Marketing efforts

[Ravid]

@BitcoinJesus2.O I won't quote your post, it's too long
What was the downside of Dan's margin trading proposition? Why did people outvote him?

As you put it, it sounds really damn easy to make it happen. And @yvv will be so happy!

[meganwale]

For me Bitshretalk website structure and other SEO thing looks good but need to improve meta tags and thread topics should be appropriate. Marketing point of view you can prefer a social media campaigns.

[abit]

maybe  posting a weekly "what's new/state of network" in r/cryptocurrency may help a little too, like district0x is doing. and making the community up vote the posts

I think same as you, something big have to be made for marketing.
I'm a noob at marketing but if you need main d'oeuvre you can call me

as for Stan's billion hero compaign, I fear it is as dead as his "btc-united" project
it look like he like a lot exposing his ideas, make them look revolutionary as fuck like if he was selling cheap penis enlargement pills, then forget them

We have weekly report on Steemit like this https://steemit.com/bitshares/@steempower/bitshares-state-of-the-network-3rd-october-2017

We have weekly hangouts like this https://steemit.com/eos-project/@officialfuzzy/pm7fk-beyondbitcoin-rsvp-whaletank-hangout-232-or-2017-11-11-or-sat-200pm-utc-or-over-325-usdbd-in-awards , if someone can make transcript of them that's great.

[dan777]

Great platform, great founders, great community....and no one uses the platform. Mean while competitors are catching up fast. Unfortunately the Lamborghini in a farm shed describes bitshares 100%

[Crypto Kong]

Awareness is another, we could all start posting on https://www.tradingview.com/  and similar sites making traders aware of Openledger  and Rudex

This is a fairly simple but good idea, also etoro. It has a lot of noob users looking to buy bitcoin that don’t know how. They have a good forum/ chat room thing on their app. Few of us should start sharing posts on how bitshares is safest best way to trade crypto


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[doyoubit]

Awareness is another, we could all start posting on https://www.tradingview.com/  and similar sites making traders aware of Openledger  and Rudex

[天籁]

What about the margin trading? What's wrong with it?

Currently, you can be margin called even if you have enough balance to cover your entire debt in your account, because  MPA contract is not smart enough to be aware that no debt exists until bitAsset is transferred from the issuing account. To close your position, you need to add funds on top of your 2x collateral first, which is nonsense. and if you have, say, 1000 USD worth of BTS in your account, and you want to short bitUSD, you need to issue 500 bitUSD, sell them, add BTS to collateral manually, issue 250 bitUSD more, sell, ..., keep repeating this infinite number of times until you get old and die. This is not how shorting should work. You should be able to go ahead and put 1000 bitUSD sell order on bitUSD/BTS market. Alternatively, you could put 500 bitUSD order on any other market or send them to your friend. Or, you could put 800 bitUSD sell order on bitUSD/BTS market and send another 100 bitUSD to your friend at the same time. In all these cases your position would be covered by 2x collateral all the time, because bitUSD which is sitting in a limit order is not your debt, and when the order is (partially) taken, a smart contract which is really smart would top up the collateral as needed. This is how shorting works on other exchanges.

I repeat myself, decentralized margin trading is an awesome idea, and a greatest selling point of bitshares. It should be advertised proactively, because people trade on margin like crazy on other exchanges, which indicates that a huge demand exists. But, it would be easier to convince everybody to switch to DEX if the major flaws were fixed.

GREAT VIEW POINT

[yvv]

What about the margin trading? What's wrong with it?

Currently, you can be margin called even if you have enough balance to cover your entire debt in your account, because  MPA contract is not smart enough to be aware that no debt exists until bitAsset is transferred from the issuing account. To close your position, you need to add funds on top of your 2x collateral first, which is nonsense. and if you have, say, 1000 USD worth of BTS in your account, and you want to short bitUSD, you need to issue 500 bitUSD, sell them, add BTS to collateral manually, issue 250 bitUSD more, sell, ..., keep repeating this infinite number of times until you get old and die. This is not how shorting should work. You should be able to go ahead and put 1000 bitUSD sell order on bitUSD/BTS market. Alternatively, you could put 500 bitUSD order on any other market or send them to your friend. Or, you could put 800 bitUSD sell order on bitUSD/BTS market and send another 100 bitUSD to your friend at the same time. In all these cases your position would be covered by 2x collateral all the time, because bitUSD which is sitting in a limit order is not your debt, and when the order is (partially) taken, a smart contract which is really smart would top up the collateral as needed. This is how shorting works on other exchanges.

I repeat myself, decentralized margin trading is an awesome idea, and a greatest selling point of bitshares. It should be advertised proactively, because people trade on margin like crazy on other exchanges, which indicates that a huge demand exists. But, it would be easier to convince everybody to switch to DEX if the major flaws were fixed.

[Crypto Kong]

I don't know much about marketing. Not far ago I've seen on steemit one guy called bitshares "a Lamborghini in a farm barn". I feel exactly the same way. We have a car with a super advanced turbo charged engine which lacks a finish layer of paint, has bolts and nuts loose and full of cow crap inside. How do you want to market such a car? I don't see any way to sell it, but to finish paint, fix all loose parts and to clean up all shit.

Finally, we have a GUI which has a nice overview page (it was a shame before the last update not only buy its look, but by content too). This is a good progress, but there are still so many little flaws to fix. The biggest one imo is a margin trading. The idea of decentralized margin trading is brilliant, but current implementation on BTS is flawed, I insist on this, and this is one of the reasons why whales don't want to put their money into issuing bitAssets. I don't believe that a bunch of amateur enthusiasts, like most of us are, are able to fix this. This is a job for professionals who have experience in building traditional trading platforms. I know that the DEX by its nature is very different from forex etc, but it has to be at least not worse than traditional platforms by user experience to attract traders with big money.  This is not possible to achieve without special skills which developers of traditional finance platforms have. We need to get such people onboard.

Some great points here but I don’t agree with everything. I personally don’t think you’ll get whales here with any amount of marketing without liquidity. They can’t trade here yet, end of.

We need to focus on starting from the bottom up. We need to get the little people in here. We need to market our liquidity increasing, profitable market making strategies to smaller players. We need to get the auto bot liquidity trading strategy worker proposal raised and completed and market this to the smaller players.

To those unaware we have started 2 chat rooms, one to discuss profitable liquidity increasing strategies and one to discuss creation of the auto trading bot and introduce a worker proposal to get this done.

This will create excitement, the whole of crypto wants to get rich quick. Tell me one small player new to crypto who doesn’t want an auto bot trading on a dex for them with the dream of free money for nothing. We promote this in our tour of AMA to the small fish and we are on to a winner.


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[Crypto Kong]

I propose we all forget about the "I think someone else better than me should do it", because at the end, nobody does anything but wait and hope someone else will do it for them.

if you think you can't do a thing, then let's focus on which thing we could do our self and in the short-medium timeframe

Great idea.

You can start by retiring this account.

We know what a "bagholder" is... it's someone left holding the bag, often "stuck" holding it.

It's ironic that you want to focus on short-medium time frames.  I suggest you choose a forum alias, without a negative connotation to it.  That would be an awesome start.

Haha he has a fair point, the name bagholder not a good advertisement. Improving marketing for you would defiantly start here [emoji23]


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[Ravid]

I don't know much about marketing. Not far ago I've seen on steemit one guy called bitshares "a Lamborghini in a farm barn". I feel exactly the same way. We have a car with a super advanced turbo charged engine which lacks a finish layer of paint, has bolts and nuts loose and full of cow crap inside. How do you want to market such a car? I don't see any way to sell it, but to finish paint, fix all loose parts and to clean up all shit.

Finally, we have a GUI which has a nice overview page (it was a shame before the last update not only buy its look, but by content too). This is a good progress, but there are still so many little flaws to fix. The biggest one imo is a margin trading. The idea of decentralized margin trading is brilliant, but current implementation on BTS is flawed, I insist on this, and this is one of the reasons why whales don't want to put their money into issuing bitAssets. I don't believe that a bunch of amateur enthusiasts, like most of us are, are able to fix this. This is a job for professionals who have experience in building traditional trading platforms. I know that the DEX by its nature is very different from forex etc, but it has to be at least not worse than traditional platforms by user experience to attract traders with big money.  This is not possible to achieve without special skills which developers of traditional finance platforms have. We need to get such people onboard.

Dude, that post was more insightful than almost anything  in this thread, good job!
 Yeah, I've read that article too. And you are most certainly right about all the little flaws, especially cow crap. The thing is, we think as technical people, not marketers. Those guys can sell anything. Have you seen the sheer amount of coins/ICOs at CMC? 95% of them don't have anything at all. A lot of them are valued in millions just for the promise of delivering something someday. We have a working product that even with all the cow crap beats everything there currently is on the market. Not for long, though, as competition is catching up and time is running out. As @Stan wrote in one of his posts, his marketing guys are drooling all over this platform.
 As Kong stated, these AMA sessions not only will bring a new way to get exposure, they will also get us a market survey about what people need us to have and what needs to be improved.
 What about the margin trading? What's wrong with it? Is there any link where i can read up on it? If this issue can't be solved by our "amateurs", why is it so hard to hire a professional trading platform dev with experience?
 I would also like to know about all the other "loose bolts", where can I read about them?

Disclaimer: It may seem like it's just a bunch of newbies with no clue blaming the older members for not doing anything, but I assure you I am here for civilised discussion and only for the betterment of this project.

PS we still haven't heard from other " big guns" here, their insight is important too

[intelliguy]

I propose we all forget about the "I think someone else better than me should do it", because at the end, nobody does anything but wait and hope someone else will do it for them.

if you think you can't do a thing, then let's focus on which thing we could do our self and in the short-medium timeframe

Great idea.

You can start by retiring this account.

We know what a "bagholder" is... it's someone left holding the bag, often "stuck" holding it.

It's ironic that you want to focus on short-medium time frames.  I suggest you choose a forum alias, without a negative connotation to it.  That would be an awesome start.

[bitsharesbagholder]

I don't know much about marketing. Not far ago I've seen on steemit one guy called bitshares "a Lamborghini in a farm barn". I feel exactly the same way. We have a car with a super advanced turbo charged engine which lacks a finish layer of paint, has bolts and nuts loose and full of cow crap inside. How do you want to market such a car? I don't see any way to sell it, but to finish paint, fix all loose parts and to clean up all shit.

Finally, we have a GUI which has a nice overview page (it was a shame before the last update not only buy its look, but by content too). This is a good progress, but there are still so many little flaws to fix. The biggest one imo is a margin trading. The idea of decentralized margin trading is brilliant, but current implementation on BTS is flawed, I insist on this, and this is one of the reasons why whales don't want to put their money into issuing bitAssets. I don't believe that a bunch of amateur enthusiasts, like most of us are, are able to fix this. This is a job for professionals who have experience in building traditional trading platforms. I know that the DEX by its nature is very different from forex etc, but it has to be at least not worse than traditional platforms by user experience to attract traders with big money.  This is not possible to achieve without special skills which developers of traditional finance platforms have. We need to get such people onboard.

I propose we all forget about the "I think someone else better than me should do it", because at the end, nobody does anything but wait and hope someone else will do it for them.

if you think you can't do a thing, then let's focus on which thing we could do our self and in the short-medium timeframe

[yvv]

I don't know much about marketing. Not far ago I've seen on steemit one guy called bitshares "a Lamborghini in a farm barn". I feel exactly the same way. We have a car with a super advanced turbo charged engine which lacks a finish layer of paint, has bolts and nuts loose and full of cow crap inside. How do you want to market such a car? I don't see any way to sell it, but to finish paint, fix all loose parts and to clean up all shit.

Finally, we have a GUI which has a nice overview page (it was a shame before the last update not only buy its look, but by content too). This is a good progress, but there are still so many little flaws to fix. The biggest one imo is a margin trading. The idea of decentralized margin trading is brilliant, but current implementation on BTS is flawed, I insist on this, and this is one of the reasons why whales don't want to put their money into issuing bitAssets. I don't believe that a bunch of amateur enthusiasts, like most of us are, are able to fix this. This is a job for professionals who have experience in building traditional trading platforms. I know that the DEX by its nature is very different from forex etc, but it has to be at least not worse than traditional platforms by user experience to attract traders with big money.  This is not possible to achieve without special skills which developers of traditional finance platforms have. We need to get such people onboard.

[bitsharesbagholder]

maybe  posting a weekly "what's new/state of network" in r/cryptocurrency may help a little too, like district0x is doing. and making the community up vote the posts

I think same as you, something big have to be made for marketing.
I'm a noob at marketing but if you need main d'oeuvre you can call me

as for Stan's billion hero compaign, I fear it is as dead as his "btc-united" project
it look like he like a lot exposing his ideas, make them look revolutionary as fuck like if he was selling cheap penis enlargement pills, then forget them

[Ravid]

Asking is allowed of course. But for marketing I'm definitely the wrong guy to ask. :-)

No no, I summoned you for the kong's idea, you seem to me like a tech guy with deep understanding of the platform, could you possibly  be a member of our "AMA Taskforce"?

[pc]

Asking is allowed of course. But for marketing I'm definitely the wrong guy to ask. :-)

[Ravid]

So now we just need to wait for the responce from the "big guys"

Is it considered as spam if I tag a few people like this:
@fav, @pc, @xeroc, @Stan, @yvv
?
Pretty sure they are not all devs, but their opinion is important nevertheless

[Crypto Kong]

Doing a tour of AMA not only is great for marketing but allows us to get great feedback and to know first hand the questions consumers are asking in a wide variety of coin fan bases. If the same question is being asked over and over again we know we have a problem.


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[Crypto Kong]

Me neither but I had an idea the other day... Ark, in there slack channel do an AMA hour (ask me anything) for other coins. Then post a transcript to their Reddit. It’s quite popular. I’ve passed stans contact details on to DR10 a prominent community member and delegate. Anyway.... my idea, we could do a tour of popular slack channels doing an AMA to “keep the wider community updated”

What do you think???


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 I think this is a great idea. Moreover, it can be done even without any outsider marketer's intervention. As @fav previously said, this place is run by developers, so there are a lot of folks who know plenty about inner workings of the system.
 By marketing efforts I meant SEO, articles in popular magazines/papers, plugs by celebrities, weekly trending on twitter... Stuff like that. All of which are meant to increase the exposure. Your idea is also a great way to get exposure, so I'm all for it.
 Just need to get some devs on board and figure out an incentive - pretty sure they are busy folks as it is, they'll want to be paid

Perhaps if we use our contacts throughout the bts community to reach out to other communities we could return the favour and allow them to do AMA in our channels? If we get things organised it could be simply an hours work for a dev to answer some questions. Payment could be put through worker proposal easy that way just for an hours work.


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[Ravid]

Me neither but I had an idea the other day... Ark, in there slack channel do an AMA hour (ask me anything) for other coins. Then post a transcript to their Reddit. It’s quite popular. I’ve passed stans contact details on to DR10 a prominent community member and delegate. Anyway.... my idea, we could do a tour of popular slack channels doing an AMA to “keep the wider community updated”

What do you think???


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 I think this is a great idea. Moreover, it can be done even without any outsider marketer's intervention. As @fav previously said, this place is run by developers, so there are a lot of folks who know plenty about inner workings of the system.
 By marketing efforts I meant SEO, articles in popular magazines/papers, plugs by celebrities, weekly trending on twitter... Stuff like that. All of which are meant to increase the exposure. Your idea is also a great way to get exposure, so I'm all for it.
 Just need to get some devs on board and figure out an incentive - pretty sure they are busy folks as it is, they'll want to be paid

[Crypto Kong]

So now we need only two things:
  1) An input from Stan himself about possible interference between the two campaigns
  2) and this is the hard one - someone to take it upon himself to make a worker proposal and supervise the whole thing. As I have no experience in marketing, nor in management, and I'm not even from the US, I feel less than competent to do it myself.

Me neither but I had an idea the other day... Ark, in there slack channel do an AMA hour (ask me anything) for other coins. Then post a transcript to their Reddit. It’s quite popular. I’ve passed stans contact details on to DR10 a prominent community member and delegate. Anyway.... my idea, we could do a tour of popular slack channels doing an AMA to “keep the wider community updated”

What do you think???


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[Ravid]

So now we need only two things:
  1) An input from Stan himself about possible interference between the two campaigns
  2) and this is the hard one - someone to take it upon himself to make a worker proposal and supervise the whole thing. As I have no experience in marketing, nor in management, and I'm not even from the US, I feel less than competent to do it myself.

[Crypto Kong]

  As we slowly approach the new age of decentralized exchanges, more and more people are looking for  a good polo/'trex/etc alternative. We all know that there is already a fierce competition in the dex field. Right now it looks like our main competitor is waves - although we have consistently better daily volume, they've been on the market for a lot less time than we have and already have bigger following (at least at twitter they have x1.5 more followers than we do if that can be used as a metric).
 I know that our platform is better in every way (I can't relate to even the UI complaints), but it worries me that people won't care. Their marketing is better, more people are hearing about them and it won't matter to them that the order matching is centralized - for a non-tech trader as long as it works fast and reliably it will be a go to platform. And it will work fast and reliably, at least for some time - they will not shoot themselves in the foot with front running.
As we all know better tech doesn't always win, marketing does.
 We also know that Stan is organising a huge marketing effort for the billion hero campaign and has hired some strong names in the marketing business. Personally I have no idea where it stands right now, because he hasn't published relevant updates for some time, and what his exact gameplan is too.
 What I want to ask is why not hire the same guys that Stan has, who it seems are already familiar with our product, to take on the "routine" marketing for bitshares?
 Or do you think it's redundant because the hero campaign will do it anyways? I just feel like I'm sitting in the dark, waiting for a miracle to happen. "Soon, guys, soon the Mighty Stan will come and shine the light through our dark cave, you just have to beleive..."

I just want to see your thoughts on this, no disrespect to anyone.

No problem in running seperate marketing campaigns...


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[Ravid]

Well, developers being in charge is not a bug, it's a feature. It ensures the best tech possible. However as you pointed out, these issues are here since forever. They won't solve themselves.

The ones you pointed out can be solved by the same developers that run this thing.

For the others we need external help. Hire a professional UI designer (if it hasn't been done already) for the wallet, professional marketers for the exposure and promotion...

I know i'm not the first to speak about it, but for some reason no action is being taken.
I would like to know why.

[fav]

Well I'm an engineer, not a designer, so the landing page looks fine to me

I see your points, but that's the problem in bitshares since forever. developers in charge

[Ravid]

Well I'm an engineer, not a designer, so the landing page looks fine to me

 What you say makes sense and is important, but I feel like the scale of it is not enough.
I don't know how many people buy LTM, why they do it and how many newcomers they manage to register with their referral links. I, personally, don't like clicking on links from people I don't know, much safer is just google bitshares and find the wallet. And I think there is a whole lot of people who will google the project's name after hearing/reading about it somewhere for the first time instead of asking random strangers to provide them with a link.

 Anyways, it's the "reading/hearing somewhere" part I worry about, as for now we have covered a very limited area. A potential user won't find out about bitshares if he doesn't specifically search for it. It was a bit less of a problem in the past, as we were in the top 20 on CMC, having a lot more exposure. Now, as we sit somewhere on the 50th place, it's like being on the second page of google search, where no man has ever set his foot.

[fav]

tools to effectively spread the word and market.

imagine if you send someone to bitshares.org/wallet?r=fav now - do you think this landing page is appealing for a new customer?

what is needed is a nice system setup, with different landing pages highlighting different problems and how bitshares solves them.

goal should be to sell LTM memberships & Asset Creations, that's how the network & marketer can make money.

next step: develop more unique features for the lifetime membership program to make it more interesting

[Ravid]

Hot damn that was fast. I'm used to the steemit drowziness.

What do you mean by the user tools? Everyone has twitter/facebook/etc. - looks like it's not enough. Moreover, putting this "burden of advertising" on users might lead to "promoter apathy" (like voter apathy) as in no one have time or willingnes to put in an effort. Imagine a company like apple or microsoft telling their customers to go to the streets and promote their product...

Or maybe I misunderstood? Can you elaborate?

[fav]

in my opinion, bitshares lacks the tools for it.

you need someone who can get a grass roots word of the mouth system up.

in other words: give users the necessary tools to market the blockchain. much more sustaining and effective than time square ads.

[Ravid]

  As we slowly approach the new age of decentralized exchanges, more and more people are looking for  a good polo/'trex/etc alternative. We all know that there is already a fierce competition in the dex field. Right now it looks like our main competitor is waves - although we have consistently better daily volume, they've been on the market for a lot less time than we have and already have bigger following (at least at twitter they have x1.5 more followers than we do if that can be used as a metric).
 I know that our platform is better in every way (I can't relate to even the UI complaints), but it worries me that people won't care. Their marketing is better, more people are hearing about them and it won't matter to them that the order matching is centralized - for a non-tech trader as long as it works fast and reliably it will be a go to platform. And it will work fast and reliably, at least for some time - they will not shoot themselves in the foot with front running.
As we all know better tech doesn't always win, marketing does.
 We also know that Stan is organising a huge marketing effort for the billion hero campaign and has hired some strong names in the marketing business. Personally I have no idea where it stands right now, because he hasn't published relevant updates for some time, and what his exact gameplan is too.
 What I want to ask is why not hire the same guys that Stan has, who it seems are already familiar with our product, to take on the "routine" marketing for bitshares?
 Or do you think it's redundant because the hero campaign will do it anyways? I just feel like I'm sitting in the dark, waiting for a miracle to happen. "Soon, guys, soon the Mighty Stan will come and shine the light through our dark cave, you just have to beleive..."

I just want to see your thoughts on this, no disrespect to anyone.