I wanted to talk about network effects. And ended up coming up with more questions than answers.
Network effects can have profound impact on user growth and retention. If two of your closest friends are active on Hive it is more likely that you will also become active on Hive. If a few extra people see, read, and engage with your blog post, you feel like the network has more value.
If more people are putting more social energy into the network, it has more value. There is also more demand for network resources (Hive Power) and more demand for the network’s currency (Hive/HBD). And more reasons for new developers to build on the network. Having more bodies in the door solves a lot of problems. But it’s a hard problem to solve. So how do we create more network effects that work in favor of the Hive community?
An end goal would be for every crypto project to feel like it’s crucial to create and maintain their audience on Hive. How do we get there? This struck me after @acidyo pointed out that CZ_Binance long ago published blogs on Steemit.
How do you get people to come? ‘Build it and they will come’ is a false promise. Most of the people who could come have very little attention left to pay us. We have to get in front of them somehow.
HivePOSH is a start. Broadcasting links to Hive network properties has a chance of getting in front of someone who might want to join the network. There’s a chance they won’t get it right away, and it will take a few times of clicking a LeoFinance link before they realize something interesting lurks beneath the surface.
How do we amplify that and build a really strong Hive brand?
- Do we attend more conferences to get in front of people there?
- Do we go out and publish content online where there are other readers - like LinkedIn and Medium?
- Do we pay people to try Hive and hope that they stick around?
- Do we focus more on the apps and marketing the apps to appropriate audiences? I.e. get LeoFinance in front of folks who write about business, crypto, finance.
Are we even ready to receive a lot of attention? Maybe the onboarding experience needs to be really polished first.
Here’s an idea. What if we made a really solid one-pager for getting started on . And then push out the PDF everywhere imaginable. Post it on university campuses, blast it out to email lists, send out mass snail mail. Would that work?
There are good reasons to care about this. If you are reading this, chances are you have stake in the network. Making the network more valuable, benefits you (and everyone else). And, Hive actually helps people in many parts of the world (see Ghana and Venezuela for examples). But Hive can only help people if they know about it and they try using it, learn about it.
What do you think?
Respectfully,
Cleanthes
This is [HiveBloPoMo-2022-Post4].