Maybe it’s more like the cloud. “Take control of the cloud” “Put the cloud in your pocket”. Idk. Those sound kinda cheesy but maybe an angle.
I still need to marinate on a be your own bank alternative. Glad to see your dusting off that path cause that really helps.
Yes and this is what we struggle with.
That one message.
Taking that garbled mess above and sticking it into a tic tac.
One short, sharp, concise pitch.
One password to rule them all. Is good.
Is it good enough?
I kind of envision pitching this to the Dragons Den, Shark Tank and seeing them get angry at the inability to explain all this in one sentence. What do they call it, the elevator pitch?
So in that situation what do you say? This is what we need to find, chop up, shorten, beat down, clean, polish and put on a silver platter so it just comes out and rolls of the tongue.
Could we create our own language of sorts that captures the attention?
Kind of like “Blockchain” you heard that years ago and people just went “waaah?”
Or like I remember the ads for the Matrix movie when it first came out, it was literally a black screen that said What is the Matrix?
Bitcoin - Your own private Swisse bank account and money.
Coke - Refreshing drink.
Uber - Your own private taxi
Email - Digital letters
YouTube - Your own TV channel + funny cats
Walmart - Cheap consumer goods
SAFE Network - ?
The opportunities and scope of the Safe Network are incredibly broad, so distilling it all down into single pithy line that will work with all audiences will be very tough.
All the product examples you give are far narrower propositions which makes it a lot easier.
I’d say we don’t actually need to condense it down it to one pitch if we consider the target audience with each message.
So, if you are talking to a base that you know are password manager savvy, or concerned with data breaches, then you hit them with that “one password” hook.
Then talking to another subset that might be concerned with predatory business practices, or being unable to compete with amazon, then you could talk about re-building the economy of the web.
VPN users and we talk about “all the worlds data, available to all humanity” etc.
I think if we accept and embrace the breadth of the Network, then we can formulate a marketing strategy that works with it. Yes, it is more challenging than more simple products, but also very exciting and rewarding too… and it comes with the advantage of an almost endless array of topics that can be leveraged and discussed to reach new people.
Communicating what the Safe Network is, and what its implications are, is a picture that builds over time in peoples minds, piece by piece, block by block. Find a small hook that resonates with them, and then start building the fuller picture over time.
This is one of the reason we ended up with this hero message on the website:
We’re Building The New Internet
Freedom of expression, control of personal data, private and secure communications; and a whole new economy.
Accepting that is a whole lot to unfold under each of those subject areas; but also rich and fertile ground out there for each!
What would that mean, in concrete, practical sense? How to have a relationship with the Network itself? I’d argue, that it can only happen through some kind of interface, be it CLI, SNAPP, browser, or some other app / site. And an average end user is not going to upload their data with CLI, so the Safe Network APP and it’s developer @JimCollinson, is going to have a crucial role here. 
So what are the reasons for the end user to upload the data?
Only the storing / backup aspect is dependent on the end user alone. Other uses are depended on friends, customers and general public using the Network. To invite groups, and not just individuals, I think apps and platforms would be hugely beneficial. Before Facebook (or Myspace), only few indivuals had homepages, and now almost everyone has a kind of homepage, meaning somewhat stable and semi-public online existence.
I’m also thinking can Safe Network offer something better for the end user in terms of convenience, meaning better user experience, or better / easier / funnier / more creative ways to use data? A couple things comes to mind:
As an example, when checking the weather forecast, I would sometimes like to see what did they say about the weather yesterday, and how their previous forecasts matched with the actual weather. This kind of behaviour is not default in the services I use day-to-day, but could be in Safe Network. Maybe there could be other examples of “what was said vs. what happened” type of use? Traffic timetables maybe?
About the amount of data needed in order for the Network to grow, I think video is the number one type of data we want to have. So some video sharing app / site would be great. If I remember correct, Safe Network should be able to deliver the videos faster than Oldnet, so this might be a selling point for average Joes, just in terms of convenience.
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!
The promise of the Safe Network is to give people back control over their personal data. They are in charge of it, and they hold the keys to it, but it resides on the Safe Network. So while they do not need to know how it all works under the hood, it is a change from handing over their data to an app, instead they are placing trust in the Network.
So this is what I mean by a relationship with the Network, they need to trust it—much more than an individual app in fact. This is the reason we need to market to end users: trust, and an at least a cursory understanding of how their data no longer resides with the app, but on the Network, and that they have the keys to it.
In a practical sense yes, it means that they will use an app such as the Safe Network App to manage access to their data. It’s where they will ‘log in’ or rather lock and unlock their Safe.
They will also need to fund their use of data on the Network, either by being paid by the Network for spare resource, or topping up their wallet from an exchange, or other business, or friend etc.
I dare say over time, as the Network and apps mature, things will get more seamless, perhaps through higher integration with operating systems and such; but fundamentally the relationship between you, your data, and the apps you use to manipulate it, will shift significantly—and this is reason enough to market and evangelise this significant change.
We’re Building The New Internet
Freedom of expression, control of personal data, private and secure communications; and a whole new economy.
@JimCollinson
When you think about some of the greatest innovations ever e.g. the train, the car, the internet, wifi, microwaves, planes, antibiotics. All of them have a core invention that led to the rest of the whole.
Cars and trains are nice easy to grasp examples steam engines and internal combustion engines.
That is the core that the rest of the body is built around.
With the Internet it was machines on opposite sides of the country being able to send and receive messages to one another.
With Snet in my mind it is a serverless/distributed Internet. Being private, being anonymous, being safe, being secure, being scalable, are all the body but the core is taking the internet as we know it and putting it on everyone else’s computers.
And so I think we ultimately agree.
However, the regular guy doesn’t really know, get or even care about this. It is changing, it really is, I can see that, but I still think the economics speak to the every day users and farmers. This is the golden ticket and I think in a tiny little way that might not mean much to anyone else but my pissy little mediym articles prove it. People were far more interested in the mining side than they were anything else.
We’ll see.
Perhaps the marketing hook is not one hook but various hooks. Fisherman do use different hooks to bait and catch different fish at the end of the day.
I saw a quote the other day by Warren Buffet “An investor should act as though he had a lifetime decision card with just twenty punches on it.”. Spreading that out you get 1 decision with snet marketing only 1. What do you do?
I know what I am doing, im marketing to folks that want to mine and farm. Simple.
In fact here is an idea why don’t we see who can send the most traffic to this very forum. You get one go, it can be a video, an article, whatever. You send the traffic here and we get @frabrunelle to tell us which source sent the most. Im betting the folks interested in farming will take the prize and I’m willing to wager a bottle of scotch on it 
OK. So one thing we could do is to put up with clear terms and examples:
So let’s say a friend sent me a video of me skateboarding in Signal and I would like to post it on Facebook. I first need to download it and then upload again to Facebook. It is a clumsy process, and Signal asks if it is OK to expose this video for the rest of my apps, which makes me feel a bit uncomfortable even though the video itself is fine. Everything related with data security / privacy is quite fuzzy and a bit scary to me. With safe the sharing from Signal to Facebook is just a click or two and the security of it all is ensured in the background.
That was not a perfect example of the Network, as there are no Facebook in Safe Network, but that was an example of an example I’d like to hear as an end user. Can someone come up with a better example?
Yeah, I agree. It’s not a one size fits all hook.
Farming is definitely low hanging fruit that’s for sure. There are plenty of folk shut out of Bitcoin mining that we could talk to for example.
Of course, Farming is only one half of the supply/demand picture. Farmers will need a healthy demand from people uploading and using data on the network.
But I’d say if you feel comfortable talking to miners, and you understand their world, their language, and what makes them tick, go for it!
I never feel comfortable in this world. But I like it 
I am by nature a shit talking meat head. But I know what I like and I can pick winners
The OLE low hanging fruit sometimes falls and rots because people are too busy looking for the biggest fattest ripest fruit at the top.
Reading the twenty plus posts this morning which contain lots of useful stuff one phrase popped into my head (probably been said before) which is:
Safe your data
It stuck with me as I read because I think it encapsulates several things which I picked up while reading, such as:
It’s also a lead into some first uses (easy to understand, easy to do) of Safe in practical terms for the same reasons:
We suffer a bit from having so many great things we could say about Safe so it’s right we try to focus. What I think “Safe your data” gives us is a memorable and powerful tagline to help us focus our ideas around the core features of Safe, which can also be a seed around which we build the marketing messages and the brand, even as this broadens over time to different segments and offers.
If you were asking me directly, I have recently gotten into the crypto thing, where that is only relevant in that I have trying to understand it including technically.
In simple terms, I am a truck driver. (USA and very specialized freight)
Having interest in the mining aspect (like bitcoin) I was exploring how I might run a crypto miner on my truck (I am already making power so to me it would be ‘free’ power to mine in the sense that I already burn diesel or need solar for my hotel load). Anyway, in order to maintain constant internet I want to combine my 4G/5G devices from the 3 US mobile providers (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile) into one usable link. In searching for routing and other options I came to MAIDSAFE/SAFE NETWORK.
Combine the knowledge I have gain about working of blockchain with all the censorship going on, I became VERY interested in SAFE.
I actually think I have seen the conference back in 2014 or something the head guys did. I had no clue about anything when i watched it then. I watched it this week and it ALL made sense with current context.
I also attempt to make software (F# and dotnet stack) which I am focused on WASM client-side/no central server ideas. Which again, matches SAFE full on.
So, SAFE just is a perfect alignment of the stars for me, or if inclined, I would say God has been preparing me for this for many, many years.
SAFE your data… I really like that actually!
Sounds a bit like command to me, and I immediately resist.
How about:
Safing your data
I’m not putting “Safe your data” forward as a marketing tagline, but as a phrase we keep in mind to help us in the design and implementation of our marketing.
It could also be a public tagline, but that’s a separate discussion for later.
Remember the meaning of safe is not only free from harm but also a big metal box.
I actually really like it. I just might use it in my own apps if I were to actually get one done and use SAFE.
Brilliant!!!
I’m no artist… but it feel like this save icon is due an update.
Have you safed your work?
Saving your work is so 1990… where we’re going we safe our work.
Imagine seeing that button in Word, click, type in password, saved to your safe account.
Though… i’d prefer to just mount my safenet to windows instead of letting Word access
it directly.
Sure. I was just thinking it as a tagline and I personally would like to receive an invitation rather than command. But as @happybeing mentioned above, it was not intended as a tagline.
EDIT:
I think in general it would be good have an emphasis on offering something, and avoid anything that would create an impression that our target individual is doing something wrong, or wanting wrong things when accepting things as they are. I would also steer away from depicting threatening picture of the current surveillance capitalism. Or at least separating that threat image from our actual marketing messages, which should be composed of positive solutions and good feelings. Something that people would like to join on it’s own merits, not just an alternative to something worse. Be active rather than reactive.
EDIT 2:
“Safe your data” brings to my mind a threat, and that’s why I don’t like it so much.
“Truly yours forever” for example, has a different tone, if you see what I mean.
(Maybe I should start taglines thread…)
You wont need to mine, you can just farm the SAFE Network @IvanRainbolt much cheaper, less power required, no special equipment etc.