I am sending you this message as a follow-up to my chat with Kevin on Telegram re sharing some marketing and communication ideas that I believe would improve Nervos positioning and building the community. Please note these are NOT pump & dump / “moon” ideas, but rather a healthy way to keep the community engaged and growing as unfortunately we have all seen a great deal of crypto projects literally die and go into oblivion because of lack of adequate communication by the team.
Remove the super long welcome message on Telegram. I understand why you put it there and so new people don’t have to ask the same questions over and over again, but I feel like it is the only message there and that it interrupts any meaningful discussions by popping up every few minutes / hours.
If possible, the admins on Telegram should now and then provoke meaningful discussions to keep the talk going and the community engaged. Right now not much is being discussed, I understand it is too early, but still let’s not lose the momentum.
Create a weekly / bi-weekly status update report for the community, this is a best practice that other projects are doing (Tezos, etc).
Make sure you release updates every now and then where you stand, what is going on, etc. People in crypto expect this.
Tell us more about your partnership with Huobi, about the partnership with the bank, about the road map. Tell us about the VCs, how are they helping, what should we expect of them. Again keep everyone ENGAGED and informed. 1 hour in crypto feels like 1 week in real life, so just don’t be silent.
Make competitions (design, trading, etc. etc.) now and then. You need an active community that talks about Nervos, shares information, new people hearing about the project, etc.
Be quick. For instance, now yet updated on coinmarketcap 10 days after ICO doesn’t really look great as you had enough time to prepare what they need and get there on day 1.
Make regular AMAs, meet-ups around the world, etc.
This are just my ideas, hope they or at least some of them would make sense. If you need more detailed inputs on any of the above, I would be more than happy to put some plan in writing.
Hey Toma, thanks for your post and constructive feedback.
Yes, promotion of a new project is always a bit tricky. Of course we want as many people to know about Nervos as possible and get as excited about it as we are, but it is also important to us that we don’t come off as “aggressively” marketing the project. Its a hard balance to strike and we try to err on the side of caution. As Benjamin Franklin once said:
“It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.”
Regarding your points above, here are my personal opinions:
The longer welcome message on telegram has been quite effective at reducing basic questions when new users join the channel. We really want the Telegram group to be a community discussion group, and not seen as a “help desk” were people can ask questions where they could easily find the answer by visiting the website (or even just reading the pinned message). When people ask these very simple questions, we are forced to answer then and become the “help desk” or ignore them and seem unresponsive, the longer welcome message helps address this.
Agree. The more valuable discussion we can get going the better. The English speaking community is still very young so i’m sure we will see this increase as time goes by. But we also hope the community can help bring up these discussion topics.
There is regular community and dev updates sent out to the mailing list. Perhaps this could also be done as a Medium post and then shared in community channels.
There is a lot of stuff in the works and we try our best to make sure all important announcements are made and updates are shared on all channels.
The updated roadmap will be released shortly - it is being finalized by Dev team currently
Yes these are good ideas. The Mainnet launch community design competition recently finished, which gave out lots of free Nervos swag.
It’s listed, but there are some technical requirements from CMC - this is being worked on and should be ready soon.
Yes there are regular weekly dev chats and AMA’s planned. There was also many meetups in 2019 and will continue in 2020 - also hope the community can get involved in this side of things too.
Many thanks for your prompt and detailed reply, appreciated.
Agree with all points, especially that there should be balance with the marketing activities (nobody wants to see another pump & dump project being case away into oblivion).
Wish you best of luck and let me know if I can be of any help.
PS: I sent the Nervos team an enquiry about possible collaboration about 5-6 days ago (via the website form), but still haven’t heard from you guys. Do these normally take longer or maybe my message wasn’t received?
Thanks for those advices! I want to share some thoughts regarding our 2020 research/development roadmap here.
IMO the most important thing for us in 2020 is not about CKB/Lina, but the application development tooling and standards. CKB’s programming model is powerful, but we lack documentation, tools and standards such as well-supported high-level programming language, IDE, testing, UDT etc. There’s no ‘solidity’, no ‘truffle’, no ‘metamask’, no ‘ERC20’ on CKB. Application development on CKB is the new frontier for brave adventurers, it’s fun but it’s also painful and dangerous. The tricky thing is there’s a chicken-and-egg problem here: applications can only thrive with convenient and powerful development tools at hands, while great development tools usually emerges when you’re building some real applications. Plenty of trial and errors are needed. As long as we work as a community, I’m confident we’ll have pretty good documentation, development tools and some useful application standards by the end of 2020.
The layer 1 CKB/Lina is still in her infancy, there’re many things we can do to make her better.
The most interesting problem to me is sub-linear PoW verification, which asks how can we verify a chain of headers efficiently in sub-linear time. It will be the core of an efficient light client protocol and where PoW really shines. We did some research on superblock based NiPoPoWs and FlyClient and some PoC work already, but I believe there’re still a lot of work to do as things become complicated when difficulty adjustment is introduced into the protocol. As Lina is running, we’ll have have access to more statistics in real environment to help us improve NC-MAX, for this let’s wait Ren’s NC-MAX paper We expect there will be ways to improve CKB-VM and programming model as we observe more scripting in real world, the team already has some ideas.
For layer 2, we have worked on the a chain framework Muta for a while. It’s already opensourced on github if you’re interest, but there’re still several iterations to go until we can release it. We create this framework in order to lower the barrier of appchain development and also help us learn the intricacies in layer 2 protocols. One thing I want to point out is that Muta is one of the layer2 protocols we’ll see on top of CKB, it’s neither an one-for-all solution nor the ‘official’ solution. We’ll see many different protocols running on layer 2, built by different teams in the community.
Thank you so much Toma for the thoughtful suggestions. Ben and Jan’s responses hopefully have provided many details on what we’re currently working on from both marketing and product point of view. We can definitely do better engaging with the community one way or the other. For the last week or so most of the discussions have been helping people onboard to run nodes and installing wallets. I expect as we see those taken care of, we’ll be able to have broader communication with the community too.
We expect there will be ways to improve CKB-VM and programming model as we observe more scripting in real world, the team already has some ideas.