What's our marketing hook? What do we do about it?

is someone else’s hook on topic?
Just saw this https://onionshare.org/ which I wonder is a good real world story that states a relatable problem and sees the tool as the natural solution:

“When Glenn Greenwald discovered last year that some of the NSA documents he’d received from Edward Snowden had been corrupted, he needed to retrieve copies from fellow journalist Laura Poitras in Berlin. They decided the safest way to transfer the sizable cache was to use a USB drive carried by hand to Greenwald’s home in Brazil. As a result, Greenwald’s partner David Miranda was detained at Heathrow, searched, and questioned for nine hours.
That’s exactly the sort of ordeal Micah Lee, the staff technologist and resident crypto expert at Greenwald’s investigative news site The Intercept, hopes to render obsolete.”

That’s the actual definition of the “internet” in the 90s.
If we are talking about the next level I would add an extra property to it that is unique to the Safe Network: your personal internet or your cloud. Not very catchy, I know, but I am thinking along these lines.

I think the main added value is that we are getting all the conveniences from the cloud without sacrificing of our privacy to use it, this network would be truly making the internet ours.

I am thinking a way we can encapsulate this idea in a catchy way that wasn’t already used in hyperbole with crappy mundane products (the term “personal cloud” has already been used to sell NAS, “personal internet” has been used to promote VPNs…), without sounding nerdy, and to make people care about it.

Not an easy task.

I am not a lawyer but I think Safe would make redundant and obsolete regulations like HIPAA, PIPEDA and GDPR regulations. The savings in compliance and liability would be a no-brainer for any company to adopt it, if the network works as intended.
When patients and other customers truly own their own data, all companies would stop being exposed to all these risks associated with it.

Btw, I would re-explore the original inspiration for the Safe Network. The inspiration from biomimetics in the way the network self-organizes like an ant colony is a spectacular mental imagery. And this is not a “marketing puffery” like much of the superfluous abuse of terms like in other blockchain projects, this truly modeled from true inspiration from behaviors in nature.
I thought the talk given by @dirvine in Google Tech Talks in 2008 was very inspiring and exciting, we should revisit that to get more inspiration from it.

The thing that hooked me the first time was:

“If your computer breaks why do you want to fix it so badly… why isn’t it like your TV or your toaster, just get another one?”

And the rest was intriguing and funny as hell:
“Why is data stationary? It’s all in one place, if your server goes down, data gets wiped, the whole thing is gone”

“What is about ants that scales so well?”

Asynchronous, Network, Transport, System…”

“NAH! It’s actually ants”

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From the convenience point of view one thing I’m thinking is finally having an “internet money” that is actually usable.

Just yesterday I bought a pair of sneakers from the web with credit card, and I had to type so many numbers and on top of that verify with my bank credentials. How clumsy! Then I left my home and forgot my credit card next to my computer. Would be great to have some kind of money baked in the internet.

But, from the marketing perspective this might be difficult. I think any “internet money” is a bit scary to average person.

This is the default policy for all threads, but can be more easily enforced in a “strict” thread as you suggest if people are all aware that slight meandering off-topic will cause their post to be hidden.

Primary users in this “strict” thread are encouraged to more readily flag posts that begin to veer off-topic. A Mod’s role is then just to check that a flagged topic is really off-topic and not abuse of the flag. For the current “experiment”, flagged posts in this “strict” thread will simply be hidden and not organized/moved to a more appropriate Off-Topic thread.

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So continuing my sleep-deprived ramblings I think this would be a nice hook, in a youtuber-like clickbaity way:

"What if the whole internet was like your toaster?"

I think I would click on it, it is absurd and weird enough to make my brain itch.
I would then structure it like this:

  1. Explain how the current internet works
    1.1) Shortcomings: disk failures, third-party trust, hacking risks.
    1.2) Current systems to support these shortcomings, and whole industries that were born to just sustain its inefficiencies. The costs to the end user: insurance, liabilities, compliance, security audits, administrators on-call, backuping and disaster recovery, systems hardening, constant patching (and the impossibility to patch the latest updates in systems in production as soon as they are released), security in depth, etc… and after all this, even in the best scenario, to never be sure you’ve done enough to protect the network. Defending a network sucks, especially in a company.
    1.3) Show examples when all these systems fail catastrophically, and its consequences in our personal life, businesses, economies and the impact in our culture (lots of examples to pick from the “things that would not have happened in Safe”)
  2. Show a toaster.
    2.1) Show a dramatization of what happens when the toaster stops working (toss it, get a new one, get your toast)
    2.2) Show how absurd would it be to have regulations for toasters or paying warranties extensions for toasters or pay-per-toast plans or renting a toaster per month, or a toaster-as-a-service. W-what? Why would you?
    2.3) Ask the question: why can’t the internet be like a toaster? Free of any worries, like an appliance, easily replaceable if it fails. And always yours.
  3. Introduce the Safe Toaster, I mean, Network.
    3.1) An internet that you own, accessible from any device. Does the computer fail?, toss it worry-free and get a new one, and bam!, you get all your files for free, forever. Your data, your toast, free toast forever.

And there is a crumble on the table from the toast, and a few ants come to pick it up… which is a segue to how the network works.

I gotta get some sleep, this is enough crazy talk haha

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Thinking about what Jim was saying about the difficulty in encapsulating the benefits of Safe in a single sentence or catchphrase, why not create a series of mini ads for our target audiences? I’m not suggesting we actually create ads, but there’s a technique called 3-10-30 (I think although I just looked it up and can find no reference to it, so I may be making that up). Anyway the idea is you have a 3-second message (like a headline) a 10-second message (like a standfirst) and a 30-second message (like an abstract or a story) plus a call to action.

The idea is to pull the interested reader from one to the other before they lose interest. I find it a useful technique for finding the right sort of wording and ideas that may resonate, and because you’re not tied down to trying to find that one slogan it can be creatively freeing. Here’s a first attempt.

Target: App Developers

Bye bye server-side

This may be the last time you ever have to configure storage

Not everyone’s a full-stack developer. Most devs just want to craft a beautiful app that people will enjoy, but the ugly reality is that configuring storage, databases, servers and security is something that comes with the territory. Until now. With the Safe Network there is no server side because there are truly no servers. Content addressable, linked-data-compatible and fully encrypted, the Safe Network frees you from back-end drudgery.

Click here to start building your first Safe app right now.

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Target: Privacy aware end users

Dave, it’s Alice. We can’t trust Bob

An everyday tale of internet betrayal

It really hurts me to say this but after all these years I don’t feel I can trust Bob any more. I’m convinced he’s passing on really personal stuff about me to Carol, and God knows what she’s doing with it, but Eve seems to know more what I’m doing than I do myself. It’s scary. So Dave, from now on let’s chat and share over the Safe Network. It’s private and secure and no-one can eavesdrop. Other friends are joining too. See you there.
*Names of corporations have been changed for reasons of confidentiality (remember that?).
Join Alice and Dave on Safe. Click here for an invite.

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Target: Bloggers

Stop paying ISP hosting fees

ISPs and DNS providers and certificate authorities all charge recurring fees. Stop paying and your blog is gone for good. Here’s how Safe is different

On the Safe Network you can forget about recurring charges for your blog because it’s pay-once-keep-forever. Rates are way lower than subscription sites, and unlike free blogging platforms there’s no-one making money off your content but you. Best of all, your content is published forever. Yes really.
Pay once, publish for ever: Click here to find out more

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These would be great for Twitter using an image with a hint of branding for the long text.

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Yeah, I’m thinking of it at the moment as a way to chuck some ideas at the wall to see what sticks, but ultimately that would be the idea.

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Keep on chucking.

[There’s a song somewhere in there]

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My thoughts -:
In my opinion end users wouldn’t even look at SAFE network if we pitch it as “network of networks”, “own your data”, “Decentralization” etc. Like it or not, most don’t care about privacy or owning data. People will be willing to trade off privacy/owning data for ease of convenience. We wouldn’t have Facebook, Google etc otherwise. Also, to some extent other projects such as Sia, Filecoin etc solve some of these issues.

So, what makes people take a look at SAFE? This is where I think the focus should be.

What is the one thing that

  1. Only SAFE network can offer and no other network can
  2. People can easily relate to
  3. Tangible benefit
  4. Might lead to take an action

I think it’s - Data permanence.

My initial tag line would be - “Pay once. Store forever”. This one thing would satisfy all the above 4 criteria. I mean think about it. People do recurring payments every month just to keep their photos on Amazon, Apple & Google. If we show them there is a better alternative we would gain some traction. Then we can expand on that. Saving money could be a trigger point for most users.

If we just focus on storing photos, videos and songs alone, we would have tons of data which in turn can lead increased farming interest and eventually to more dApps.

On a second thought, “Pay once. Store forever” might sound like a scam. Maybe we can expand that to be like “Pay once. Store forever. Securely and easily”.
Ease of use is another thing that could be a selling point. All other decentralized projects are complex. Safe is easy to start with. The only challenge or downside is obtaining SAFE token. The more easy we make it to obtain SAFE token, the lesser the resistance to try out the network will be.

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“Pay once. Store forever. Security, Privacy, and Freedom without the hassle.”

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The shotgun approach, targeting individuals, will take a long time and be unnecessarily costly (by some measure). Better to incentivize, support and target developers who will create the apps that will drive the customers. Imagine how many users could flock to a Safe version of Facebook, YouTube, Google and the like. Developers will be easier to convince of the advantages/benefits of Safe. I understand some of these apps are already in the works but Safe could do more to support them.

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It would be great to spin that “easy enough that grandma can use it” that has long been the goal in crypto. It’s gotten better in ways but I’m honestly surprised it’s not better than it is. We still have to copy and paste these long alphanumeric strings and trusting a third party or having a hot wallet is a risk but cold storage is definitely too complex for grandma. If grandma can remember a password and passphrase then I think we’ll be the first to be an all in one, easy and secure solution to fixing the grandma problem.

To your point about saving money. I think that’s an interesting angle to take. We all seem to understand most are intrigued by this space or motivated by the promise of making money. By providing resources you can earn but also permanent decentralized storage can make storing data extremely cheap long term.

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Not a sly way of getting more info or commitments (honestly!), but will the test net include the beautiful interface that @JimCollinson has been developing, or will that follow? Just to get an idea, as I assume the ‘consumer’ angle or comms would only kick in once this is in place.

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Based on some of the conversations was thinking it may be good to create a thread for the naming conventions of the releases or updates, beyond Fleming, Maxwell. Was thinking an interesting idea would be for the naming convention of using the names of massive data breaches - then I thought the ‘Mtgox release’ - then realized it was not so much a good idea. :rofl::smiling_face_with_tear:

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It will follow, unfortunately. None of us working on front end apps right now. It will change though, for now though more likely CLI only.

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“Pay once. Store forever. The security, privacy, and freedom that grandma remembers.”

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I might caution using “ISP” which is literally Internet Service Provider. I still have to connect my computer to someone else’s computer in order for there to be a network. While SAFE could reduce that to just switches, those connections have to happen somehow.

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