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

Safe yourself.

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Lots of very interesting ideas bouncing around.

The way I see it, as the man-in-the-middle who brokers apps and end-user interaction, interest needs to occur in lockstep, which we’ve established. Interest in one group cannot, and will not, increase significantly without the other.

That said, I don’t think we can just “market to both”. Specificity is important, and I don’t think that’s a contentious point either. We only have so many resources, and we can’t afford to further muddy our message.

Based on that premise, there is friction between our two goals. We need both consumers and app devs to get on board at the same time, but only have the ability to specialize in marketing to one at a time.

(Let me know if I’m about to mischaracterize this. I’m also just writing to bounce ideas around)

If this were a game of American Football, I imagine @Sotros25 would be relying mostly on deeper passes, looking to get bigger gains per completion. @JimCollinson 's approach here seems akin to marching up the field, with a focus on high-reliability and shorter gains per-play.

I would say both are equally valid approaches (the analogy isn’t perfect, there are extrinsic effects like MaidSafe’s reputation/history, but I hope it gets my point across that both can work). Choosing one over the other may be ultimately better, but I don’t think that’s the sort of thing that we can a priori judge very easily. The biggest danger to us right now, as I see it, is indecision and violating the specificity constraint.

Just my two cents. If @dirvine thinks we should market consumers first or apps first, it doesn’t bother me either way. But whatever the call is, I’ll follow it to the end, as that seems to be more valuable right now than which side of the coin we land on.

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Some more ideas I will probably put into Hackernoon articles when i can find the time:

The Answer to Surveillance Capitalism: SAFE Network

Another spin;

The Answer to The Social Dilemma: SAFE Network

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Hey man! that puts me in a corner :smiley: (kidding). Random brain dump incoming.

Personally I feel we need to do a mix here. Encourage, help and assist app devs to create products. We need to as a community promote the hell out of them, so that means we as a community need to critique apps as tough as we can, both UX and features.

So let’s take Jams and Safe-git, two great apps, then throw in a static website publisher and a browser. We have a great start. Add in Decorum for that feature rich social platform and we are getting somewhere. At the same time we have secure signalling easily added for a messenger/video/audio conferencing solution. (man I wish we had IP6 available).

So we have the start of an eco-system, we can build on that and do it all together.

Then we get the message out, Here comes freedom! So the story is great, a new Internet with no controllers and no snooping (bad apps can but we call them out). With that message we know works we present use cases, apps usable today and promote those, letting devs know, you too can build a global scale application just like these!

We need to market / PR a great story for folk to run nodes, be part of the solution - today help your fellow human, help those in need, help the environment and most of all, let’s give our children something decent we have done in this generation. You know what I mean.

So I see this mix as being the right one. Be good to know what everyone else thinks though.

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Hahah, my bad, I fell into the trap of using you as a proxy for “the will of the Safe Net community” :laughing:

I was trying to get at the idea that if we opt for formal, targeted marketing, like mentioned in above comments, I see it as an accelerant for the sort of grassroots growth you’re describing. As long as we’re all on the same page as to what that targeted marketing looks like, we don’t run the risk of inadvertently impeding our natural growth instead of bolstering it.

And like you mentioned, the community-centric approach is our strength, so it makes sense to play to it. We already have a small but healthy ecosystem on this forum, and apps like Jams and Safe-git are evidence of that. I’m no marketing guru, but I don’t see any reason why that can’t scale naturally on its own.

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My gut tells me these and other first movers will define the early days of this network way better than we imagine. There’s some wheels we all need to put a shoulder to as the network launches and I am heading for these market leaders (whether they know they are that or not :wink: )

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It doesn’t have to be ‘formal’, or traditional, it could (and should) be grassroots and community driven, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be targeted. Having a target just allows you to be more efficient and coordinated, and to be able to devise, weigh and test the most effective strategies for meeting the objectives of the project.

I think this is the crux of it for me… if we build a shared understanding of what objectives of the Safe Network are, a shared understanding of target groups, then we can build a strategy that allows people in the community to get stuck in, and we can take account of the skills and time polka have, as well as empowering them to talk to people and groups they have a connection with, and aspects of the project they feel passionate about.

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MaidSafe already came up with a good hook.

“Privacy, Security, Freedom.”

That mantra alone will create 1Billion clients within the first 3 years.

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I’d be interested in connecting with anyone that has crowdfunded related dApps. Can you you tag or link to those attempts? Its crucial to study/evaluate our past failures.

Got a couple noob questions for you Mr. Collinson, thank you in advance.

Is it NOT required someone have a SAFE Browser to view content hosted on the network?

Does this mean a person CANNOT take content down if they choose?

Is this an upfront fiat payment (USD or otherwise), and is there already a cost scale in place? Do Users pay a chunk upfront and than get XGb of storage? Are they buying tokens upfront and then dwindling as they upload more content?

I really appreciate all the time and thought yourself, and the other developers have been sharing here. Clearly a TON of prior investment by MANY makes the stakes in getting the marketing right enormously high.

Kudos

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No problem!

Yeah, you will need the Safe Browser, or another Safe compatible app to view content on the Network.

It’s a payment in Safe Network Tokens, at a price determined by the Network at the time you upload, although we should be able to give a close estimate before your hit the upload button.

Yes, it’s the latter. You earn (or buy from and exchange or friend) tokens, and then redeem them for a varying amount of storage—at the point you need it—the exact amount is determined by Network conditions.

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Both are true.

Correct, if content is public (published) it’s like the internet archive for everything.

You can for example change what appears at a given URL, but all previous published versions will remain accessible. It’s not that different to today, only instead of just a select few hoovering up all public data and having access to it, everyone has equal access to everything. No selective editing of history, hiding inconvenient facts, or losing important information by accident or because a business goes bust.

If you make the data accessible to a particular group (private but shared), you can remove it.

You pay for data as you store it using Safe Network Tokens, which you acquire by purchasing them or preferably earn them by contributing resources to the network.

I’m not sure exactly how your wallet is debited, but it is I believe fine grained, i.e. as you use up space, small debits are made to your balance.

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It is very likely that Safe portals will be built similar to the Sia portals through which you will have access to the content in the Safe network.

Just trying to catch up with this thread, and I think this is an interesting angle.

I think the opposite is true, potentially.

Speaking as a non developer who has learned how to make a website via SAFE, the bar to entry is much lower than on the clearnet.

You don’t need to find someone to rent server space from, and you have a ready made Javascript API to work with, so you don’t need to learn extra server side programming.

I’d like to think that with some good CMS style apps that have networking capabilities, SAFE will have a much smoother continuum of social media post at one end, through personal blogging site, to company website at the other end.

I actually think this could be one of the network’s ‘killer features.’

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Gd point, this could be packaged as a “killer app”, one of many I hope. It is also likely to become much more. So a photo roll, website, youtube thing,blog, research paper repository and more. A simple (relatively) app which would capture all the app rewards on a ton of data, relatively easily. Especially if they all start sans commenting etc. So again relatively easy to release incrementally and best of all, no infrastructure costs. The person/team that does this is likely to be in a good place.

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I’ve actually struggled a bit to convey this to developer friends, I think because they’re so used to the ‘full stack’ architecture. They still think Safe is something more to learn, rather than less.

Thinking about it now, maybe the way to express it in developer terms is to emphasise how much can be done with a static website plus the Safe API.

If I build anything, it will certainly have minimal and very carefully thought out levels of feedback! I’m probably in the minority, and fighting a losing battle, but I think in almost all its forms its one of the most destructive and addictive aspects of the clearnet!

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How about starting a topic to brainstorm this. I imagine there’s are a bunch of possible ideas for simple publishing or sharing. If I was twiddling my thumbs I’d have a go.

I’m thinking, what’s that one thing you (random non technical user) would put on the web if it was as simple as “select, add some text, click”?

I suspect there some things people would love to do but which we’re all missing because currently it’s too much hassle, or constrained by some commercial imperative not to do quite what people want.

Like text messaging, which was dropped in but never seen as likely to be particularly useful, but users instantly loved.

I think the simplest no brainer is a share anything app which does all the setup for you so anyone can do it without realising they’ve reserved a name, uploaded a file etc. They select, add some text, then click publish, save (private) or share (private+selected viewers) kinda thing.

If we have a bunch of ideas we can keep a list and they might be a good basis for a Hackathon, or kept as a list of handy apps new developers could cut their teeth on.

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It seems a very obvious big hook if we get it right. The tricky part is folk need to be on Safe to see Safe sites. It’s way to simple to say integrate the clearnet and there will be raging debates about “just do it” as it’s simpler for users etc. If we could remove those debates or ban them from a particular thread then it would be amazing to explore this one.

That’s twice today I have recommended banning/moderating and it feels wrong, but sometimes I think we do need to say here is the subject, stay on track or talk on another thread. Otherwise things get too complex way to fast and ideas killed.

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I’ve long wanted more of this because I think we lose a lot of value by straying off here and there as people jump in without regard to the focus in an OP.

Those keen to explore more widely would learn to “reply on another topic”, so those discussions can still go on. In general I don’t think moderators want the extra work of this which I can understand. Cleaning up topics isn’t a favourite, you get flack for it etc.

EDIT: how about trialling an on-topic-only tag on which mods apply a strict please stay on topic policy and move infringing stuff without question (referring to guidelines). The original poster gets to apply the tag, or not. To begin we could ask original posters to append some boilerplate explaining this whenever they apply the tag.

EDIT2: @david-beinn I added an on-topic-only tag to your brainstorming topic and suggest adding the following boilerplate to the bottom of the OP:
__

Please stay on topic in replies

This is tagged on-topic-only so please stay on topic in your replies, and if you want to spin off a wider discussion please replay on a new topic by clicking the ‘link’ icon (a two link chain) under a post and choosing +New Topic.

This is an experiment, so let’s see how it goes. Thank you!

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:100: To be used for topics that should not stray at all, so strict on topic or similar. To be used with care.