Hi Matt, I'm glad to hear you are doing what you can to stay on Hive - the absence of optimal marketing has long been a massive hindrance to the value and growth of Hive generally, so I am always interested to make the most of any move in that direction.
As you may recall, I launched a proposal via @strategizer not so long ago that aimed to perform crucially needed market research in order to establish some baselines for future marketing drives, not only of Hive itself but also for the various dApps. In general, the dApp creators supported the idea and voted for it - but in the end it didn't get funded. Unfortunately, I found it very difficult to even get any feedback from some of the larger stakeholders.
As I recall, I didn't receive any comments or input from anyone at Splinterlands and although Aggroed just apologised to me for that yesterday, I would like to gain clarity and clear a few things up before voting on your proposal. I obviously want Hive and Splinterlands to thrive - especially since I worked for quite a while on marketing Splinterlands TV.
a. I found during my drive to promote @strategizer, that there is a massively obviously divide among Hive users when it comes to marketing. There are those who do not have any professional experience in the field and who think it's fine to just brainstorm and hope for the best.. and there are those who have learned from the extremely well established digital marketing industry norms that while experimentation is all well and good, it is necessary to operate within a framework that is grounded in the scientific method and that is prepared with some degree of research, in order to not waste the marketing budget.
It is not an exaggeration to say that the divide here is extreme to me and in some cases it is highly alarming that so much budget is being spent based on whims and vague concepts.
I know that you have said that you want to use the DHF funds to pay for an external marketing agency - however, the funds given to ignite marketing previously are a clear example of how this can actually lead to next to zero benefit. This is, to my mind, partially due to the complexity of web 3 and the willingness of agencies to take money regardless of whether they really know what they are doing or not. The best way to handle this is to ensure a continual process of close monitoring, analysis and refinement right throughout the marketing and growth process. I know from experience that many agencies are nowhere near cut out for this, yet to the untrained eye they seem very professional.
Can you provide me with any insights into how you intend to tackle these issues and also explain whether or not you are open to feedback from the Hive community on such high level decisions as which agency to use - or at least which priorities to focus on when picking one?
b. I don't know if you are aware, but Inleo's marketing proposal, which was funded a few months ago, was based on the idea that they would repay the funds if they didn't achieve certain growth goals - are you open to that kind of approach with your proposal?
c. I personally think that what Hive needs as a high priority is a rock solid on-boarding system that has professionally written educational text and videos built-in which leave no room for misunderstanding when new users approach Hive and try to orient and set up a presence. Are you open to developing this kind of feature set for Splinterlands and open sourcing it so that other dApps can also benefit and everyone can combine forces to grow the eco-system in multiple directions at once?
Thanks for your time Sir!
Hey @ura-soul, great to hear from you! I am very sorry I missed your proposal. Please feel free to reach out to me directly in the future if something like that comes up, or anything else really.
I know first hand about how expensive and completely ineffective "marketing agencies" can be. When the SPS token first launched we hired a marketing agency to promote it for a little while and it was exactly as you said. I prefer to hire someone directly who is part of the Splinterlands team to lead the marketing effort rather than an external agency. This person would be responsible for working with the rest of the Splinterlands team and the community (which is our biggest asset) to figure out how to make the largest impact with the least expense.
Since taking over Splinterlands last September one of my top priorities has been massively reducing our expenses and squeezing as much value as possible out of everything we spend. I would never just throw money at a marketing agency. The future of the company, my livelihood, and my reputation are on the line here.
Assuming we get the funds to do so, whether from the DHF or elsewhere, we will interview a lot of people (and possibly some agencies) to try to find someone who I am confident is an expert in web3 marketing specifically and who will think outside the box and come up with new and creative ways to get very obvious and significant results. We've also already been working on implementing a lot more analytics and tracking within the game to make sure we can quickly and easily measure the results of anything we do and I will cut the cord quickly on anything, or anyone, that isn't getting results.
As for your two specific questions:
Repaying the funds isn't something we can realistically do. We are going to need to spend the funds on the marketing efforts, so if it turns out to be unsuccessful at achieving the growth we are looking for, we simply won't have $500k available to repay. I understand that this is a risk for the Hive community. The proposal is asking for an investment that has potential risk as well as potential reward. Ultimately it all comes down to whether the Hive community thinks the reward (i.e. a highly successful application on Hive that brings in lots of users and attention) is worth the risk, and whether or not they feel the Splinterlands team can deliver.
I really think that the best way forward is for the vast majority of new users to onboard through an app, like Splinterlands, rather than onboarding to Hive more generally as most Hive users do today. That experience is typically pretty different depending on the app, but I am very open to at least open-sourcing the back-end code that we build to help other apps build similar onboarding experiences. Once users onboard to Splinterlands, which includes creating their Hive wallet, setting up Keychain, etc., then over time they will be exposed to more and more of the Hive ecosystem which I think is more natural. Not sure if you saw the follow-up post to the proposal but in there we specify that we plan to teach players the basics of Hive and encourage them to explore the ecosystem as part of our revamped onboarding process.
Hope that helps. I understand that this is a big proposal, and definitely no hard feelings if you (or anyone else) decide that it's not a good opportunity for the DHF. No matter how this turns out we'll still be here doing what we can to try to build a breakout web3 game on the Hive blockchain. Also, not sure if you're going to Hive fest but if you are it would be great to catch up in person.
Hey Matt, thanks for replying here.
I actually did message you directly about the strategizer proposal via Discord, as that's the only point of contact I had - also Aggroed, but got no replies. Is there a better place to message you? I don't think I'm part of the Splinterlands slack any more.
Can you clarify what you meant when you said that you would hire someone from within the Splinterlands team? Maybe I am misunderstanding, but wouldn't they already be being paid by Splinterlands? Do you mean that you want to direct someone from your existing team to then find an external agency?
As I mentioned numerous times during the Strategizer discussions, I am all for DHF money being used to market Hive, but as someone with a few years of experience marketing online (plus having also built my own social network previously), it's very clear to me why the significant spends to date have not achieved anything measurable (and the people involved continue to employ the same thinking). So it was especially frustrating to see the community reject the only logical step to correct this (an internally directed research project). I know that your business depends on your actions here and also know that having a centralised effort is beneficial in these situations to direct energy and get tasks completed - so on this alone I expect you guys to do better than Hive itself has done so far.
I have tried to on-board numerous people to Hive, even people with crypto experience - I even wrote them guides.. None of them are users today. I see that part of this is caused by the complete failure of all Hive sites to provide education about the blockchain and UI systems - leaving users confused and de-motivated. At some point I will solve this myself if no-one else does.
Sure, I will probably be at Hivefest - yes, I agree, it would be great to meet again. We actually chatted a while over dinner in Poland IIRC. Thanks for reminding me actually, I need to book some tickets! ;)
I look forward to your response here. Cheers!
I am very sorry about that...I just searched for you in Discord and saw that you did indeed message me about that. I guess I must have missed it. I turn off Discord notifications when I'm working and sometimes I come back to a deluge of messages and things can fall through the cracks. Please don't hesitate to ping me again in the future if I don't respond to something, or you can also message me on the Mattermost Hive chat. I get a lot fewer messages there.
Sorry - I worded this poorly. What I mean is that I want to hire someone new, who would then become part of the Splinterlands team. I think someone who is directly part of the team as their full time job will be much more motivated and get better results than someone at an agency who is just assigned to the project.
I have had similar experiences, which is why I don't think direct onboarding to Hive is the way to go. Even if better education options were available, my guess is that most people won't be motivated enough to spend the time to consume the education materials.
Instead, I think Hive should aim to have lots of great apps, and users will onboard to an app that interests them and then will naturally over time start learning about Hive and exploring more of the ecosystem just as a result of them using an app that is on the platform.
There are definitely a good number of people that discovered Hive and went on to participate in the ecosystem just because they played Splinterlands (I know this anecdotally, but it would be neat if someone could do some kind of analysis to determine how many accounts that started with Splinterlands went on to participate more generally on Hive). If those same people were onboarded to Hive directly, my guess is they would probably not be interested, but because they were exposed to it through something they are more naturally interested in it was a smoother experience.
I think this is the case for pretty much all blockchains. I personally don't just go and use other blockchains, but I will use them if there's an app I want to try out that is built there. To me, that is why Hive is falling so far behind. There are either not enough apps that people want to use, or people just don't know about the apps that are here because we don't promote them like other platforms can. This is what this proposal is all about and what I think Splinterlands is in the best position to provide right now - getting the word out to the broader web3 community about a fun and engaging game on Hive as a way to successfully onboard lots of new users to the ecosystem.
Ok, understood - I realised through that proposal process that the proposal system desperately needs better communications and notifications built in - the PeakD team took up my suggestion of adding in notifications for new proposals, but I'm not sure how much that has helped.
Ok, thanks for clarifying.
I am thinking more of the type of education info that is built-in to the UI as is found in triple A games, so they can't be totally avoided, but are non invasive, intelligent/dynamic and are also potentially gamified or at least truly useful!
Most of the people I invite are creative people and/or smart - they love the idea of hive but are repelled by it's details unfortunately - anything that can be done to increase retention, should really be done - as otherwise traffic driven by any marketing efforts are like pouring water into a sieve. I know from my own social network that it there is a desire to get users as fast as possible, but if that skips over the on-site optimisation needed to retain them, then it's counter productive.
As far as your proposal goes, I am for it. I just want to make sure that there is something in it for the rest of Hive too. I know you have highlighted some ideas already in that direction. Perhaps the most obvious opportunity in that direction I can think of is to nudge Splinterlands users to become Hive bloggers and to get them using generic Hive social networks to do that, rather than directing them to Splintertalk - do you think that's possible?
I will vote on this now. :)