Quote from: xtester on June 10, 2014, 06:49:39 AM

Here are some more thoughts I have about strategic moves for NEM future.

NEM Battle Plan

As I said in my previous post, there seems to be a huge crisis of integrity and trust going on in the altcoin world right now. There are so many scam coins and pump & dump schemes that one cannot be too careful.

Where does NEM fit, how is it different?

The idea is that when you look close enough at the current state of the landscape, at how NEM has begun and has continued to operate, the contrast becomes obvious. NEM is very different from what you see around it, it is a movement based on the principles of integrity, trust and charity. Integrity, because the official personnel responsible of NEM has proved to be transparent and correct in every dealing regarding NEM. Trust, because NEM people have proved to be very responsible with everything they do, and at the same time show a great ability for getting things done. Charity, because although NEM devs put an enormous amount of hard work to build NEM and could have sold(IPO) NEM shares at a significant price, they choose to award it as call to participation for an insignificant fee or contribution in order to give an equal opportunity to about 3000 members.

This is NEM, and it's clearly unlike anything we've seen until now.

Precisely because of this big trustworthiness crisis I think NEM could have an enormous advantage to build upon, in addition to that NEM aims to bring deep innovation on multiple levels thanks to its extremely competent dev team along with its large, diverse and talented community.

Our target and fighting strategy

I think our target for the end of NEM's first year after launch should be to clearly emerge as the most important altcoin in town. We should strive to be the most trustworthy, smart and innovative movement/coin. There will be a tremendous advantage if we manage to create ourselves a name, spread it everywhere, and continue to act consistently to it.

Further more, I think if we achieve the above mentioned target and continue in the same manner, we should be able to aim for our 2nd target in about 2 - 3 years after launch: challenging bitcoin and becoming the most important crypto movement and currency.

How to do it:

In order to emerge as the most important altcoin we need to fight on more fronts and hit strategically and decisively.

1)On the technical side: in order to have a natural and significant advantage over everybody else we need to focus on the following aspects: a)advanced blockchain technology and payment network, b)rich and diverse ecosystem/usability and c)radical and intuitive simplicity for the end-user.

a)Our blockchain technology needs to be more flexible and robust, preferably it should also be able to solve some of the problems other blockchains have(e.g. too much hard drive space taken and slow syncing). I should also enable developers to easily integrate and build powerful apps on it.
Our payment network needs to have the natural incentive to make money flow(which I think will happen with POI) and also good transaction speed and transaction scalability. If we do this two things(advance blockchain and payment network) better than anyone else we have a foundation for long term success right there.

b)I think a rich ecosystem will also be very important so in our first year we should do everything it takes to create NEM apps, get merchants, business and online stores to accept NEM, get companies to pay salaries in NEM, get NEM accepted with important exchanges, payment processors, ATM's. - and even find some big companies and help them to use NEM as a background infrastructure(this would be a great mean to help us make steps toward our end).
I also think in addition to offering PC ecosystem, we should build a good ecosystem for mobile users and all before the end of the first year. During the second year, we should make an important step and create a hardware wallet and focus on integrating it to our ecosystem and creating innovative ways to use it.

c)Here I think we could divide things in 3 important iterations. 1st - the launch: things are moderately simple, better than what we see around us but still far from ideal. 2nd - we have created and stabilized our core system and can focus deeply to achieve an unmatched intuitive simplicity for all of our ecosystem. In this second move we are also starting to make important waves in the mobile apps and ecosystem world. 3rd - we have reached a brilliant state of simplicity across our platforms now we move forward to do the same with our hardware wallet.

2)Marketing side: The key part missing here is, as I said before, correct targeting. We don't want to target everybody, that is a waste of time and money. We need to understand how technology adoption works.(See this image: http://wikibon.org/w/images/c/ca/Technology_Adoption_Curve.jpg) So first we need to target early adopters. Most of the people who would be crypto early adopters are already in the crypto world - so we need to make sure they hear about NEM. A lot of other early adopters are spread around the startup world and great technical and university hubs of the world. (I think I have a potentially instrumental move here, I know a platform with somewhere between 100k - 500k very smart technical people/business man/ entrepreneurs/hackers, all early adopters to whom I could pitch NEM and maybe reach a mass of 20k-80k views of the content I pitch, so this could be big, indeed it would be the premium crowd we would like on our side. It also is one of the best idea marketplace/hubs of Sillicon Valley. The most important part would be that if we are good enough, a lot of those 20k-80k early adopters will be converted to NEM which would bring an enormous boost. But it's not guaranteed that my pitch would work, it's a bit more complex, I'll explain when the time comes.) In addition to that we could spread the word about our experiment in economic circles and kindle some intelligent discussions around the subject.

3)Community: We need to further grow our community and create an incentive for smart and highly productive people to start using and contributing to NEM.

So the big picture of short term roadmap should look like this:

1) Launch and 1st year ->Build trust - Build ecosystem -Work on simplicity - grow community/adoption - build mobile ecosystem

2)1 year after launch -> Emerge as the most important: trustworthy, innovative and rewarding altcoin/movement in town

3) Continue with - Build ecosystem -Work on simplicity - grow community/adoption - build mobile ecosystem - move to hardware wallets and gadgets, make it simple and cool.

4) Have great innovative blockchain + advanced payment network + rich ecosystem and usability + very large and very smart community + brilliant intuitive simplicity + simple mobile usage + hardware and other cool gadgets => Challenge bitcoin => NEM becomes 1st.

Targeting technically savvy people/developers is definitely gonna help build the new ecosystem. Let's hope we can attract people like that. Unfortunately, ethereum seems to be doing the best job currently, mainly because of all the media attention.