I think a lot of people think I'm advocating targeting only the crypto crowd as opposed to a larger pool of people. That's not what I'm doing at all. I'm saying we need to clearly define who an early adopter is and who he isn't. So far the target demographic seems really fuzzy and there is no strategic reason to keep everyone is the dark about that.
An early adopter != only cryptonerds
Early adopters for disruptive technology are the same sort of people who adopted the PC or the Internet before anyone else. I really hope the marketing team has the common sense to target early adopters before the early majority because the early majority follows the lead of the early adopters. Establishing that foundation is essential to our eventual success with the mainstream.
First thanks for posting the vid it was great.
I am trying to give your argument some deeper thought So let me throw some numbers out at you?
As I can find bitmit and SR are 2 of the biggest(in terms of revenue generated) somewhat similar market places I can find. SR, in its time 1.9 million a month bitmit was harder to find numbers for but I would guess it was much much less. I won't throw companies like ebay into this mix because whether we like it or not crypto's are not mainstream and to use a company that accepts fiat would completing blow the numbers out of proportion.
So lets say each did a even 2 mill for a total of 4 mill a month of business done. I would suggest that in the bigger picture this really isn't that much money and it will take some time for OB to be doing that much business. This doesn't even touch on the fact that many of the cool features won't be implemented until after release (put at not by the end of the year). While OB may seem like low hanging fruit, the time it would take for multi-sig may make said fruit not low at all. Lets be honest multi-sig really matters most to use but probably won't matter at all to mainstream because they won't be using OB or conducting transactions that would take advantage of it.
How much in revenue do you think OB will do in the next 4 months? I say 4 months because I am gathering thats plenty of time for bitshares to ink bank deals, and release a nicer client. With those things done they will start these "funnels", and if the funnels are done correctly we should be sitting a few cents higher.
I understand your argument about building a foundation of users (cryptonauts) that will help produce this network effect when a mainstream marketing campaign is launched. I think we could have done some cheap marketing to make people in the crypto community more aware of bitshares to help build this foundation. Do I know how many foundation user's it will take to get that perfect mix of cryptonauts vs new blood, no. Do I think it would be nice to have more cryptonauts, absolutely. Do I think at the current adoption of cryptonauts it will STOP new blood from trying it, the answer is no.
I think the marketing plan is a all-in move.I think its success will be based very much on fiat-on and OFF ramps(the second part will bring more crypto users on board). I also think a low fee debit card, pretty UI and reasonable decent funnels will work just fine, if done in a timely fashion.
On a side note I tried looking into other projects Brain has worked on to try and see his marketing in action. I was a bit stumped on finding info on them (this is not a insult). Not that I am the best finding this kind of info I just wanted to see what kind of style we could expect.