RE: Marketing w/Mitchell - A Steem Ecosystem
Thanks for the update. I didn't watch the video, as I fully trust you with your transcript.
To be honest, I'm a bit disappointed. Focusing your strategy on developers drives resources to an area which is hard to monetize. Developers build apps, not communities. Developers are not necessarily entrepreneurs, they know how to build stuff, but not how to sell it or how to create complex processes aorund that stuff.
Your strategy is based on the fact that these developers will be able to also bring customers in, which is already proven to be false. It stems from the same paradigm which created Steemit, and look where you are now, one year after the launch: a meager 13,000 users. That's below joke level, it's not even a startup. If you pitch a VC with these numbers he won't even listen.
As they are right now, the Steem blockchain and the Steemit.com MVP have a reasonably articulated community. You already spent an entire year building this. Not banking on it is a bit ADHDish, so to speak. Why not building this community and create engagement here? Why not using what you already have? Why not focusing on growing this community first, listen to its members and see what they want?
The client is always right. Always.
An entire ecosystem of apps built on top of the Steem blockchain, (especially since you proved no success building a simple community around a simple social media website for the last year), well, that looks really hard to build to me.
Especially now, when you are also facing serious competition.
But are the majority of current clients the target group we really want? Does our current clients represent our future clients? Probably they don't . Of course we must serve them but at the same time we must try to drive other demographics as well.
I can clearly see you are wishing well and I appreciate you for that, @liondani. But with all due respect, I think Steemit Inc is going down and it's going down fast.
I consider myself an early adopter and even an evangelist (I even held Steemit meetups and encouraged fellow Romanians to create a section in Romanian here) but as time went by, I had to accept a rather bitter truth: there's a poisonous mix of incompetence, enthusiasm, greed, technical skills, luck and inability to communicate in this venture, all so powerfully connected in a monolith-like structure, which is simply spiraling down, no matter what I chose to do. This mix is "protected" by a chronic lack of opening towards people using the platform, myself included. I had many improvement proposals, many suggestions and I barely had a few acknowledged. And when they were acknowledged, they were quickly dismissed because, for instance, I'm 'not a real developer' (to quote @abit). I'm not saying that my suggestions were perfect, far from that. I'm saying that they weren't even taken into account.
This opaqueness towards client feedback is the main cause of the downtrend.
And by the way, you have the clients that you attract, not the clients that you want.
They claim that after @dan leaved many things like that will change... Let's see...
PS must say I doubt he was the "only" responsible... I hope all took the right lessons and we will move forward...
We'll see :)
Finally..some serious thought and not just rah-rah.
Thank you dragoroua
One thing to consider
4.5 million for TSU after the first year vs 13K Steemit of which all but about 3k are bots?
Why am I reminded of the crew of the Titanic franticly re arranging the Deck Chairs while ignoring the hole in the bottom of the ship?
others seem to agree
Good reminder, the one about Titanic :)