Quote from: konner on December 23, 2016, 01:06:19 PM

I get the path the team has chosen and for the most of it I agree with it. At a certain point you have to start investing in awareness though.

You say new users won't be interested if they can't spend it anywhere. On the other hand, merchants are not interested if we don't have enough users (Dev says this himself). The only way to break through this vicious circle is to incentivize the markets a bit.

You invest in awareness to attract new users on one side and approach merchants with a good support package and clear benefits on the other. If a merchant sees there is a well thought marketing plan behind this initiative it will give him more trust to take the leap then if he only sees an awesome app without any support or promotion.

You can spend the next ten years trying to make things perfect, but at a certain point you will just get passed by lesser products that have done their share of good marketing. I'm not saying it is totally going to fail without marketing, just that together with good marketing it will surpass all others without a doubt!

It's all about timing. Nobody is planning on spending the next 10 years 'making things perfect' but at the same time that doesn't mean an over emphasis on marketing without the fundamentals is the way to go either.
When the last bit of 'hype/bubble' came a few months ago we were not yet ready (despite having what some already think is the most usable mobile wallets in crypto), and it showed, we were flooded with support queries to a point where we almost couldn't cope, and make no mistake that little 'hype' was just a tiny taste of what might come if we were to really start pushing 'marketing'.

With 1.6 out we are now in a far better position - but make no mistake we are still not ready, if another 'hype/bubble' were to come right now a lot of the growth would be wasted as a result, for many people you only get 1 shot to make the right impression on them.

So forgive us if we want to take a bit longer to do things right, but we want to build something that will last here, not just fuel the next pump and dump. We are well on our way to where we need to be and it definitely isn't going to be 10 years - 2017 is going to be truly exciting - but we are not at that point yet, thats the honest truth.

Despite what some people here seem to be trying to claim - we are not morons living in some bubble oblivious to the realities of the world.
Rijk knows what he is doing he is a good leader, he knows how to listen to other people when it is important and also how to ignore other people when it is important, and both of these are very important leadership traits. Waterloodown has a lot of experience, in my own capacity I have a lot of experience I work not just a programmer but have co-owned my own company for 10 years now... As a team we have a huge wealth of real world experience to draw from.
And then there is the community a lot of whom also have lots of experience and who we listen too when appropriate.

So I do hope that when most people take a look at what we have done so far, they will be able to think "Hey these guys haven't done badly so far, maybe they have a plan", because anything else is honestly quite insulting. if you hate our work so far then fine go ahead and insult us, but if you like our work a little bit of faith/respect would be nice