I don’t think it’s a red herring at all.
Tesla’s success came precisely because they didn’t market to early adopters. They prototyped an electric car that they knew would directly appeal to and target regular people driving luxury ICE cars. And it took them, what, 4 years from the prototype to customers actually receiving them?
But they had the end user salivating during that four years because they promised better than ICE performance, and ICE range.
The biggest win of all for them in my view was the supercharger network too… they promised ICE car range, and refilling that would be free and only take 20 mins. And again, this took them years to develop and roll out; but the promise and hope of it was there.
And this was because the understood what end users needed and required in an electric car, and they went out and marketed it to them. Not just to EV enthusiasts.
People were sold on the vision on Tesla, and were willing to put up with a lot of waiting, production delays, poor quality control, and a whole host of other issues, because they believed in it; and because Elon’s vision chimed with them.
I think I’d push back on the notion that end users need to know when, or need to know a release or launch date before it’s worthwhile talking to them.
This very community is testament to the fact that you can engage people, and that they can become evangelists, based on a vision and a shared set of values, even without a launched product.
Marketing a brand, and a vision, without a product, is actually quite common… brands do it all the time; yes it takes a bit of creativity, but we have so much to talk about, and so many ways to say it, that I don’t think we will be short of ideas. It’s more a matter strategy.
Just as an example on strategy. We’ve been talking a fair bit on the forum and in some calls about video being a very useful tool for us, because it has a long tail, and can be readily shared across many social channels, and propagate far. It can be reused, re-edited, made into podcasted etc. So it’s good bang for the buck.
Just taking a wee look at some brands successful use of YouTube when they have no new product to sell… There’s this guy from a brand called JHS Pedals:
He makes guitar effects pedals; but spends almost all of his time on YouTube talking about other people’s products… and not in a negative way either!
Why? Because he understands how to talk in the language of his customer, and he knows how to build a community around that, he knows the sort of things they will be searching for, what is likely to get them to subscribe. And then when he has a new pedal to launch: a large and receptive audience ready to listen.
I’m not saying we set up a channel where we only talk about other people product BTW 
(although a little collab from time to time would be cool), but that if we find a way to talk in the same language as our prospective users, understand what the are looking for, what can hook them in, they we can build a strong foundation to launch from.
So, we have what, 3000 subscribers at the moment. Maybe we’d want to make that 30,000? How might we do that?
Matt’s suggestions around community videos are great! And his other suggestion of leveraging the Things that would not have happened on Safe thread is great too.
Pick any one of those high profile news stories, and you could make a YouTube video discussing it, have offer up the vision of how the Network could have avoided it, and chip in with the vision of what we are creating. Hooks a plenty!