Strategizer is a new project that assists the Hive community to direct its own decision making & marketing by enabling access to high quality data and actionable insights. We intend to apply tried and tested digital marketing strategies to Hive in order to accelerate growth and to overcome challenges that have arisen due to Hive’s decentralized structure.
The main goal of this introductory proposal is to lay the foundation for ongoing improvements to the way Hive interacts with and responds to the wider world. This includes collecting insights from existing and potential users, market analysis, User Experience (UX) research & beyond.
Continual improvement on all levels requires that we first understand what is needed and why. Marketing is much more than advertising and should extend into the development of products/services to ensure that we all understand why Hive is collectively performing as it is at any given moment. Effective marketing and growth begins with detailed research.
Every avalanche begins with a single snowflake. ❄️
We propose a process of market research, analysis and reporting in order to improve Hive’s digital marketing footprint. We will begin with market research and move on to data driven suggestion, primarily for improved growth strategy that benefits the entire eco-system. This will include the creation of reports that provide relevant market insights and actionable intelligence for the Hive community, assisting stakeholders to make better informed decisions.
Increased community awareness of Hive’s market positioning, performance, opportunities and threats should optimize the use of DHF funding, plus improve the rate of Hive’s growth. The benefits of decentralization are strengthened when everyone involved is empowered with accurate information.
Hive's quest to increase its share of the social networking market is opposed by vast, centralized corporations who are adept at manipulating markets and audiences. Hive and its dApps have not been able to powerfully compete due, in part, to the inherent benefits that centralization offers organizations in key areas.
While decentralization remains the only way to overcome some challenges - at which Hive’s historic competitors completely fail (e.g. freedom of speech) - significant changes are needed. In particular, Hive needs to learn to compete in the online information space with corporations that leverage their centralized structure to efficiently respond to the demands of their users and to market changes.
Despite conceptually being an ideal on-ramp for Web 3 and crypto in general, Hive only has around 3000 active (posting) accounts at present. It is clear that assistance is needed in order to reach a point of ignition that can substantially accelerate Hive’s growth. Regardless of your vision for Hive's evolution, one constant remains - Hive needs growth and new users in order to become more useful.
Hive's competition grows almost daily too. Several open protocols for decentralized social networking now exist and, additionally, strong competition has emerged from a Sequoia Capital backed ‘Decentralized Social Network’ called ‘DeSo’. Deso has slick marketing and could be said to be misleading the public by claiming that they invented decentralized social media. Despite being relatively new, they are already outperforming Hive in the Coin Market Cap tables (their market cap is currently more than twice that of Hive).
Being complacent here is a mistake, history shows that without a well executed, thorough and optimized marketing strategy it is common for the better products/projects to be overpowered by competitors who are more organized and who strategize more effectively.
Resolving this complex digital marketing challenge requires a multi-faceted approach, which itself depends on access to meaningful market data, user feedback and other relevant information. Actionable intelligence must be consistently and clearly communicated to Hive stakeholders in order to influence decision making in ways that can point Hive on a trajectory back towards the kind of growth and success that was seen during the promising early growth period of Hive’s predecessor, Steem.
Hive needs reliable translation of market activity and user sentiment into coherent strategy that meets the real needs of target audiences. This requires the application of professional marketing processes. This proposal sets out an initial plan to establish pathways towards success by producing highly relevant analysis and reporting, which the entire community can use as they see fit.
We foresee this proposal benefiting all aspects of decision making in the Hive community:
We will also produce suggestions for marketing strategies that can form a basis of follow-on projects that accelerate Hive's growth and public visibility.
We aim to shine the light of understanding into areas that can only be explored through the application of integrated market research, user feedback and systems analysis.
The Hive community relies on proven systems that generate the consensus that enables decentralization at the technological level. While this provides the basis for a system of pooled hardware resources, we understand that there is space for the creation of new approaches which assist community members as they themselves reach consensus on matters of governance, design and growth marketing.
Reaching understanding of and consensus about the more human-centric aspects of Hive’s evolution has often been hampered by a lack of reliable, shared data resources. Discussion of the state of Hive and any visions for Hive’s future will be greatly aided by access to trusted maps that show the social marketing landscape that Hive exists within and that help to highlight the available paths forwards towards greater success.
Understanding an ever changing social media landscape on a global level requires collaboration and access to shared resources that help projects to connect with their target audiences. The more that Hive’s community understands the decentralized social networking marketplace and Hive's potential new users, the more chance there is of optimized problem solving and sustained growth (backed by data, rather than continued reliance on what is often little more than personal opinion).
Decentralization implies a range of projects will naturally spring up on Hive and while it is not essential for everyone to agree on every topic, the more aligned the community can be on key areas, the more effectively it can take action to achieve goals on a large scale. If holders of so many diverse viewpoints are to reach a consensus on complex topics, they need to be on the same page as much as possible, which requires that they all have access to a shared pool of high quality information.
The marketing and growth of Hive has so far not been scaled up, partially due to a lack of consensus among key stakeholders as to the most appropriate strategy for success in attracting potential new users, on-boarding them and to then motivate them to evangelize Hive to others.
Some voices claim that marketing Hive should not be attempted without technical hurdles surrounding on-boarding/retention being overcome, while others see opportunities being missed and a failure to take the initiative to help the community to profit from them. Growing/marketing Hive and improving Hive’s technology do not need to be separate processes - in fact, they need to feed into each other. This is how most successful technological businesses sustain growth and respond to their audiences.
The early success of Steem has already proven that decentralized social networking is capable of drawing in creative people to further develop the vision. Perceived shortfalls in website tech and other areas can be compensated for by the presence of structures in the community that can clearly be seen to be effective at creatively solving problems and that are moving Hive forward towards success.
Improvement of the website tech itself can be sped up through improved data availability, user feedback, system monitoring and communication/co-operation within the community. By taking steps to empower Hive’s stakeholders to solve Hive’s problems, we begin to close the gap between Hive and its competitors in multiple ways simultaneously.
Through an initial process of research, followed by the creation of data driven growth strategies, we foresee the potential for Hive to be rejuvenated and for the passion of community members to be effectively channeled towards our collective and mutual benefit.
Achieving impressive growth goals for Hive in the long term requires a significant outlay and potentially years of work for numerous people. Steemit Inc. was burning through their funds at a high rate, yet without fully cracking the code for sustainable community growth - so it is understandable that the Hive community seeks to be careful with DHF funds. At the same time, moving too slowly could be just as fatal.
This proposal is intended to demonstrate and test the efficacy of our approach. The concepts can then later be scaled up (and potentially automated) via further proposals to the DHF once this proposal is shown to have been valuable to the community. This initial proposal is only for research and strategy, not for implementation of any potentially more costly marketing activities, such as advertising campaigns.
The tasks outlined below are aimed at establishing a baseline for market research and analysis that is oriented towards improving the overall performance of Hive.
Note: While we are open to advice from the Hive community and are flexible - once funded, the final decision on which tasks will be completed, how they will be completed and by who will rest with the team responsible for this proposal.
This work is predicted to be undertaken over a 3 month period, with team members working flexible hours, as needed.
The tasks have been grouped and prioritized to ensure that we first collect data from within Hive, then external to Hive from potential target audiences.
We will then analyze the results, publish reports and also generate new DHF proposals that either ourselves or other teams can make use of in order to implement suggested changes based on the data.
We will generally prioritize general reporting that benefits everyone on Hive, but also aim to produce data and reports that are specifically relevant to key Hive projects who respond to requests to participate in the process.
Building community spirit requires that we go beyond just stake weighted voting as a way to assess the community’s preferences. To reach true consensus as a community we need to measure more than just wealth on Hive, we need to collect the views of people and to then make the results visible.
Gather information about Hive users:
Their preferences, pain points and why they like/dislike aspects of Hive. What do they want to see change on Hive? What is missing?
Learn about non-Hive users in Hive users’ extended networks:
Gathering targeted data from the internet can be costly and unreliable. We can leverage Hive's community to do some of the data collecting by providing insights about their own friends/connections and their sentiments towards Hive.
Consult with dApp owners/operators:
Tailor research to meet dApp operator's specific needs, plus to collect their own insights.
Segment the data into business users vs normal users:
Gather data from business users about their perception of what they need to see in order to want to invest and build more on Hive.
Gather off-chain and general audience data, prioritizing crypto oriented social media spaces, but also reaching out to the uninitiated.
Transparent collation and presentation of key data for consumption by community members.
Data driven suggestions for the Hive community to consider, aiming to improve key performance metrics for both Hive and its various projects.
Marketing Strategy:
Sharing the lessons learned through the research/analysis with the aim of better promoting Hive and capitalizing on identified opportunities.
New DHF Proposals (Bounty Proposals):
Rather than purely relying on the hit/miss approach of community members suggesting their own ideas for funding, we can highlight optimal marketing/development tasks based on our data. We will publish ‘suggested work requests’ as blogs with the intention that developers and others are inspired by them to adapt our ideas into their own proposals, gain funding and help Hive to grow.
Automation/Continuation of Market Research:
Finally, we will discuss the options for extending the work of this current proposal beyond its limited scope. Should this proposal be well received and achieve its goals, we can produce further proposals in order to provide insights to the Hive community on into the future.
The highlighted tasks can be completed by our initial two person team:
We both have a wide range of experience in relevant fields, including digital marketing, community growth, systems design, software development and business operations.
In addition to our own labor, working solidly on this throughout the project’s time period - we are also budgeting for the following:
We have estimated that to complete the tasks that we would ideally carry out for this proposal, we will need around 107 full days of work (8 hours per day) - split between the two of us.
At a standard daily rate (per person) of $504, this works out to a labor cost of $53,948 over the estimated 3 month period.
We are also allowing for:
Note: The original estimate when the proposal was created was $670 per day, but it has since been scaled down. To avoid paying a second DHF fee we can just return any excess funds received at the end of the funding period.
For reference, the two main marketing projects that have so far been funded by the DHF are Leo Finance Marketing and the Ignite Visibility proposals. These two projects both spent money on external advertising. Leo Finance is ongoing and Ignite has completed.
The amounts which these projects asked for as follows:
In the event that the proposal is only partially funded, we will do our best to publish whatever useful information we have to the community, as soon as possible after the funding stops.
Note: Any rewards from
We are excited at the prospect of helping Hive to evolve towards a position that enables all of its facets to shine. Please consider voting for our proposal to optimize and propel the Hive Blockchain into a new period of growth and success!
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please send them our way and we'll reply asap.
To our mutual success,
The @Strategizer Team
