DDoS’able, unhackable, surveillance free, universal anonymous publishing, access and communications
- Free forever after upload, massively scalable website hosting
- farming
- application developer rewards
- (perhaps) automatic content rewards (PtP)
- (later compute)
- etc (it’s not hard to think of things like this with stand out features and mass appeal)
I can’t wait to see all the things I haven’t even thought of 
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Those are ideas, not real apps yet. We can only hope that some of these concepts will be executed and publicized in a simple, coherent and effective way, with “simple” being the operative word. The app that provides people with a very desirable, “finished” product and is able to market itself professionally will probably be the “killer” app of which I speak.
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Thanx for participating in this discussion as your every word carries a wisdom.
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The beauty in all of this is A) the passion and B) there will be many solutions to these problems.
Still though, cannot take away from the fact we have no product and the longer we take to push one out the more time our competitors get to grow in numbers, plant and attack the consumer market.
This means more developers are needed to help the build and push the BETA launch.
Then once it’s launched and apps are built (e.g. chat apps for people that want to chat privately) there needs to be an easy sign on and download with no BS, literally go here, download and run.
When that’s done THEN we can do some marketing and ALL of the ideas are good so far, many ideas, many different ways, it’s all open sourced, it belongs to all of us and we can pretty much market it how we see fit, there will be winners and losers and we can all party once its done.
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So having had my morning cuppa, what say we start 3 new topics one for each part.
- SAFE marketing which I expect will be the main one. This is marketing to consumers
- Marketing to attract new developers. This is any specific marketing that is not consumer marketing for developers who want some tech meat to know if it is worth exploring. (they can already see the consumer marketing)
- Maidsafe Marketing. Not much expected here, but included so any Maidsafe marketing is not polluting the other two
- Not really - APPs can start their own topic if they feel the need for marketing ideas.
- yes, lets split
- no, keep to this topic and specify which form of marketing you are addressing
- no, its pretty much run its course and why start new ones.
0 voters
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Idk.
As someone who’s been making MaidSafe marketing his full time project foe a while, I have to say that SF these days is really teaching me one important thing:
It might just be too early still, for any successful marketing for SAFE.
I’ve met soooo many devs recently, and even in the case of my close friends: if aaanyone ever has free time outside their job (rare, in the world), and they are going to pursue a crypto / “new tech” project, then 99% of them will still go to ethereum etc (no matter how much I talk about SAFE), because to them it’s not a waste of time, since they can make something real and deliverable with their time.
I’ve even had people tell me that making tech for SAFE is a straight up gamble at this point, as some aren’t convinced it will ever actually come out.
It’s a huge shame, and while I’ve been dealing with this talk for more years than I can remember, I don’t have any super amazing magic answer that I can give to people that will make them want to compete on SAFE Apps, or get involved at all.
I gave a talk to 40+ wiz-kid devs at a startup college recently, the second largest MaidSafe meeting we’ve had these days, and nobody even downloaded the toolkit to make an app for our $125 BTC (20 lines of code) JS App Competition. Looks like it’s just me and @Joseph_Meagher for this tiny competition… :,(
You can’t even PAY people to make apps in this space right now… (Even with $8.6million! NVO 
)
People need to see a present, and a future, to invest the time into it, when there’s a billion further along projects to learn right now.
I’ve just been lurking in this thread, and IRL doing many of the ideas people give in here, and thought it might be useful to hear.
Will chug along as always. And there’s no shortage of devs who will make things when big releases happen and are marketed (Alpha 2, Beta, testSafecoin and Launch). Just talking about timing. Might be a good lesson here. But am very excited to see what people make once we allow tyem access to the right tools. But “marketing” won’t solve what we’re trying to solve here. Only stable tech, APIs, and good documentation.
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I think this is so true.
I think this topic is important because we need to develop what and how for marketing. Its not going to happen overnight and preparation is important if the right message is to be developed.
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Thank you. I partially agree with you in that Maid is distinct from Coke in its place along the corporate lifecycle. In addition to a mighty war chest, such an established firm as Coke has decades of historical data from which to draw predictions and levy plausible forecasts. However, even when diligencing a start up prior to ICO or PE deal, I do not (nor do I recommend that my clients) give that start up a break for things like limited, publicly available financial data. There are some ventures–like Twitter and Instagram–that squeeze through the cracks on shoddy (meaning baseless) marketing. Those that invest in such overhyped projects, which do not clearly articulate their past and projected fiscal performance as well as how they will achieve what they promise, pay dearly for it. Choosing to invest more singularly on the factors that motivate consumers to use platforms like Twitter and Instagram is what gets investors in trouble I think. I am not saying that investors don’t do it, but a savvy investor would stay away. Consumers are often fickle; investors have to stay ahead of demand. The last point, I think, begins to speak to a tangential line of conversation, however. Don’t want to derail the conversation from its marketing focus, so happy to continue offline/via PM if you’d like.
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Yes, have to wait until great apps are available for use. Everything else is either theory or conjecture, both of which are hard to market. It’s difficult to get the masses excited about plans that might turn out to be vaporware. People need at least one demonstrable reason for installing the network. The consumer must see the value in the product and they must also be convinced it is “safe” to install and use.
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I’m leaving this poll open for a while longer (we have time) since its is not quite a clear response with only 19 people voting and the yes/no on split close.
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