Quote from: MeTHoDx on October 10, 2014, 02:38:53 am

I'm not sure what you mean? I'm saying even if we had a 1.0 product, they're seeding the wrong demographic anyway.

I'm just genuinely curious to know what's worked out best in your experience. We've seen what happens when people wait until a product is super polished and miss the boat but also what happens when half baked software is released. I guess it would depend on the product, the demographic, and what else is in the market space (or will be soon)?

One problem we face by being decentralized is to get shareholders to spend money on development. If I don't know if others will pay the cost, I won't either. With inflation and delegates we have to some extent solved this problem. However, another problem presents itself: If the cost is now and the return is later then shareholders can sell out now and buy back later.

While the first problem is lack of spatial consensus that we all chip in, the second problem is a lack of temporal consensus that we all stick around when spending happens. Perhaps like we solve the spatial problem by modifying the supply we all embody, we can solve the temporal problem by modifying the spending we all have to suffer.

One way is to have delays on the spending, as we have seen in many instances. Another way is to have continuous spending which essentially distributes the spending across time much like inflation distributes the donations across all users. Perhaps optimally, the "cost" of the spending should hit exactly when the return on the spending hits..

“Building this—and being the company that owns this—can be more valuable than Overstock,” he says. “It can be more valuable than Alibaba.”

Open bazaar is great but a small userbase that even if we grab 100% it would be insignificant in the next few years.

Quote from: bytemaster on October 05, 2014, 04:08:31 pm

The goal of this idea is that no dilution occurs unless a user signs up and first buys 1000 bit usd.  Then the dilution is used to purchase bit usd, not sold for real usd. 

As long as the referral program is growing there would be no sell pressure at all. 

If it works the the users who stick around will provide more than enough new inflow of capital.

While I'm not necessarily against issuing more shares to fund marketing (share metaphor vs. coin), I'm against this $100 bonus. It's a complete waste of money and will not lead to the kind of adoption you think it will.

Let's use PayPal's early marketing strategy as a case study.

a) They focused on one marketplace (eBay) to build a real user base.
b) They used bots to simulate demand on eBay.

Here's a summary (source):

Quote

For a period of time, Paypal effectively gained a following by offering new users a $10 credit for registering and another $10 for referrals. However, this strategy also burned through its cash reserves pretty quickly. To separate itself from the competition, Paypal had to build and control a proprietary distribution channel that their competitors could not easily detect, much less duplicate.

When Paypal figured that eBay was their key distribution platform, their marketing team came up with a creative marketing campaign to simulate demand. They created a robot – a script that could spider eBay’s site looking for certain types of auctions – that bid on items and then, insisted on paying for the auction using Paypal.

Here's a quote from Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal:

Quote from: Peter Thiel

“Poor distribution, not product, is the number one cause of failure. If you can get even a single distribution channel to work, you have great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished… People say it all the time: this product is so good that it sells itself. This is almost never true. These people are lying, either to themselves, to others, or both. “

If I were in charge of marketing strategy at BitShares, I'd focus on a strategic partnership with OpenBazaar. The only users willing to put up with Bitcoins volatility will be drug related users (because they have no other choice); for OpenBazaar to attract "legitimate" users they need a stable crypto for their merchants and users to transact in. They need BitUSD (or NuBits) just as much as BitShares needs ONE solid distribution channel as a catalyst for organic adoption.

a) Focus on making BitUSD easy for merchants to integrate into pre-existing online marketplaces that currently need the product (i.e. OpenBazaar).

b) Seed the marketplace with BitUSD to kickstart the BitUSD economy.

Whichever stable crypto taps into a popular online marketplace first will gain network effect and spread organically from that point on. This is called a "viral insertion point" and is absolutely critical.

Focusing on attracting a "mainstream" audience (that doesn't even need/care about crypto to begin with) in favor of already existing marketplaces that legitimately need our product will be a fatal error.