RE: Perception matters. Public image matters. Proposal for a competition to improve the official website.
Are you an investor? Have you pitched to one?
My guess is no. I HAVE.
PR is great, but what investors look for in SV is mostly one thing: TRACTION TRACTION TRACTION.
Steam is doing traction just fine
It's seeing an explosion of traffic and maintaining this is the most important thing they can do. Any PR should be about bringing users. Normal users really don't need to know all the nuances to join, and can be educated later.
They are doing it right.
@summon is just responding with the truth. Small, extremely skilled teams are orders of magnitude faster than big teams. And I know from experience: I manage dev for a digital agency doing work in sports and entertainment. these are multi-million dollar deals and the team size is under 10.
The info you want is often private.
Other than traction, VCs look at team. The team at @steemit is very very experienced in the crypto realm. @dantheman comes from bitshares and was looking at blockchain tech in the early days of bitcoin. The rest have similar experience.
** Basically: There is nothing for them to manage. Steemit is working about as perfect as you could hope for an alpha/beta project.
They are learning as they go, and fixing things. But things are fine, don't worry.
Actually, I have.
And from my experience the most crucial concern in investors' minds (apart from the idea itself and its traction) were these aspects:
Most start-ups fail not because the idea is bad. They fail because the founders run out of determination to carry on or they start fighting with each other and lose focus on the long-term goal. So information about people behind a project is pretty important, not just TRACTION TRACTION TRACTION.
I talked about this. Team matters - especially at the seed stage. But they are past that, and have a proven product. Then the value of things is going to be about the success of the product.
Bravo. Please continue with this attitude and everything will be just fine.
I KNOW this and, as I said, I do not need convincing and cheering up. Chances are I know Dan longer than you and I know what he is capable of.
But my point is this: how a person coming from the outside of the crypto-world can know this? You expect them to dig deep into discussion threads?
Also, the ability to manage huge IT projects and ability to build and manage big teams might still be a challenge. His biggest project, BitShares, has never reached this stage so it's uncharted territory.
I think I like this reply better than your original post! The key phrase, for me, is:
"But my point is this: how a person coming from outside of the crypto-world can know this? You expect them to dig deep into discussion threads?"
This is where you really had me...
I admit, my post (and my thinking) evolved a bit and this might cause some confusion. Initially I was mostly upset about @summon's response but then I started to dig deeper into the root of the problem and now it seems @summon has little to do with it.