Saturn Marketing works

#1

Hi Saturn members,

Hope you are all doing well. I’ve been just 1 of the many community members that follow and be really excited about Saturn. With recent “whitepaper” blog posts about Saturn Protocol v2, this project is approaching its roadmap’s final stage. Despite all the achievement so far, it’s mostly technical hard-work from the team together with Sam’s endless connection. You may hardly find any project that has such a great product, ecosystem and vision but still “under-radar” which is demonstrated by:

  • A small number of social members:
  • Saturn Telegram group ~ 700 members (sadly most of them are fake accounts with advertising purpose), Reddit ~200, Twitter ~4k (the greatest presence so far)
  • To have a comparison, I take Tomochain (1 of our targeted blockchains to launch a DEX) which has ~9k telegram group member, Reddit ~1.5k, Twitter ~22k
  • Although this is not a fair comparison because of Tomochain’s $8 mil ICO, it shows us some points to think about.
  • A fairly slow progress of Final Hodl program especially on ETH.
  • At the time of writing, after nearly 1 month, only ~5mil Saturn ETH sold (1.7%) while this number on ETC is ~ 90mil (30%) in which 75 mil came from 1 transaction.
  • If continue this speed, it may take months to complete the hodl program, even after October (our roadmap milestone for Prometheus go live). Of course there will have some whales join in some days with big contribution hence the hodl will complete earlier. However, the best scenario is that we become decentralized in term of investor which is critical for a DAO project
  • Low trading volume of Saturn & STRN token indicates low interest & awareness of the public about Saturn

Thanks to the vision of Neuron to open source Saturn DAO as a community project, I strongly believe it’s a right way to go ahead and become an eternal DAO as long as the internet exist. However, the first thing we need is a strong community, without community, there is hardly any progress after Prometheus. At this stage, we really need to find out an appropriate marketing approach within our available resource in order to reach more members and make us present enough in efficient social channels. This is not a 1-day work, it requires mixture of strategy, plan, materials, programs and measurement.

  • Strategy: team Saturn has done a very good job to position its product and features amongst numerous crypto projects, especially in DEX sector.
  • Plan: I don’t think we have enough focus on marketing activities so far, at least without a detail plan. What we did is being visible on as many social channels as we can. However, different channel/ customer sector need different approach.
    • Twitter is a formal channel which is suitable for business/expert: we can reach experts/coders or overall enterprise reputation here. They are smart money owner and potential technical community. This is also where we find business partner
    • Reddit is more of a social platform with wider community: hype/dump and crypto newbies can be found here. They are mad money owner who are continuously seeking for investing/trading opportunity
    • Telegram/Discord: an instant way to get contact and acquire new community member. These channels are useless without strong administration
    • Other critical channels: Medium (for blog and education, a potential reliable investor acquisition, not a bad idea to stream our content blog to there), Industry website like Cointelegraph (we may sponsor article about our valuable work), Facebook (for advertising, public awareness, trader acquisition), Linkedin (for potential DAO workers), Youtube….
  • With above approaching plan in mind, we need appropriate materials respectively.
    • Educational articles: we have numerous well-informative Saturn blogs. However, it can always be improved by better categorization for ease of reader. Personally, I have introduced Saturn to my friends, they are often difficult to know where to start amongst our endless blog posts. Also, most of the articles require prior understanding of crypto, not newbie friendly enough.
    • Multi-language support is also very important. To make our decentralized vision reality, we need to reach international audience. I know this is mentioned in our roadmap for which we need to accelerate.
    • Tutorial: in this busy world, people tend to skip reading text and be more preferable with media content. What we’ve seen so far is that many newbies find it difficult to trade on Saturn the first time due to their familiarity with CEX
      • A completed set of video tutorials embed in the landing page and other media channels like Youtube, Instagram … categorized per trader, investor, business owner,… will be really valuable for Saturn to get mass audience
      • Monthly AMA as a live tutorial, communicate project progress, and show our commitment to participants
    • Technical tutorials, dev-kit for community developers as team Saturn’s focused so far
    • Advertising materials like poster, short introduction video, sticker, banner, … will be used to run different advertising program
      • This may be the most expensive program to run, seasonal implementation can be considered
  • Last but not least, we need to choose appropriate marketing program and have sophisticated measurement. Whether we run a seasonal advertising on youtube/google ads or to list on a reputable ICO rating website, or sponsor some writings about us on cointelegraph … Maybe a combination of them in a pre-defined timeline.

These are the marketing works that we somehow lack so far. With the launch of Saturn protocol v2, we as DAO members can vote to employ Saturn worker for above works but we cannot wait till then. The crypto industry advances at lightning speed every day, so as our competitors. Remember that our advantage today can be outdated tomorrow. Although the team has done endless great work so far, they really need more support from community for long-term success.

Believing that team Saturn has been always expecting to see more and more community idea come up, so I write this thread and hope that every one of us feel free to bring up your idea or at least it’s something for us to think about. Community support doesn’t have to be such a commitment, instead, every little thing like re-tweeting a post, like an article, sharing marketing materials to your own social network… can do a lot of help!

Thank you for reading.

Future is bright!

4 Likes
#3

I love your videos! :metal::metal:

1 Like
#4

Thanks for writing all of this, Anonymous. It’s a terrifically important issue and I imagine that many of us in the community think that marketing and advertising is an area where Saturn ideally would be doing more. You’re right that those of us in the community need to take a larger role in spreading the word on some of the various channels you mention. That’s probably the main takeaway here.

However, it would also be good to know what plans, if any, Neuron, Sam, and the development team have regarding funding for marketing. They have done an amazing job building SN into what it currently is, and as we know, there is still more to do. However, I don’t see any mention of marketing in the road-map. It would be good to know whether any of the Prometheus HODL funds are slated to be used for that purpose, or whether that will have to be an additional expense. As you say, this is not an issue that we can afford to wait on.

#5

Thank you for writing this up! Great job starting this conversation.

HODL funding includes our content marketing and paid marketing campaigns that have brought us to the top of DEX ratings, but most importantly the team is building the infrastructure for community members, DAO members, other crypto businesses to run their own marketing campaigns and be rewarded for it.

In the interim, while this technology is being built, we can definitely get ahead like you say and promote more interaction between community members and start working as Saturn DAO. Here is a three pronged plan that we propose to get the ball rolling.

Community Management
More specifically about our chat groups, as you point out our telegram group is no longer what it used to be and unfortunately it is regularly spammed by fake accounts or scammers. We never really wanted to moderate our chat groups heavily and I believed members would spring up their own groups and sub groups. I would like to propose making our Discord server the official place to chat about anything Saturn Network. Discord is better suited for managing large communities as we can have categories of text channels on the server: token trading discussion? Saturn DAO proposals? Saturn Exchange support? Marketing? Developers?

I would also like to have community moderators on the server, to ensure it is decentralized, so to speak. I think this is a great way to help transitioning into being a fully community owned & ran project. I have spoken about this before and do have volunteers for this role, I am more than happy to offer Saturn tokens as bounty/payment for this type of work. I suppose the question is if we ask for people to apply, is the community happy with Team Saturn picking the initial moderators?

We can also have sort of bounty/competition with a Saturn token reward to try to motivate people to joining our Discord server, though it should not simply be joining the server. I noticed Kyber Network recently made the same decision, they had a competition which revolved around creating some form of content (blog article, graphic art or video) and then to enter your submission you had to share it on their discord server. That was quite a neat idea?

Improve Documentation
Gitbook.com could be considered to improve documentation and make it newbie friendly. A good example of where Gitbook has been well used is with xDai: https://www.xdaichain.com/. We could build the same sort of website as a community and create a Saturn Wiki. To get started we would pretty much need the following 1) someone to register a domain. 2) someone to set up Gitbook for that domain 3) I believe Neuron and myself should be added as collaborators, along with any other community members who want to be part of this initiative.

The end result is we would have a way to provide content that is organised and decentralized, in the sense that it is controlled by the community.

Internationalization and localization
This may be the easiest initiative to tackle as a community, as crypto communities are quite used to providing translations for bounty payments. We will publish a document with all the phrases used on the website, and the community can translate for a Saturn token bounty. We can then use these translations on Saturn Network website but also keep all of these translations open source to ensure they are available for anyone launching a Saturn Ring in the future.

So those are 3 solutions I believe we can get started on as a community, maybe an official move to Discord should be prioritised first as it should make it easier to organise/navigate other proposals together?

Also don’t forget we are creating a buzz around Saturn Protocol v2 off its technical merits:

I don’t see any reason why this won’t continue, especially as we start to make releases. We have also seen media attention off the back of other project’s successes, who have a healthy trading market on the exchange. The initial leap up we saw in trading volume has also stayed pretty steady despite the current world environment which is far from ideal. As we can see the Saturn Protocol fee collecting is steadily growing up:

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collected fees on eth.PNG1243×672 36 KB

And if the releases are not creating the hype we expect, then we have also organised press releases for marketing in the past:

So this can definitely be an option for the future. We’re always open for community input and feedback, hope to see more members join the discussion, as like you say it is important and I also agree there are things we can get started on today.

2 Likes
#6

Hi Sam,

Thanks for your quick response. There are always very good ideas from the team.

Agree with all of your suggestions and yes, moving to Discord is first priority. Personally, I totally trust team Saturn to choose appropriate moderators as of now while keeping in mind that every DAO member will be able to vote on this kind of decision soon. And you are right, translation is the easiest way that member can contribute to the project. I’d be very happy to make my local language translation when it’s available. I even plan to translate some critical Saturn blog posts and post on Medium or somewhere else like your Gitbook idea! It will definitely help spread Saturn in my country. Do you have a list of recommendation? like 10 must-read articles for Saturn newbie?

One more point to add, could you put all the articles related to Saturn into a Text channel on Discord server (like “Saturn on the news”) so that community can help spread the words. If it’s not shared by you, I didn’t know we are doing this buzz campaign.

#7

If you need a moderator on discord I can help. :eyes: We also need to either add Saturn/Strn to a discord tip bot or make one! Will reach the younger generation easier :slight_smile:

#8

Thanks, Sam! You guys are doing a terrific job and sometimes it’s easy to miss all the things that are going on. I agree that prioritizing the Discord is a good idea.