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:

1. 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.

2. 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.