Great effort
@Akado!
I think we should consider this a small piece of some market research.. I think you would have gotten a lot further if you would have started from that point.. market research that is.
You went in there guns blazing without knowing what you were shooting for.
This happens in sales all the time and why you in this instance and many fail to close. Without understanding your customers pains and what they are looking to gain, you can never hope to sell them what you are offering unless you happen to hit it by luck. Bitshares has got a bunch of feature sets, but without a clear understanding of the exchanges problems, what they like to see solved, and the things they will gain as an exchange, it will fall on def ears. So I am not surprised by his responses.
When you go into conversations like that you got to think about who you are talking to is thinking at ALL times.. WIIFM (Whats in it for me). So when he asked you what is bitshares, a more targeted answer might have been "its a platform that will help you secure your exchange and save you money". Everything else doesn't matter.. no matter how awesome YOU think it is.. all that matters in that moment is how awesome HE thinks something about Bitshares is for his business that increases his profitability.
Getting him wrapped up in technical elements even more now is NOT the answer. He still doesn't know why he should even be thinking about that. You still got no idea what he needs either. You could have gotten a lot of these answers if you took more interest in his business instead of selling Bitshares.
People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.
I don't know if he knows you care about his business yet... if you have some way to get that across by perhaps asking him about his business and being genuine in your concern to see it improve and grow, he would be more eager to listen to what you have to say. Otherwise you become what you mentioned fearing.. another coin trying to sell him on get on their exchange.
I don't know if any research has been done on the topic of crypto exchanges operations.. some people have mentioned in this thread some of the issues.. but to really know whats going on and what challenges they would like to solve and other things they like to gain in the crypto exchange business some market research should be done or found on the matter. Then you take that and see how Bitshares may or may not solve those things and put it all together into something that is easy to digest for exchanges. This would be a VERY targeted information piece for that particular market. They will love it.
Why hasn't that been done yet? Because nobody has really tried yet like you have.
.. it's not up to devs to sell it or come up with multiple marketing materials for every market.. it's up to anybody who would like to like you did today. I am only pointing out what went wrong so that you can go at it again more prepared and with more odds of success. Considering we are still pending API development to improve our feature sets as an exchange platform similar to central exchanges, I think it is a bit premature to be talking migration with them.
Nonetheless.. I think its always good to develop relationships and learn more about the marketplace so that you can better serve them. I would recommend taking a step back and focusing on that first.. then regroup and approach them again this time with focus on what matters to them.
Again.. great initiative and effort. I hope you keep at it and create what might be the repo data for what exchanges need to get onboard and why they should.