I wanted to start a discussion thread regarding recent feedback on Radicle’s marketing and communications strategy. We’ve gotten a lot of notes from folks who believe the Radicle project needs to improve their marketing & online presence. The goal of this thread is to dissect this feedback and discuss structured suggestions for what the community would like to see communicated from the project.
Overview of Current State
First, let’s talk about how the Radicle project currently communicates. We have multiple communication channels that we use to share updates:
We actually started the Discord in addition to our Matrix channel due to community feedback to make it easier to engage with the Radicle community. I think we’ve already seen that this will be a great resource for keeping the community up-to-date and engaged. We have an active set of community mods and a strong presence from our team.
Our Discourse is the hub for all longer-form discussions about the Radicle project and RAD. The team uses it regularly to share project-wide announcements, releases, feature updates, and more. We believe the Discourse is actively engaged with by the team (but it seems that this isn’t considered marketing by the community )
Our blog is for longer-form pieces of content regarding the Radicle story and vision. We need to improve our content development & presence. I think we (the team & the community) all agree here. We’re in the process of bringing on people to support with our blog & content development. See the job board.
We use our Twitter to share announcements & project-wide updates, as well as amplify Radicle-aligned messaging from partnerships and the greater ecosystem. We probably could tweet more, and will be trying to bring someone on to help with social media strategy. However, we don’t believe in “tweeting just to tweet” — we tweet when there is something to tweet about (maybe it’s just about finding more things to tweet about!)
All Radicle development is open-source and public by default. The radicle-dev GitHub is consistently active and is the best place to see what the team is working on. This includes roadmaps and planning documents (See the app team’s Cycle Planning document as an example). I believe we could provide more examples of longer-term strategy, but it’s very easy to see “what the team is working on” by diving into the GitHub.
How we want to improve
Easier & more accessible channels for community chatWe launched the Discord for this reason!
More project updates & community interactions with the core team - we’re starting a monthly community call as a first step here
More active social media presence - we’re hiring!
More consistent content development on Radicle vision & long-term plans - we’re hiring!
With these in mind, where does the community believe the project can improve?
What marketing is “missing”? Where do people want to see Radicle improve awareness? What do people want to see from the core team? What do you believe has worked well for other projects?
Please only respond to this thread with structured suggestions & developed feedback. Let’s leave vagueness and FUD at the door
Before discussing “marketing & community” it is important that we define which groups of people are being served in any future efforts.
I would split the community into 2 major groups:
Investors
Developers
Does anyone think I’m missing a group here when it comes to our community?
Investors
So far, it feels that the loudest voices are coming from the investment community. As an investor myself, I personally feel pretty good about where things stand as far as community channels (Matrix, Discord, etc.) But if, for example, another investor pitched a proposal to hire a team of meme lords and allocate budget to pay influencers to talk about Radicle, I would soundly vote against that sort of thing. I am not really interested in hype marketing.
If I had one point to critique on:
Updates on the product have been a bit hard to find, if you’re new to the space or just too lazy to look around GitHub and more technical notes that are buried. So perhaps a focus of education around what the product does (see video tutorial note below) and how it’s going might be useful. I don’t know if this will placate the desires of momentum or speculative investors, though.
Developers
I would argue that the long-term interest of all investors will be served by focusing on the developer community. The product itself is still not quite up to par with GitHub in terms of feature parity, although it is fast approaching. I would much rather have Radicle’s resources spent building out an amazing project and finding ways to get real FOSS developers to adopt than I would care about most any hype marketing.
And in order to do that, below are a few examples of “marketing” I would find extremely useful to spend time and effort on:
Video tutorials on how to use Radicle Upstream
Extremely well documented tutorials on getting setup, especially focusing on ways that make it as easy as possible to migrate entire workflows from web2.0 to Radicle/web3.0. I suppose this would go here.
Product marketing: related to the point directly above, but heavily investing in product developments that lower any and all friction to adoption of Radicle. Spitballing, but for example, would a CLI that lets you point at an existing GitHub repo and get it auto-magically configured for Radicle? (I’m sure others have better ideas here)
Business Development: I know web3.0 isn’t really about doing “business” in the traditional sense, but for example, what other partnerships can be made to spur on adoption from developers? Are there OSS communities that can be partnered with — whether older stack tools like Linux, Apache, Python, various JS tooling — or web3.0 protocols? I specifically don’t mean partnerships like with Gnosis or platforms that facilitate the governance of Radicle itself, but rather protocols that will be utilised by developers to build stuff.
Lastly, I would like to say this:
Holders of RAD are not the same as users of Radicle. Developers are the users. And users are king. Given 51% of the RAD is allocated to the Radicle Treasury, developers/contributors to Radicle will, by definition, be more important than any group of investors over the long run.
You’re wrong on every issue bro. If this project merely goes with the so called “users” it is going to take a lifetime to attract more investors.
You have to know that without the investors, the growth rate of the project is going to be halted.
I believe we have to balance these out and value each community separately without biasing towards one.
I think the Abbey’s suggestions sound amazing and the devs should go with it.
A lot of what I said it aligned with what Abbey noted for future plans. I would just emphasize that product marketing – i.e. marketing that creates a positive feedback loop with usage of the product – is the most important work that can be done in the near term.
What kind of things did you have in mind that are so different from what I noted?
Your response didn’t have any specifics around marketing, so I’m kind of curious to hear what other ideas are out there.
Your point of view is theoretically correct, but you ignore the role of funding for the project team itself to support the extreme case of low prices leading to investor withdrawal, that project team where there is income to support the development of the project, but also unable to recruit, do we have to rely on the founder begging to maintain life, so it is important to maintain a good balance. At this stage is very dangerous, the current price is lower than the price of LBP, and 3 months during many other projects more profitable effect, meaning that investors have been withdrawing, if it can not be reversed means that constantly abandoned by investors, no investors also have no concern for the crowd, how to attract more people to use the product? Only by doing a good job on the product itself is of no use, there are too many such companies finally closed down or were merged and acquired, the market is so ruthless.
Exactly. Nice explanation. Tnx.
I’m currently in the red for this project but I am a coder and a believer. I will simply HODL.
Many investors (and frankly, more powerful ones) just think about the annual and even monthly ROIs. So, keeping in mind to broaden the community and making the RAD an attractive investment is the key.
It is not the mid 90s when the quality spoke for itself. Nobody has 50 years of time to wait for their investments to grow. We need up-to-date advertisement and active presence in social media.
Can you please explain in more detail what you expect in terms of advertisement and social media presence?
I’ve laid out pretty detailed notes on what kind of documentation I’d expect for both non-devs and developers. To me, creating such documentation on a regular basis as well as creating partnerships + events around it covers most the bases I’d care about. And this sounds like it might be in-line with what you’re expecting. But I can’t actually tell. All you’ve said so far is “bro, you’re totally wrong” and “we need presence.” Details would be really helpful to hash out these ideas together
I think we should think of Marketing as Growth and Distribution as Radicle is a product centric network.
Growth
IMO, the first two steps are to define the target audiences (as @bordumb pointed out) and define a growth funnel. We could start with something like AAARRR (alternative RARRA) as a starting point and continue iterating the discussion from there:
Awareness – How many people do you reach?
Acquisition – How many people visit your website?
Activation – How many people take the first important step? (e.g install Upstream, replicate…)
Retention – How many people come back for a second/third/tenth time?
Revenue – How many people start paying? Start using the token RAD in the app?
Referral – How many people refer friends?
The above framework might fail to address certain P2P specific questions. I still think that growing the network and fostering network effects should be the #1 growth goal.
Besides marketing activities and campaigns to support the growth of the product I think the biggest growth mechanism is distribution from within the product.
Distribution
A product distribution mechanism is when people start sending radicle native links which results in non-radicle users to explore the product. Examples are shared Notion or Figma pages that are being sent to peers. I understand this is much more difficult with an offline-first product that isn’t served via the cloud.
In that sense sprout.radicle.xyz is a distribution mechanism imo and we should focus on more on these type of use-cases. Because installing the app (activation) is quite a big barrier to overcome. A user who’s been sent radicle links over and extended period of time is much more willing to take the time to install and use the app.
I think we need massive exchange first, that will increase liquidity and people will know radicle then try research about it then
then can spread marketing with influencer / video show how big of radicle / attract dev to use radicle
imagine if u try increase marketing but only uniswap can buy it, this will discourage investor by gas price (exclude coinex and mxc, it is low liquidity)
Guys we do not have any “milestones” on either the radicle docs, main project website (radicle.xyz), or GitHub page. I think arranging some schedule (however lengthy) can be very helpful to show the community that we deliver and stick with the plan.
For instance, there’s been some discussion on releasing the windows version (I know usually coders hate windows, but again, it can be important to the community!). We can consider that a milestone in the development pathway.
I completely agree with @bordumb - it makes sense to split the audience between investors and developers, and I feel efforts would most productively be focused on the latter group. That doesn’t mean investing in a community manager isn’t important too, just that onboarding projects to Radicle and getting them engaged in the community and suggesting new updates/features is the most important thing right now.
I don’t get the arguments made against @bordumb on the need to attract investors, which seems to be referring to retail investors buying on uniswap rather than strategic investors? Didn’t the LBP just raise like $25m, that should fund development for a while surely? I don’t buy that the project will die if it doesn’t get listed on binance or tries other strategies to get the price to increase.
Good projects that quietly build and attract users will achieve fair value in the long-term. No need to burn cash on shilling the token.
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With these in mind, where does the community believe the project can improve?
