My email to Brian.

Hello Brian,


I understand that several people have been complaining about various things. I am not emailing you to tell you how to do your job. If bitshares chose you then there must be a good reason as they are incredibly smart people. Instead, I want to explain my journey today so that you may make the bitshares experience many times better for the average user.


Today, I decided to figure out what the counter was for on the forum. I originally thought that it was for a snapshot like the previous counter was for. I was not sure what snapshot it was for though. So, I decided to try to figure it out. I googled it. I searched the forums for it. Finally, I decided to post on the forums.


My original post was to determine what the counter was for. The first few posts were posts that I expected. They did not clearly identify the question I was asking nor did they answer it. I asked the question several different ways until finally somebody stated that it was for a share in all future DAC's. This lead me to the question "Why isn't this being blown up like the 4th of July?"


Everybody's initial response was "Marketing." People kept saying that bitshares was not exploiting all means of media to get the word out about the final AGS donations. Others stated that it was a difficult idea to understand/express. Three pages later I was able to understand two things.


The counter is for the final AGS donations and, bitshares is not expressing its ideas in an easily understandable format. If the average user has to go through what I went through to discover these two things then they most likely will never understand bitshares. I don't want this to happen!


Below is a quick brainstorm of things I could think of. These are some of the things that the marketing director thought of for the company I work at. Feel free to use, abuse, or ignore.


Please consider utilizing other media outlets to express the ideas of bitshares. News articles, analog radio shows, and maybe a dedicated section on the forum that is soley dedicated to videos explaining everything. I realize that there are videos in various places about various things but that is difficult! http://bitshares.org/blog/   https://www.facebook.com/officialbitshares    https://twitter.com/_bitshares  These are awesome! Maybe it should be in the signature of the main players so that people are more aware of it? Press release subforum needs to be more active and exciting. More articles need to appear on major crypto coin news websites. More "C" level explanations need to be created of the ideas and technologies.


In conclusion, I did not wake up today expecting to end it with an email to the marketing director at bitshares. I hope that my journey will help you to understand what the average person runs into when trying to discover bitshares. I hope that then helps you to better market bitshares for success.


Sincerely,

Phillip (aka wesphily)

I work in IT at a high level so I can definitely appreciate the difficulty of translating/expressing ideas that most people don't understand. More specifically, I am almost always talking to a "C" level person (CEO/CIO/COO) when explaining various things. I once had to explain to a person how to use windows 8. This person had never used a computer in her entire life. I was able to complete this task in 1 hour. Below is a link to a person who explained cyber warfare and, recent revolutionary changes that make it more efficient. He was able to do this in a way that everybody in the audiance was able to understand.
http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_domas_the_1s_and_0s_behind_cyber_warfare

I say all of this because I know that there is always a way to make a difficult idea understandable to the average person. This leads me back to marketing. Every time I have to explain a new technology to a "C" level I have to be able to market it in a way that they will understand. If I speak too technical then they will feel stupid and not really listen. If I don't explain the features well then they will see it useless and not buy it. If I market it good enough then they understand that value and easily make the decision to invest.

So as stated before, bitshares desperately needs to improve marketing. I don't know who heads this department up (if anybody) but, somebody definitely needs to own this issue and resolve it.

I definitely do not discredit the success of bitshares. Please do not hear me say that. When Stan said something about "an advantage for those that researched," it sparked all those questions. It is a curse I have. I'll assume he meant in general which I agree.

So my final conclusion is that ags finale was not marketed well. This was not on purpose. It was just something that was done poorly. Things are being done to improve this but, nothing is being done that can resolve the immdiate issue. (lack of people understading what the last ags is for and that it is the last ags.) I would guess that it would be difficult to resolve this with so little time. Is this correct?

Ah ok. Now I understand. I also agree that lots of people will probably say that. They may not all be fud but, I definitely see people using it as such "premine 2.0."

Should something be done to try to prevent this? Is that already being done? Should we continue as is and hope that the product makes the value despite the fud?

Quote from: NewMine on July 15, 2014, 04:39:10 pm

With all that said, I ask why do you care?  At this point, you get what you get here, and that is a lot of pumping from the regulars and then they gather pitchforks for any who speaks up or questions.  See most recently super3's thread and then AdamBLevine's posts and CharlesHoskinson. I agree with your concerns outside of the AGS donation, because I could care less how many more people donate or not.

This is misleading as to what goes on.  Obviously there are fanboys.  If you have the right stuff, you better have fanboys.  Most people do not jump all over sincere questions.  One of the biggest reasons I came here is because Dan *invites* questions.  He wants to be challenged.  I actually felt like I am being listened to.

Even if Dan isn't the smartest guy, he is surrounding himself with really sharp guys and has a very open mind.  No bullshit rule by committee, just a man who doesn't seem to have ego problems trying to find the best solution.  This to me seems like a damn good recipe for success.

As far as what CH and ABL have said, I would suggest you look at their critiques.  CH was treated well until one person said something negative and he started to imply a threat to remove the support that he came here to initiate.  That was one person out of a user base of 5k.  I don't care to bring this up, because those threads are behind us and have no positive value going forward.

Also, as an investor in AGS, you should care how many people donate.  The more people who donated to AGS, the more authenticity it will have going forward.  We're already starting to hear the "Wait, I didn't know anything about this." FUD.  See this thread for example.

My OP was not FUD. Not sure how you can welcome questions and then call them fud.

I'm just trying to understand why this isn't being blown up like the fourth of july. It is easy to see in the markets that people truly don't understand what will happen. The alternative is that they do understand but, nobody believes in bitshares. It is hard for me to believe that nobody believes in bitshares due to the sheer knowledge/expertise that the developers bring. So, my guess is that they don't understand and/or don't know. I then have to wonder why that is.

Were there radio shows, news articles online, news paper articles, ect..?  EDIT for English: If these things didn't happen then there was a lack of marketing.

The countdown is to the end of AGS donations, not to a snapshot.

So for which DAC is the "snapshot"? For every future DAC that honors AGS.

Some in the pipeline include the DNS DAC, the lotto DAC, the voting DAC.

Yup. So AGS donars are banking on people not understanding this so that they get the best bang for their buck on ags and, their pts holdings increase when people find out it is too late for ags. (directly or indirectly)

EDIT: Makes better sense why people wouldn't want to blast out hard about the end of ags.