Thanks @Jonathan for initiating this thread. It’s really great to see these incredible ideas coming from the community. This post also triggered me to share some of my own thoughts on where I see we stand today and how can we start incorporating some of these community ideas.
As a quick background, I am the VP of Growth at DFINITY. My team is responsible for helping build our developer ecosystem, manage our grants program amongst other things. The notes below are just my opinion and I am using this as a way to seek more inputs from the community.
As a growth focused person, I always think of things in the form of flywheels. So my thought process has always been to create core growth flywheels for IC.
Here is one core growth flywheel we are chasing right now:
- Attract Entrepreneurs/Developers —>
- Help them become successful (technical support, grants/funding, UI/UX, PR, marketing, etc.) i.e. help them get to a point that they can build a vibrant user community around their product (and eventually becomes a self sustaining economy) —>
- Showcase their success stories (social, press, interviews, community) i.e help the teams attract more users and help IC attract more Entrepreneurs/Developers —>
(Back to step 1. Rinse and repeat)
tl;dr - IC is going to be successful once the entrepreneurs/developers building on IC are successful in attracting/retaining users and created sustained economic activity.
Now to bootstrap this flywheel, we have to think of all the ways we can attract a critical mass of entrepreneurs/developers on IC. Hence, the first problem we as a community need to solve is how to drive “Awareness + Interest” around IC?
In my mind building “Awareness + Interest” is a function of the following things:
1: Helping find a true product market fit
2: Crafting the right message
3: Building channels to constantly deliver that message
#1: Helping find a true product market fit:
Ensuring that what we are building is solving a real pain point. In our case it involves constantly talking to developers and understanding “Why” they are here to build on IC. I wouldn’t talk too much about this topic as I believe lot of us understand this reasonably well.
#2: Crafting the right message:
There have been constant iterations within the foundation around communicating the value proposition of IC more effectively. Website, documentation, 20 year roadmap, sample code , whitepapers, academic publications, infographics, videos, workshops, community conversations, Twitter spaces, et al.
Now each of these are catered towards a slightly different set of audience personas but the underlying theme has always been to communicate the various aspects of the IC out in the world across a varied set of audience. Here is my personal assessment of where we stand (not necessarily the opinion of the foundation):
- +ve: We have been constantly improving and now have a reasonable ability to constantly bring out foundational content available out in the open.
- Scope for improvement: Content does not mean solid messaging.
Let’s zoom into what is the challenge here?
IC is very different from anything else out there (alien tech!) and it is reasonably non-trivial to explain it ELI5. After all as humans we make our mental models to describe anything new by finding a comparable. Now as a community we have all been making attempts. Few describe IC as a decentralized cloud, some others describe it by the things that have been made possible on IC, another few by focusing on speed like comparing TPS metrics across chains and some others describe it by the novel tech innovation it brings to the world.
Note that there are no right or wrong answers here. Having said that we certainly need as much of a crystal clear messaging as possible to help scale. One thing is for sure, we need to focus more on highlighting benefits vs. talking about features (and I understand it is easier said than done but we need to continue iterating).
Lets take a couple of illustrative examples:
- When we talk about “Reverse Gas” (feature)…the benefit is that a user doesn’t need to have tokens in their wallet when they are liking/commenting on a socialFi app like Distrikt
- NFT’s are completely stored on chain (feature)… the benefit could be that you can now imagine the entire games or specific levels of games as an NFT and not just a simple jpeg.
To be honest, I have learnt about these benefits during conversations with different members in the community. We at the foundation are constanly learning about new and better ways to communicate.
This is one area where I think the community can help. Let’s all iterate to refine the core messaging of IC. We need to highlight the key benefits lot more effectively… from http calls to tECDSA to BTC integration, etc.
# 3: Building channels to deliver the message:
Now lets take a deeper dive into few of the channels and where (I think) we stand today.
- Word of Mouth:
- +ve: Lot of IC growth is organic. We are seeing a constant influx of entrepreneurs/developers and users experimenting with IC. Public repos, canisters are scaling well.
- Scope for improvement:
- Effective tooling to measure the word of mouth viral co-efficient.
- More traction for IC ecosystem projects (more successful they are the stronger the word of mouth)
- Initiatives where the community can help:
- Build awesome products with viral features (more users —> more attention to IC). The best way is to show (not tell) of what IC is capable of doing.
- [Open for suggestions]
- PR:
- +ve: TBH we need to improve a lot here
- Scope for improvement:
- Significantly better media relations (journalists who understand IC and can cover updates)
- Crafting better messaging and PR pitches for core platform releases as well as ecosystem updates.
- Data driven new story opportunities (media covers breaking news and not features)
- Initiatives where community can help
- Help craft better elevator pitches for ecosystem projects
- Analyze public data (and possible compare with other ecosystems) to create media friendly articles
- Thought leadership via guest posts in top media outlets
- [Open for community suggestions]
- Social + Content Marketing
- +ve:
- Strong traction (and constantly growing) on owned channels - Reddit, Twitter, YT, CMC etc
- Significantly reduced FUD on owned channels like r/dfinity, twitter, etc. (a huge round of applause for Diego and our community support team)
- Scope for improvement:
- We need to have a better representation in external communities (for instance, r/cryptocurrency, etc.)
- Initiatives where the community can help
- Help break into external communities with thoughtful arguments (not shilling without substance)
- Help translate IC related content in multiple languages
- [Open for community suggestions]
- Partnerships:
Some additional background as it was suggested by community members on Twitter thread. The foundation had multiple early level conversations with large brands, enterprises, consulting firms, etc. Getting access is not any challenge instead it is a matter of prioritizing based on the bandwidth we have available. Very much open to community inputs here.
- +ve:
- Key focus so far has been on financial exchanges where we have made some good traction.
- Scope for improvement:
- Prioritizing/resources
- Initiatives where the community can help
- Big Brands: Most brands are looking for solution partners and creative agencies/consulants before they think about the technology stack. The foundation has more R&D focus. We believe the community entrepreneurs are best positioned to recruit brands, top artists, etc. and bring them to the IC ecosystem.
- [Open for community suggestions]
- Events/Speaking Engagements
- +ve: TBH we have a lot to improve here. We are very early
- Scope for improvement:
- Effective filtering of events
- Better planning, early outreach (resource have been a challenge)
- Initiatives where the community can help
- We need more and more people talking about IC at events
- Help access to strong events
- [Open for community suggestions]
- Ambassador Programs
- WIP (more details will be shared soon)
My thoughts here are by no means comprehensive but treat them as where the current gaps are in my opinion. We can significantly accelerate the adoption of IC is by collaborating and filling the gaps.
What Next?
I would propose the formation of working groups focused on these topics where we can brainstorm and make tangible progress towards these goals. Over the next couple of weeks we will map out things internally and reach back out with the next steps.