Welcome!

are hub funded activities responsible for the disruption of the dashdirect debit card?

No, not in any manner.

Let's get after it ladies and gentlemen. There is nothing wrong with the product. It works right now, today. In fact, Dash is the most sophisticated crypto on the planet for the specific use case as money. Sure, we have a bunch of very cool stuff in the pipeline. So why are we ranked.......84? Because outside of the Dash community, nobody knows this. The ONLY thing that stands between us and tremendous success is marketing. Efficient, scientific, effective marketing.

The Marketing Hub is the biggest tool we have to grow our marketing arm at the moment.

We are at a critical juncture. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that this is a life or death moment for Dash. If we do not make a big and effective marketing splash, it is conceivable that Dash slips out of the top 100 on CMC. If that happens, we have lost.

We have just gone through a big shakeup in the leadership on Core. Right now, we need effective marketing to get the price up and increase our user base. This will invariably lead to more transactions. That makes the budget more effective. A bigger and more effective Treasury gives us the resources to beef up marketing even more. It also makes room for additional personnel to take some of the stress off Core and the Dev team. This is the path to victory. It is the only path to victory.

Do not be distracted by politics and "sides". Humans are deeply wired for tribalism. It is extremely tempting to label people and groups within the Dash community as "us vs them". I get it, but fighting amongst ourselves will get us nowhere. We need to put that behind us and get on with the actual work of building honest money for the world. Our only real opponent is the legacy banking system.

Marketing, marketing and more marketing. Vote yes.

solarguy

how have you determined that the hub provides "effective marketing"?

They will be doing extensive A/B testing and they are actively seeking new ideas and new participants so the funds go disproportionately to the advertising and not the overhead and admin. All done out in the open. Social media marketing is a well developed and understood process. Define the target audience(s), develop the message(s) and then do extensive A/B testing with that audience and that message and refine the message and distribution to achieve optimal results. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Are there other avenues that meet those criterion right now?

I can assure you that there will be measurable and published kpi's.

If you're going to quote me, please quote me correctly and in context. Where did I say that I have determined that the Marketing Hub provides effective marketing? They just got started. They have had a drop in the bucket for resources to work with compared to lots of other teams. Ryan said so himself (with regard to what we had spent to date on marketing.)

What I have determined is that the process they have set up should be very effective and also designed to evolve rapidly as we collect data. Historically, we have not done this much.

Do you disagree with my statement that they are the biggest marketing tool we have at the moment?

Solarguy

If I recall correctly the hub started in August. I don't find your excuses for their lack of results compelling. That is 7 months of operations. You, nor the proposal, present evidence to suggest the hub can generate results. Your argument that they do not have enough funds doesn't even make sense considering they have funds left over from previous proposals.

You are suggesting we need to vote to support this proposal to get effective marketing or Dash will die. This is an accurate summary. I did not distort your words. You should be able to clarify your position with something substantive if you are going to suggest the hub will safe the life of dash.

Regarding your question, the size of the tool is irrelevant. Results are relevant. I'm asking if you can point to any results that would suggest this is how Dash should be marketed. Marketing is a skill and a profession, if the people running the hub are funding things that don't generate results for many months with many hundreds of Dash that would suggest they don't know what they are doing and/or they are incapable of producing meaningful results. More time and more dash is unlikely to change this. Do you have results that suggest otherwise?

Is there any meaningful alternative?

Do you have an upcoming competing proposal?

Are there other alternatives that meet those criterion?

You realize they still have 190 Dash that they have been saving so it can be used to best effect when DashDirect is fully released and The ThorChain integration goes live? There is little use in pumping a feature that's not tested and live.

You realize that there was a substantial drop in the Dash price in the last 3 months, further hampering the roadmap? Did I mention that there will be measurable and reported kpis?

I don't find your lack of alternatives compelling. It's easy to complain. It's harder to offer constructive criticism.

solarguy

Doing things simply for the sake of it is not compelling. We're effectively suppressing the price by funding this, the exact opposite of your stated goals.

300 dash x $109/dash = $32,700 per month that could be spent on a professional marketer(s). If the hub took the money to hire a pro that could be a good use of the funds (provided it yielded tangible results). That is not what is proposed however.

Instead you are proposing that we create an entity (the hub) that will be competing with any future marketing endeavors for funds, while also signaling that we, the MNOs, have no standards or idea what we are doing.

I have no conflicts of interest. I am simply speaking in a straight forward manner. The DAO needs to purchase results. If there are no proposals that offer results at this time that is a problem, certainly. Pretending that this proposal somehow solves that problem does not help in any meaningful way and likely does harm. Nor does deflecting responsibility asking me all these silly questions.

If the DAO simply created a fund to hire a competent marketer(s) in the future that would be preferable to this proposal. So would not creating new inflationary dash supply in the first place. I am all for us working on a plan on how to attract marketing talent to Dash. If I recall, that is how the marketing hub was sold to us originally. It has seemingly failed to deliver.

Some details on funding can be found here https://mnowatch.org/proposalowners/?po=the_desert_lynx note that they have not spent all the funds yet as they are synchronising with the full release of Dash Direct which is almost ready.

Also, while you suggest using a professional outfit for marketing, note that we have tried that, most recently with Arden who burned through much more money than the hub and had fewer results to show for it. The reason the hub works is because it leverages grass roots movements and word of mouth promotion which is how messages spread in the cryptoshphere, unfortunately, we are early and the traditional marketing companies have no idea how to talk to this generation using this tech, nor do you.

The hearts and minds will be won on twitter, youtube, instagram, tiktok and other similar socials. Dash needs to be present where ever crypto is being discussed or where ever a crypto person frequents. This is something the staff at the hub intrinsically understand and something our marketing led by DCG to date has absolutely failed to understand.

Give the hub a chance, let's see how they promote the full launch of the Dash Direct product, which will provide contact-less payments, integration with applepay, samusng pay and others and a physical card, all without KYC and without you giving up control of your funds. If after this you are still dissatisfied we can talk again.

To Socrates,

You say, "The Dao needs to purchase results."

What Key Performance Indicator(s) would you suggest for evaluating or purchasing said results?
What professional marketer or marketing company would give us those results prior to us paying them?

Note that using the Marketing Hub does not preclude professional marketing people.

Which of the previous professional marketing firms and marketing people hired by Dash produced those well defined desirable results?

How exactly is the price being suppressed by this proposal?

solarguy

>What Key Performance Indicator(s) would you suggest for evaluating or purchasing said results?

Ultimately that is up to the marketing proposal owners is it not? I imagine the point of marketing dash is to drive demand up. Demand goes up from people buying more dash or people using dash more (provided they are acquiring / replacing the Dash they are spending, rather than just selling their dash which would be sell pressure). Any KPI should be directly related to driven demand. So it could be a partnership with an exchange that can quantify dash purchases or a merchant that can quantify qualified purchases made with dash or evidence of a purchase from a large financial institution of some kind. As long as the KPI maps logically from the activities of the marketer to a related increase in demand. I don't think we'll see marketing proposals offer these kpis if we continue to fund proposals that do not offer what results to expect in writing. Your focus on supporting the hub seems to be entirely process driven (what the hub can do and how they will do it administratively) rather than result driven.


>What professional marketer or marketing company would give us those results prior to us paying them?

I don't understand this comment. The way the treasury works is that successful proposal owners get paid upfront.

>Note that using the Marketing Hub does not preclude professional marketing people.

Are you aware of the marketing hub being run or hiring marketing professionals? Perhaps the hub could be a good tool if run by a marketing professional but that is not what we are talking about funding with this proposal. Is there discussion to make this happen?

>Which of the previous professional marketing firms and marketing people hired by Dash produced those well defined desirable results?

I think DACH embassy probably came the closest they seemed to have successfully grown a group of German dash buyers but so far no one I am aware of has produced highly desirable results captured by clean straightforward KPIs. I think the early days where we funded meetups also probably led to dash demand and we could figure out how to capture that info but for some reason that was deemed as not moving the needle and abandoned. I know personally I purchased tezos after attending a tezos meetup. Still, your point stands, we have not been doing the right marketing up until now and repeating the same old will continue to not work. The Dash LATAM merchant onboarding had the right idea in some ways but the timing was not right and perhaps the market was wrong and the people we hired were fudging the numbers (helped on by dash force news). I can imagine a similar project in Russia for instance being more successful now where they would value the unrestricted nature of dash.

>How exactly is the price being suppressed by this proposal?
If the marketing is ineffective it doesn't create demand. That makes the funds being sold by the people in the hub sell pressure. The hub should be able to point to $X worth of new dash purchased as a result of their actions but seemingly it results in hundreds of dash per month in sell pressure.

I can't make it any clearer. You say, and I quote, "The DAO needs to purchase results." And yet you provide no method to do that. Please enlighten us. Paying money to a professional marketing person or group is no guarantee of getting those results. We have seen that exact problem with several pros hired by Core.

solarguy

I can't make it any clearer. No amount of deflection, blame, accusations are taking away from the fact that you are vocally supporting this proposal while at the same time acknowledging that it is ineffective. It is totally illogical. I can only assume that your behavior is driven by fear. Like a cornered animal. The sad part is the increasing yes vote count. It appears the majority of MNOs are scared and acting illogically. Look back at this comment thread. You provide no defense for the funding of this proposal yet you are advocating for it very aggressively. When it fails to ever provide results, I hope you have the strength to acknowledge your role in it and take accountability. Seeing as you don't believe the hub should be held accountable for its results, I am not hopeful you will.

You are distorting my words. I do not say hiring a pro would guarantee results. In fact I explicitly say "hire a pro that could be a good use of the funds (provided it yielded tangible results)"

This is really pathetic behavior on display.

Are you suggesting a marketing professional can not produce results? Otherwise I don't see how what you said is relevant.

" The reason the hub works..."
Please, provide some evidence otherwise this is just the begging the question logical fallacy. Weak/deceptive rhetoric.

"Intrinsic"
I've never seen someone use this word and win an argument. I believe the kids on tiktok call this cope.
Why don't the hub staff have results on these social platforms to back up your claims?

Comparing them to DCG efforts is as meaningless as complaining that there are no other competitive marketing proposals to fund instead of the hub. It is basically misdirection.

I'm not sure I want to talk to you if you can't have an on-topic conversation about results and expectations of the DAO's spend.

Why do you not report the growth (or lack thereof) of the social media accounts you are financing with DAO funds. Are you not to be judged on the results of growing these channels? What sort of assurance is it that rather than addressing these tepid results with new strategies and insights, the hub leadership suggests instead to have "continued to build and solidify our social media distribution channels," whatever that means.

There appears to be little to show for the hundreds of dash funneled through the hub to date. Where are the positive results of the hub and how are they being measured? One would think these results would manifest itself as a growing number of new subscribers on social media accounts, or greater levels of engagement, or ideally from greater demand for Dash on exchanges as a result of marketing efforts. It is not clear we are seeing any of this as a result of the hubs efforts. Leading me to question what is the point? Are we simply repeating previous failed marketing efforts but with a slightly different funding and administrative structure?

If I am wrong about the lack of results kindly point to outcome metrics that justify the hubs continued funding.

Hi Socrates,

I have read all of your answers, and I appreciate your enthusiasm trying to make Dash better. On that, we are together.

Our social media accounts had to grow from 0, which is a very challenging task considering that Twitter, Instagram and TikTok are completely flooded with scam projects competing for engagement.

Even with that, we've had a good beginning with a few bumps along the road. Here are a few stats:

- Our Twitter Account got 1.1 Million impressions in the last 91 days, with 1,300 new URL clicks, most of which were to our DashDirect link. This Account is also incentivizing our community to be more active, and it’s effectively gathering the attention of other communities, like the THORChads.

- Our Instagram account reached 5,783 different accounts in the last 90 days. I believe that as soon as we can make content with the new DashDirect cards this number will increase dramatically.

- Our TikTok Account got 2,586 views in the last 60 days (TikTok does not show data beyond that). As I mentioned before, we’ve had some bumps along the road, and TikTok has been one of them. We had an Account Operator that was not putting enough effort into the publications, and after trying to work with him multiple times, we had to let him go to look for better candidates. TheDesetLynx took the role until we found that Camila, our Instagram lady, was available to be over it. (BTW, Camila manages her own account with 35k + followers in Instagram).

- Our LinkedIn Account grew to 2,909 followers. Tracking engagement in TikTok is tricky since most people use it for work and what you like shows up in your profile. Blake has been daily posting in 52 crypto groups and targeting people from ConFlip, for example.

- Worth mentioning is that our other efforts are also generating engagement and impressions outside of the accounts we manage. Our graphics and memes bounties generate content accessible to all the community, and some posts have over 10k impressions (that we are aware off, there might be posts with more, but we don’t have all the data).


Regarding your professional marketers comment, there is an issue that you might not be having in mind: Professional marketers need resources on top of their salaries to produce numbers, especially in the crypto world. Sadly, almost every major publisher of crypto news, almost every large crypto youtuber only publishes content that they have been paid to produce, and paid in enormous quantities. Just to give you an example, an article on Coindesk can cost you many, many thousands of USD easily, regardless of your professionality as a marketer.

You are also missing the point of the HUB. The HUB was created to incentive the community to come together and market Dash while being rewarded for it. The concept is so new and revolutionary that we need to be able to fail in some things in order to learn the proper lessons.

Also, if you think you can do better, please come and tell us how, in real and practical ways. We are also open to work with you if you have good marketing ideas. Please contact me on discord if you are interested.

Peace,
Pozo

If I was petty I would make a big deal about you acknowledging that the hub is failing. You claim it is new and revolutionary, I am not convinced but it seems not to matter. The scared MNOs are hoping you can pull off some results. Let's see if you can reward them for their illogical hope.

Getting impressions from people who already support Dash is not useful marketing. At least in my opinion. The growth of the accounts with new followers seemingly should be the main priority with a downstream focus on generating more demand for Dash. Hopefully in a way that is somehow quantifiable. Again, the MNOs seem not to care, so you can likely continue to just say you are doing great things and they will take your word for it.

You do mention in your post an area where perhaps the hub can be judged quantifiably- " The HUB was created to incentive the community to come together and market Dash while being rewarded for it."

How is that going? Are the number of people working with the hub growing? Is it a large number? By what rate? What are your target numbers? What strategies are you employing to grow the number of marketers? What has worked and what has not? I'm curious why this information isn't party of the original proposal text. It seems relevant. Either the hub is, as you say, growing the community or it is being run, operated, and executed by a handful of people who should be held accountable for results.

Jeez, there's no making you happy. You ask for growth numbers on the social media accounts, and (apparently) nothing else will do. Then Pozo gives you those numbers, which are pretty good numbers and growing substantially, and then you move the goalposts.

"Getting impressions from people who already support Dash is not useful marketing." Straight up not true. Sure, it's your opinion, which you are entitled to, but I don't see the truth of that at all.

"If I was petty I would make a big deal about you acknowledging that the hub is failing."
Sorry, where does Pozo acknowledge that the hub is failing.

solarguy

because I have this thing called memory, I recognize those numbers don't = growth. No one would pay out of pocket for those "substantial" growth results. Not you, not anyone.

"concept is so new and revolutionary that we need to be able to fail"

Just remember to apologize in the future when this project crumbles to nothing and think twice before opening your mouth.

Hi Socrates,

It seems like I didn´t communicate well enough when I said: "The concept is so new and revolutionary that we need to be able to fail in some things in order to learn the proper lessons."

Let me explain a little further:

With our bounty structure, anyone can bring ideas and get rewarded if two or more admins see potential in them.

The fact that a concept has potential does not mean that it will work for sure in the real world, it only means that it´s worth throwing a few Dash to see what results we get. We tend to be pretty conservative with this, as you can see in our reports above.

When an idea works, we learn a lesson. When an idea does not work, we also learn a lesson. This process takes time, but it's great because it allows us to learn what works from the real world. This is allowing us to make better choices to allocate funds moving forward, which greatly benefits everyone.


Regarding your comment: "Just remember to apologize in the future when this project crumbles to nothing and think twice before opening your mouth.", we are all trying our best in here.
I already invited you to come and help us improve, but of course, you ignored it.

I will apologize for the things I do wrong, as I am not a perfect person by any means, but I will not apologize for trying. I will also not "shut my mouth" just because you would like me to. If I have meaningful things to say and / or to contribute, I will talk.

Peace,
Pozo

Why exactly do you think he would need to personally apologize if this project fails?