Nu Marketing Roadmap

Development Roadmap
#1

Introduction: I’d like to present a first draft of a marketing roadmap for Nu over the next eighteen to twenty-four months. It builds upon the branding vs. business development discussion I started. My intentions for sharing this roadmap are two-fold:

  1. I’m hoping that our community will see with more clarity what our marketing strategy is, and where they can contribute their energy.

  2. I’m hoping we can begin to change the existing culture of passivity. Right now the culture of Nu (and in Peercoin as far as I can tell) seems to favor letting a “marketing guy” handle everything and anything. That’s not scalable or efficient. My desired future state is one where I can act as a facilitator to get business development activities started, while focusing a good portion of my energy on brand maintenance for all Nu properties.

If the objectives of this roadmap are met, every shareholder will feel empowered to begin their own decentralized marketing projects using the tools that are provided on www.nubits.com and this forum.

Stage 1: Branding – NuBits and NuShares focusCOMPLETE

Purpose: To solely focus on basic branding activities, such as repeating our core benefits and taglines in various channels, answering questions in social media, and building some basic tools on www.nubits.com like NuBippy. This is the stage where we will solidify our strategic marketing platform.

Expected timeline: Q4 2014 to end of Q1 2015.

Core activities:

  • Completing brainstorming discussion around two specific futurist scenarios:

  1. Imagine Nu: 2016

  2. Imagine Nu: 2020

  • Finalizing the next upgrade of www.nubits.com. These new pages will contain live metrics and data about the Nu network.

  • Basic social media messaging of core branding benefits to a broad audience. Key messages include “NuBits is the world’s first stable digital currency”, “NuBits are always $1.00 US” and “#AlwaysADollar”. No specific targeting of groups will occur yet.

  • Completing a three-minute introductory marketing video. We are currently recording audio and basic storyboard animations.

  • Educating community newcomers on discuss.nubits.com.

  • Continuing to encourage Peercoin and other cryptocurrency community members to get involved with NuBits. Our Google Analytics reports show that people who are referred to NuBits spend over five times (5x) as long engaging with our content as opposed to people who find the site on their own. It speaks to the necessity in this stage of targeting existing users in cryptocurrency as opposed to using a shotgun approach directed at any and all consumers.

  • Completing basic interviews when approached by media sources

  • Building out basic merchant support tools on www.nubits.com

Stage completion criteria:

  1. All major protocol adjustments are finalized.COMPLETE
    There will always be new features added to the Nu network, but we need to reach a point where a user can understand how NuShares will be valued. This is not currently possible until a finalized currency burning proposal is implemented.

  2. Mobile wallet is complete.COMPLETE Why is this such an early requirement? Because the future of NuBits is on mobile. As Nu adoption spreads across the world the user demographics will change, but right now our “Innovator/Tech Enthusiast” segment is very homogeneous. As it stands today, if you are an adopter of NuBits and participate on these forums it’s reasonably likely that you have access to online banking. If stuck using a desktop computer, I would much rather use my dollars on a site like the Bank of America rather than risking holding my funds in NBT.

A mobile wallet on the other hand re-frames the user experience and introduces a less risky use behavior that will appeal to a great deal of people. Right now there’s occasional external criticism surrounding a future NBT peg collapse because people are imagining their entire bank accounts denominated in NBT, which is very unlikely. People are far more likely (at least in the short-term) to use NBT as an electronic token for small amounts. When people download our NBT mobile wallet most of them will keep between 1 and 1000 NBT on hand for small transactions. Using small amounts of NBT in a mobile wallet is a safer way to try out the network in its early stages.

In my opinion only, our NuBits mobile wallet is going to be the innovation that accelerates user adoption substantially.

Once these two stage completion criteria are met, we can begin Stage 2.

Stage 2: Grassroots Business Development – NuBits focus

Purpose: To begin external marketing activities geared towards “Early Adopters and Visionaries”, with an explicit goal of actively searching for new avenues of growth and promotion for NuBits.

Expected timeline: Q2 2015 to Q1 2016

Core activities:

  • Creation of a marketing-specific subforum that can create task forces, communities of practice, and other informal groups.

  • Targeted merchant adoption in one small urban center at a time, one per month. We will pick a city and the community will distribute marketing material to any business they can find. The goal will be to get enough momentum to generate network effects in a small locale.

  • Actively approaching media outlets for interviews

  • Regularly releasing press releases to our database of crypto-friendly news sources

  • More aggressive article commenting. Anywhere Bitcoin volatility is written about, NuBits should be mentioned in the article comments. I’ve already seen @desrever starting to do this which is awesome. Anywhere Bitshares is mentioned, NuShares should be too.

  • Creation of comparison infographics (Nu vs. Bitshares will likely be the first if no significant new competitors emerge). Infographics spread like wildfire in social media and on forums and allow us to control the message.

  • Creation of Wikipedia page and Nu-specific wiki

  • Recruitment of specialists (economists, academics, developers, etc.) identified in “Imagine Nu” Stage 1 futurist discussions.

  • Development of tools identified in “Imagine Nu” Stage 1 futurist discussions.

  • Development of mobile-specific advertising campaigns in communications channels like Google, Coinmarketcap, etc.

  • Creation of localized NuBits social media channels in multiple languages, including Chinese, Arabic, Dutch, Russian, etc.

Stage completion milestones:

  1. NuBits or NuShares reaches top 5 in market capitalization on coinmarketcap.com

  2. Discuss.nubits.com reaches 10,000 members

  3. A retailer with >$1M in annual sales accepts NBT as a payment option

Once these three stage completion criteria are met, we can begin Stage 3.

Stage 3: Mass Business Development – NuBits focus

Purpose: To begin external marketing activities geared towards “Early Majority”.

Expected timeline: Beyond Q1 2016. It is ideal if this stage coincides with Bitcoin’s forecasted troubles in mid-2016 due to the block-reward halving.

Core activities:

  • Largely uncertain at this time. It is expected that establishing partnerships with large merchants and payment providers will be a primary focus.

Stage completion milestones:

  • Uncertain

Summary: This is a tentative marketing roadmap that is intended to encourage meaningful discussion within the Nu community. I would like to find out what your opinion is on the proposed activities, timelines, and completion milestones. I would also like you to propose new activities to add to the roadmap. If successful, this roadmap should encourage more shareholder-driven marketing projects as opposed to developer-driven marketing projects. The goal of Nu is maximum decentralization and so the goal of Nu marketing should be no different.

12 Likes
Robert Sams – Stable Cryptocurrencies, Seigniorage Shares, Swiss Coin Group,
Enable easy selling/buying Nubits with e-currency USD
NuBits PR Services
NuBits PR Services
NuBit Promotion Strategy
Want to spend few hours everyday to promote Nubits
NuShares Supply Greatly Exceeds Demand
Stage 2 Marketing Roadmap – Launch!
#2

I am glad this roadmap puts an emphasis on the mobile wallet. I think this is a huge opportunity if we can make it easy to use. Personally, I’m going to use it to send money to my brother who lives on the opposite coast. We share a family plan, so being able to send him money without the volatility, might get him to actually look into cryptocurrencies and “accept” it. It would just be another app on his phone to him and I could teach him how to exchange it for USD at a leisurely rate.

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#3

Good work and thanks for making the effort and I like the emphasis on the mobile wallet(s) too :slight_smile: , I know some work is underway in this segment, and I think we can deliver a few nice apps supporting NuBits before Christmas. So this part is definitely feasible.

Nushares
The valuation and positioning of NuShares is important. The currency burning proposal will help with that. However I think it is more important to focus on the potential benefits/dividends. Without setting expectation too high, I think it should be better advertised what a given amount of NuShares might deliver on dividends assuming some scenarios. I know this information is partially in the grant, but some consolidated supporting graphs and data on the website or even in the client would be desirable in the next months.

Marketing Fund for NuBits
You are referring to the Peercoin community regarding the marketing. You might know that River333 and I are running a Marketing Fund (like a custodial grant) with a charter on how people may draw PPC from this in order to do some Peercoin marketing. Read more here: http://www.peercointalk.org/index.php?board=66.0 for the marketing charter and the proposals submitted. I would say it is a moderate success, but it should do better.

The question is do you think such a set-up would work for NuBits? The advantage is that we don’t need to bother stakeholders with every little activity, but still have a robust process available to assess proposals and distribute the funds. The other advantage is that people can earn NuBits and that it will be proven as an usable token with a stable value.

Long-term plan
A lot of the long-term plans should be delivered by the wider community. A more pro-active approach than with Peercoin may be required to get a few things done. E.g. people can subscribe to a given proposal and bid. Haven’t seen this working very well till date probably due to the volatility of Peercoin, but it is worth experimenting further with it. Maybe with the help of tools like Openbazaar it will become more popular to earn cryptocurrencies. Also the stability of the value of NuBits will surely help. Nothing feels as bad as seeing your hard earned money get 20% less worth in a week or so and sometimes even before it is in your wallet.

Also like to hear your view or from others regarding things like releasing press releases and interviews. This requires some centralisation and a visible person. This is something we could never solve in the Peercoin community unless we hire professionals which would be very expensive and risky given other agendas they might have.

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#4

Will the community have an opportunity to participate in the video development process? This seemed to be effective for the Peercoin video. On the other hand, the nubits website has been so well done without community involvement that I’m inclined to leave the video entirely to the core Nubits team.

#5

Thank you for sharing this roadmap. Although it might change (I can imagine to include other actions/topics to stages…) I like the steps that are pointed out.
I think this roadmap describes a feasible way to contiue the good work that has become visible when nubits went live (already having lots of important pieces aboard like wallets for the main operating sytems, forum, block explorer, exchanges to trade NBT, etc.)
Focussing on important topics to continue this good work and working on them in the right order while not trying to do everything at once or trying to do things that rely on others (which need to be done before) is very welcome.

…I’m absolutely keen on the mobile wallet (from the Android wallet thread):

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#6

The mobile wallet is great. It’s something that well be incredibly useful to have ready to go when momentum starts picking up. Combine that with the currency burn and general protocol updates, and I’d feel ready to scream about NuBits from the rooftops.

“NuBits is the world’s first stable digital currency”

I ask because I’ve heard it before, and I know I will again. What say you to the BitShares crowd when they say BitUSD was the first stable cryptocurrency?

#7

Either NBT stays stable and BitUSD doesn’t or it won’t be able to say the truth by claiming that Nubits is the world’s first stable crypto currency.
…marketing wise it sounds good, though…

#8

Well planned, I really feel we are aimed far.

I have so many positive things to say but I will just comment on a couple points I personally consider weak . When you read my comment please consider my angle : I have a decently extended startup and merchant experience.

Where is the plan for e-commerce?

In phase 2 :

Imho, this cannot happen that early unless we add two milestones to phase 1 :

  1. Build or integrate with multiple payment processor for online shops
  2. Build or integrate a payment processor for physical shops.

How can we possibly go approaching business owners if there is no way for them to accept NuBits?

Before going to shops we need to get some adoption online, where NuBIts belong the most imho. Its a no brainer, and in this concern I invite you to comment on the CoinPayment proposal .

Imho, and please correct me if I am wrong, we need to plan and execute another phase where we get NuBits accepter wherever we see a coinpayments-ready shop (aka here) .

They can literally accept with two clicks, they are probably already crypto-educated merchants and for us, it is just the cost of one email. After we get some acceptance there, we can expand to non-coinpayments merchants.

And after that offline.

Imho.

Where is the niche? Who needs a 1$ coin?

I had problems identifying one or more clear targets in your proposal. Who are we aiming at? You mentioned previously crypto adopter. Thats fair enough but we need to be more specific, focus on a market niche and develop there. In any successful story of startups that scaled up, you can find this pattern.

To build adoption *we need to start by finding those markets/groups/individuals/organisations that are in desperate need of a stable cryptocurrency *.

Take a look at what people is saying here and here to get a rough idea . Arbitrage, remittance, loans, scratch cards, salaries, crowdfunding, coinpayments-ready ecommmerce, crypto-captchas with PoP are all good examples of what I meant above. These are all good markets, with different targets that will require a different toolkit : different campaign(s), different slogan(s), different software(s), same coin.

There is no way around it, otherwise people will just say “interesting idea, congrats” or “wow” at the most, or “NSR to the moon” . We don’t need that, we need markets to sell. bitUSD failed here and I don’t want to see NuBits failing for the same reason : look at them (and eliminate other kinds of concerns) : in terms of marketing, they are already in phase 2 or 3 or 10: they have a huge community, organisation, and biz dev. Yet, they market volume its below 1k $ at times. That’s by far less than the bar where I get my morning coffee. We need to study and learn from their failure to avoid being another.

Find a niche, attack it aggressively, listen to their needs and grow with them organically. We can’t just go out in the street to the average-crypto-joe now : I give regular workshops about cryptos and I learned that it takes on average between 4 and 8 hours for the average smart listener to be convinced that bitcoin can be a good idea. Its a steep learning curve and we are talking about an established reality such a bitcoin. I can’t imagine this with NuBits : it takes much longer to convince the informed user.

We need first to find people that need NuBits, hard, and selling to them a whole bunch of them. Take them onboard, listen to what they say and treat them as clients. If we don’t sell NBT, shareholders will eventually loose their confidence long-term.

We need to be successful in finding our early adopters, fast, and sorry but I will never stop repeating this. I am sure there is no need to cite research data backing my claims, I am sure you know already the literature.

What can we learn from others?

In the plan I would like to read an educated competitor analysis : where did they fail? Where did they do good? How are we different (or better)? Why is bitUSD market volume so funny? How do we plan in communicating those differences?

That’s the first question I get asked when explaining nubits . “What are other examples ? are you the first? how is it different?”

We need a clear analysis and strategy to be able to differentiate properly and learn from their mistakes and successes.

I am curious in knowing what are your considerations in the regards of my comments.
Sorry if I missed some parts of your posts where you already answer my questions in your plan, its sunday morning and I had little time but wanted to say this.

Cheers

2 Likes
#9

@desrever I think it’s premature to declare bitUSD a failure. In spite of their ongoing turmoil, the bitUSD market peg appears to be holding. Their community is bigger – at least based on the activity of the message boards – and are dedicated to their cause to the point of fanaticism.

Here are the differences between NuBits and bitUSD as I see them:

  • Nu uses two tokens that distinctly separate ownership of the network and the currency. NuBits enter the market only when they are purchased with real currency. bitUSD are backed entirely by BTSX (soon to be called BTS, I believe) and are created and destroyed by traders responding to market forces, which serves to maintain the peg.

  • There are no actual dollars in the Bitshares system, making bitUSD a collateralized derivative of BTSX. The peg is completely dependent on trading activity to absorb volatility introduced by the price of BTSX. If confidence in BTSX were to seriously erode, this would put the peg in peril. NuBits is not exposed to this risk.

  • The custodians are providing NuBits with a significant liquidity advantage at the present time. There is nothing preventing bitUSD from attaining similar or even higher liquidity if market makers see profit opportunities. Because bitUSD market makers are only going to respond to customer demand, however, it appears the liquidity of the system will grow incrementally. It’s essentially a chicken-and-egg problem.

  • The money collected when NuBits are sold into the market is used for a variety of purposes including paying the custodians, shareholder dividends, development projects and most important – fueling the exchange liquidity pools. Because all the input funds are not available for NuBit redemption, it can be characterized as a fractional reserve. This situation has emboldened the Bitshares lead developer to declare NuBits a Ponzi scheme, a characterization also made by some Austrian school economists in their assessment of fractional reserve banking. Although all modern governments run their currencies with central banks using fractional reserves, an insurance system is usually in place to deal with bank runs. NuBits does not have any depositor insurance.

  • Control of Bitshares is arguably centralized, almost entirely in the hands of the lead developer. Projects, goals, and direction change so quickly that one must monitor their forums daily to stay on top of the rapid evolution. It’s fine to be ambitious and set lofty goals, but this inevitably leads to over-promising, excessive complexity, dilution of effort, and inability to deliver in a timely fashion. Markets generally react negatively to such uncertainty. The lesson NuBits can learn from this is to keep it as simple as possible, avoid the hype, stay committed to the stated goals, and execute your strategy with the utmost of professionalism.

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#10

Is there any word on a tipping bot for Reddit or other websites? I am curious what would happen if the bot said “You’ve been tipped $0.98 (0.98 NBT).” In other words, try and make it so that it is understandable that the dollar amount you have been tipped will always be that dollar amount. I think nearly any performer or artist would rather be tipped in a stable currency than a volatile one.

#11

Thank you for this great comparison between bitUSD and NBT!
It looks like I need to learn more about the Bitshares system, because some of what you’ve written (e.g. bitUSD being the collateralized derivative of BTSX) is new to me.
It might not be the worst idea to know what competitors do - maybe they have some clever thoughts :wink:

#12

@masterOfDisaster Bitshares is probably the most complex system in crypto-space. Potential problems with its collateralized derivatives were articulated in a controversial series of blog posts here:

BitMarmot saga prestonbyrne.com/2014/08/17/dont-walk-away-run/

A lot of vitriol was thrown at the author at the time this appeared. It’s important to note that the Bitshares lead developer has acknowledged the possibility of the posited black swan event, but dismisses it as highly improbable (see comments). Even if it does occur, it is assumed that faith in the Bitshares system will give it the needed resiliency.

This failure mode is not present in NuBits.

#13

BitUSD quantity may not be sufficient if demands is high due to the fixed pledge ratio(2:1?) , btw, they claim bitUSD is “asset” not “currency”. How ridiculous!

In this website http://coinmarketcap.com

They categorize both NSR and NBT as currency and in fact several hundreds of very very volatile “coins” claimed as “currency”. LOL

#14

Thank you for providing useful insights and your technical angle on btsx. However, please try not to steer away the conversation from the Marketing Roadmap. If we want to keep discussing btsx with that angle, we should open a new thread, and try not to make it look like the Nubits thread on their forum.

Here we are talking marketing, and the competitor analysis should answer the question : why are still people not buying it (being it a 1usd coin)?

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#15

I’ve referenced this a bit in private discussions, but NuShares adoption will drive NuBits adoption. Right now the vast majority of cryptocurrency users are involved because they would like to get wealthy, as opposed to more altruistic goals such as world peace. The two outcomes do not need to be mutually exclusive of course, but we will only attract Nu users at this stage if we can make a compelling case that it is profitable for users to do so.

The issue steers into questions of legality however. The Nu team has been very explicit that no IPO has been conducted, and that no promises of future financial performance will ever be made. “Expected dividends” becomes a problem in that regard. What I do favor is stronger reporting by our custodians showing more detailed dividend information of what they have distributed. @KTm and crew have been buried under the stresses of launching reliable custodial trading operations, but I’m sure they will slowly and surely improve the way dividend information is presented to the community. In general I favor “historical snapshots” of dividend distributions as opposed to speculation on the value of future distributions.

I think a few weeks ago @desrever presented some excellent ideas around having a custodian step up to run bounties that might cover guerilla-marketing style initiatives. I think it’s an excellent idea and I hope someone eventually submits a proposal for it. Maybe @desrever when NuBot and Phase 3 of the website are complete? Perhaps others?

I agree. As we move into Stage 2, it may make sense to find someone willing to be a communications professional for us. The volume of work right now does not merit it, but as we transition to more external-facing activities it would be very useful. I’m quite content working on branding planning and research, along with writing, but won’t ever be attending trade shows or conducting interviews with the Wall Street Journal. This is something we should keep in mind as we approach our Stage 2 completion milestones.

Thank you for your comments!

1 Like
#16

Prior to his departure David completed a significant portion of the marketing video work with a lot of help from the Nu development team. Much of this was actually done before this public forum even existed.

I’m currently working with a vendor to animate the concepts and complete audio/sound engineering tasks. I’m confident that the final product as delivered by the core development team will be well-received by the community. However, I expect that in the future big projects will require shareholder approval, and so the broader community will have a better opportunity to contribute and refine ideas.

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#17

I am sorry to hear David has departed, I hope he is well

A couple of comments on tomjoad’s initial post:

With regards to the creation of a comparison info graphic, “Nu vs Bitshares”, sounds slightly confrontational - better to describe it as “Nu and Bitshares”

I am not sure about the strategy of picking one urban centre at a time. This geographical emphasis runs counter to the internet/electronic nature of modern commerce. Perhaps a better approach is to concentrate on ATMs, or types of outlet

Regarding a niche market, which desrever asks about, how about betting or casino game websites? Such websites could be approached to see if they would incorporate payments via NuBits

#18

BitUSD is not a stand-alone digital currency. BitUSD is a complicated set of trading options that are unfortunately just repackaged exposures to Bitshares X. Writers such as Preston Byrne have done a more detailed analysis and description of why BitAssets and Bitshares X are one and the same.

NuBits are indeed the world’s first stable digital currency.

EDIT: @sportscliche referenced the same article as I did. Didn’t see until I scrolled down the page further.

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#19

I think you’re correct about this paragraph. How would you suggest I word the new milestone and activities for Phase 1? I could see a core activity being related to creation of Merchant resources on www.nubits.com that include badges like the ones Sentinel made and detailed technical documentation. We currently have a placeholder on the website for Merchant resources for this purpose.

You’re right that we should better define what characteristics each segment of users has at each stage of the product-life adoption cycle I described above. I’m in the initial stages of planning some market research activities using conjoint analysis to better define them.

I mentioned in the mobile wallet proposal that:

With that in mind, successful entrepreneurial ventures don’t need to be explicitly targeted to “desperate need”. There has never been a desperate need for animated animals being fired from slingshots, and yet Angry Birds has been a runaway success. It is about finding and discovering hidden latent wants of consumers and creating services that they enjoy. A working mobile wallet will cater to many of these hidden desires, and the market research I’m going to undertake will allow us to better discover how each of these hidden segments responds to different motivators. I think we’re in agreement from your next paragraph:

Mobile wallet spending for small transactions between friends will be an important first niche in the early stages of the network. There are of course others. As confidence in the peg grows over time, more professional applications will begin to be considered more seriously by our users.

No argument from me!

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#20

@sportscliche I enjoy reading your posts, they are always concise and factual. Thank you for the contribution.

I think @desrever is right, your post may actually be a good starting point for a new thread exploring design differences between NuBits and our competitors. For those users who don’t want to read our entire white paper, a forum thread is far more accessible.