Author Topic: Why BitShares isn't Taking off and What we are doing about it.  (Read 44550 times)

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Offline Stan

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Yes, you will see layers of abstraction, "skins", that hide the details from the average user.

But that is just the obvious incremental evolution path.

This year we will go further beyond today's BitShares than BitShares is beyond Bitcoin.

(It's not like we have only two years' worth of innovation in us, you know.)

We are just getting started.


I can't believe how many people let themselves get trapped focusing on x0

Our core devs are v0 and our partnerships are a.

He who can integrate, let him integrate.

 :)
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Offline Pheonike


Its the user experience. People can understand concept, but the execution is the issue.

Offline Troglodactyl

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I think a lot of our grass roots customer acquisition will be greatly accelerated once we have solid light and mobile wallets.

I know that's what I'm waiting for before I start seriously recruiting less technical friends.

Offline clayop

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IMHO it's very easy to get new users. "Come on, and you can make money just by introducing this thing to other people!"

https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,15265.195.html
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Offline btswildpig

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New users are hard to get , especially for a service with concepts like "private key" "sync" "blockchain" "console" "participation rate"  "wallet file"  "datadir backup"

These concepts scare off a lot of regular people .

I'm expecting centralized services with only the concept of "username" "password" "find my password" while using BitShares as its basic protocol be responsible for most of
the new users in the future .
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Offline bytemaster

I would like to take a moment to comment on the recent fall in the price of BTS.   In a word it all boils down to a very common problem in the world of startups, the cost of user acquisition is higher than our ability to monetize it under the current model.   To convey my point I would like to quote some from this blog:

http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/startup-killer/

Quote
However after closely watching several hundred startups that have failed, I observed that a very large number of these had solved the product/market fit problem, but still failed because they had not found a way to acquire customers at a low enough cost.

Quote
I would like to propose that in addition to team, product, and market, there is actually a fourth, equally important, core element of startups, which is the need for a viable business model. Business model viability, in the majority of startups, will come down to balancing two variables:

Cost to Acquire Customers (CAC)
The ability to monetize those customers, or LTV (which stands for Lifetime Value of a Customer)
Successful web businesses have long understood these metrics as they have such an easy way to measure them. However there is a lot of value in looking at these same metrics for all other businesses.

To compute the cost to acquire a customer, CAC, you would take your entire cost of sales and marketing over a given period, including salaries and other headcount related expenses, and divide it by the number of customers that you acquired in that period.  (In pure web businesses where the headcount doesn’t need to grow as customer acquisition scales, it is also very useful to look customer acquisition costs without the headcount costs.)

To compute the Lifetime Value of a Customer, LTV, you would look at the Gross Margin that you would expect to make from that customer over the lifetime of your relationship. Gross Margin should take into consideration any support, installation, and servicing costs.



As a DAC many of us assumed that if we built it they would come.   Our product solves so many problems in the crypto-currency space and leads in many ways, but it is currently failing because the cost to gain a new user is higher than we can afford with either transaction fees or dilution.    In other words the only thing that can keep this ship moving forward is additional funding and a change to the business model of the DAC that so that it can generate more revenue per user than it costs to acquire a new user.   



Fortunately for us there are many viable ways to both raise money, increase revenue per user, and lower the cost of acquisition.   None of this can happen over night, but what matters it that we are AWARE of what need to be done and are actively taking steps to change the direction of this ship.   

We have a well thought out referral program that will be game changing and that cannot be gamed.  I would like to thank Max for inspiring our solution the details of which will come out as part of a new white paper.     We will be increasing transaction fees, offering bulk discounts, and overall creating a system that will highly reward businesses and merchants that bring us customers.   

The current low price is hard to look at, but unlike other crypto-projects we are actively looking at this as a startup and adapting as necessary to find the business model that takes us to the moon.    Hang tight, invest in people and you will be ok.   I am not giving up and know that we are innovative enough to eventually succeed in this space.  It has been a learning experience, but fortunately I am a fast learner. 

In our case the cost to acquire a new user is currently well over $100, we need to find a way to fund that while lowering costs.

For the latest updates checkout my blog: http://bytemaster.bitshares.org
Anything said on these forums does not constitute an intent to create a legal obligation or contract between myself and anyone else.   These are merely my opinions and I reserve the right to change them at any time.