The biggest problem with this is that you would be using DHF funds that are everyones funds on Hive to lead traffic to only 1 single Hive dapp.
Could this work? Sure. All dapps should have a marketing budget.
There is only 1 prerequisite you need to meet and that is an easy signup system. An email/facebook login.
I think you have that covered when I last checked, if im not mistaken.
Promoting Peakd or Hiveblog, for example, in this manner, would be a complete waste of time due to their user unfriendly signup system and the Hive keys instantly being shoved in user faces the second they touch the dapp. If that hasnt been understood yet after all these years, I hold no hope that it ever will.
For Leo it could work.
You should also consider that influencers are expensive, theyre lazy, they take so much time to deal with and are completely clueless most of the times.
The time you spend on them might have much more value than the actual return they provide.
Also, you should probably not have so many different marketing channels up at the same time. You should be focusing on 1 or 2. You will spread human resources and funds thin. Pushing 1 or 2 channels would allow you to build more momentum.
When I worked on marketing, advertising did about 2.5x industry benchmarks but it failed on signup since everyone was completely confused by it. People are very interested in the concept, its the initial user experience what's terrible.
On influencer marketing success will depend on how good you are at vetting the content creators and how much time you put in with them. Most of them lie, fake engagement, fake views, etc. You have tools online to check that.
If you go on youtube consider that a 1 million Sub legit account for 15 seconds of ad time charges about 15k-20k USD per video. It can go up to 3x that when it comes to crypto influencers.
Anyways, good luck with the proposal.
Said this LONG ago if the onboarding it trash it doesn't matter how much money you throw at it it's going to greatly underperform.
The onboarding process is better now as long as LEO can issue in enough hive/leo power to new users that they can interact well and then scan and manage those for inactives (Perhaps a 30 day window before the delegation is removed) It would give them a chance to earn a little something and hopefully support themselves.
The biggest missing part to this right now however is an easy way to swap crypto or fiat for LEO/Hive on the UI and also the explain how that all works and why they would want to do that. That's the biggest friction point I see right now. Getting people in and earning a little isn't too bad now but that earning is just going to be an exit (however at least it's supported by ad revenue this time around which will help)
There's a serious lack of development that happens on hive. There's critical elements missing that other blockchains have but it's only been LEO that I've seen take this head on with DeFi, Swaps, New social network methods and then supporting it with ad. Something like this could start to support more development as well which is critical if hive is ever going to take off.
Influencer marketing can work great if done right. It's the single most powerful method for building something quickly and then keeping people around. I dropped my two cents on what needs to be in those contracts to the LEO team and if they are there and upheld is should produce a decent result instead of a one off pitch.
I agree on the importance of the delegations. We've built something that handles this - as mentioned in the post:
We currently delegate to users and are in the testing phase of this more updated and dynamic version which can delegate and pull delegations of RCs efficiently by tracking user activity. i.e. when a user is highly active, we watch their RCs start to get low and then delegate more.
When a user's RCs start building up, our delegation bot sees it and then un-delegates some RCs as they aren't being used. If they suddenly become active again, then step #1 restarts and they get delegated more RCs as their activity rises and RCs fall.
Buying LEO / HIVE is definitely a piece but I don't thing it's front and center for most users. Most users are here to be active on social media, not to buy into some crypto currency. Recognizing that is important. "but how does LEO / HIVE benefit from that?" Users are highly valuable. They create the UGC but they also generate (for us) ad revenue that feeds back to LEO.
The investors need to know how to buy LEO / HIVE and the gateway is through DeFi exchanges - my opinion. We're aiming to update the bridge to be built into the leofinance.io UI soon and allow people direct swaps to LEO / HIVE through other cryptos using the smart contract multi-token bridge backend.
Thank you 🙏🏽
If done right is the key operative word! Vet the influencers and do a lot of research on their audience before jumping into an agreement with them. Lots of BS out there, especially in the crypto space. We've seen these pitfalls and even got burnt by a few back in some of our old campaigning days. Learning from these successes and failures is important in carrying forward.
One way we want to leverage influencers is actually getting them consistently using leofinance.io and telling their audience to as well. We have a lot of ideas for this but imagine just 1 successful influencer bringing themselves + 1000 of their most loyal fans. Could be a game changer for all of us. The right research is highly important.
Thanks for all your feedback both on this proposal and with the UI. It's always greatly appreciated!
Thats why I moved away from it when I was doing this, from brute forcing signups to brand awareness. Stuff like the promo video I did is still the most viewed Hive piece of content ever made by far.
You need to try and if you see it doesnt work or something works better, you adjust.
Im talking to people right now to finally do a Hackathon. Some projects have been doing them with great effect.
But i cant do it myself. I need devs to deal with documentation and to vet code.
Some cool stuff ends up coming out of hack-a-thons I'm a big fan of that.
Hey man, first of all thank you for your vote in the proposal, and an even bigger thank you for the feedback.
You are entirely right, a great user onboarding experience depends on how easy it is for potential adopters to start using the app. This is precisely why one of the main pilars for the new User Interface of Leo is on-chain hive accounts with an existing Twitter or Google accounts.
This Twitter and Google sign-up process is fast and simple. After around 30 seconds of authorizations from either Twitter/X or Google account, users will be able to thread without having to deal with their keys, wallet concepts, blockchain buzzwords (decentralized, immutable etc). Then, when they are ready and want to do so, they can claim their wallet and keys, with all the rewards they have generated so far.
The Influencers part is tricky, we do have some quotes from reliable, non-botted personalities in the crypto space, and yes you are right they are expensive and most of the times they don't deliver enough results for what they charge. Any influencers that end up doing any promotion/marketing/mentions of Leo will have to be familiar with the project, like it, and if they want, invest on hive or leo before doing any work, and we hope/expect that their promotion services will be partly paid for, and partly because they want to do it. That being said, thanks for the feedback on this, anyone who's worked with influencers in the past knows how tricky this can be, so thanks for the heads up.
We will definitely take this into account for the deep dive on each marketing section, thanks for your take on this!
Overall, thanks for the good words at the end and again, thanks for the proposal vote!
I'm with you on this one. There is no point in marketing an app like peakd that isn't user friendly. It won't encourage people to stay and even if they do creating content doesn't add any value to the app or to the eco-system.
I've been vocal for years on the need for easy access to hive, lite accounts, a web2 experience and especially ad revenue for apps to generate profit.
LEO has hit or is on the process of hitting all of these points so it is almost time to start spreading the word.
I would say that it's vital to have all the bugs worked out of the site first. Make sure that when people arrive that the site is ready for them and shows it's best face.
The other point would echo the comment above and be careful where the funds are directed. For a niche site like LEO i could see a lot more success from small er events, guerilla marketing, certain sponsorships that tie into the brand and other efforts.
The team is not aiming for huge numbers to start and these should be achievable for very little outlay rather than throwing money at influencers who don't care about the product, have no integrity and in most cases are far from trusted by any community. Influencer is a dirty word in a lot of sectors.
With that said, it's time to make some moves into the broader crypto community and the proposal has my vote. If not now, when??
Lets just hope that it is done in the right way. A quarter million is a lot of money to outlay against a few thousand users. I would hope to see a lot more than that for the money when compared other apps that are out there. Smaller targeted marketing.
Exactly right on all of your points and thank you for your support on the proposal! The experience needs to be seamless - I've often said and re-said in this proposal - and it needs to feel as good or better than Web2. Our UI is in a really good spot right now.
Are there improvements to be made? Always.
New features to add? Always.
We will always keep pushing that envelope.
But you're right - if not now, then when? The Hive userbase (social only) is 11k users. We are offering to DOUBLE the Hive userbase. It will only cost Hive ~$220k to double its userbase.
As stated toward the end of the proposal, it's not an exact metric but consider that 11k users and the current market cap of HIVE is $100m.
Will doubling the userbase be worth another $100m to Hive at a cost of $220k? Not necessarily. But what we are saying is that doubling the userbase of a $100m project is likely to be worth some amount of "valuation" to the core project. We believe that its in the millions of dollars at a bare minimum but again - that's a hugely subjective variable that will be impossible to predict.
We want to be the net inflow for Hive. The thing that Hive has been waiting for is a mainstream moment that creates an influx of new users. We're gonna put in our own resources and match them with the funding from this proposal to make that a reality.... and if we don't succeed, the DHF gets all of the money back.
Get 9,000+ new Hivers or pay $0. That is the offer we're making to the Hive community. We know we can achieve it and we're betting on ourselves because we'll have to pay all the costs of marketing if this plan doesn't work and we do in fact return the DHF funding.
I think this is a pivotal moment to onboard new Hivers and it makes me very excited to think about the coming year when we 2x the social user base of Hive which will ultimately benefit every single dApp in this ecosystem.
When I was doing this, I tried most approaches on a smaller scale before moving to brand awareness almost entirely.
The best results by far were related to Ecency and the mobile app. Nothing else came even remotely close.
Onboarding via influencer affiliate link on Hiveonboard had terrible results. On a sample of a 100 created accounts only 1 actually made it into a dapp and none of them made a post. They simply didnt know what to do with the keys.
And I would know this because id have to try and explain how to do it in the comments of the influencer videos.
Without this you have very little chance of any mainstream success.
Yes. I mean the proposal is fairly long but it doesnt actually cover specifics. I was kind of dissapointed with that. But I assume they didnt want to spend time brainstorming before the proposal passes.
Yes, but its very easy to remove support if unhappy with results.
Hey man, we are definitely doing a deep dive on each of the sections very soon, we have something prepared for this but of course, the proposal is already way too long to squeeze in details on each section.
I'm about to reply to your main comment but this one is faster to tackle hehe.