Topic: Bitcoin needs a marketeer (Read 3340 times)

Added! Commented! Done!

This thread was started, in essence, to hunt down a marketeer. I feel we now have the right person to do that marketing--worldly.

~Bruno~

Cheers Bruno,

Thanks for the vote of confidence.

I have created a new thread here:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/putting-my-hand-up-to-be-the-unofficial-bitcoin-marketeer-56032

If you feel the need for someone in this role and are willing to support me then please add your name to the list.

Here's what I think. I read the first sentence, then glanced over to see who penned it. That was enough for me.

I second this!

+1

~Bruno~

(now on to read the rest of this post)


May I suggest you start that thread? That way you'll have a tad more control during that pledging process. I, for one, would welcome you in that role. I didn't need to read that resume thingy. I've already spent several hours learning about you during the beginning of you starting that Convention in Prague. I like what I'd read. I like you. I believe you'll have no problem getting the support you need. Of course, count me in as one of those supporters. Anything I can do to help.

I would put my hand up to be the marketeer for bitcoin, this is my argument:

Organised the bitcoin conference in Prague (with no budget) - had bitcoin being accepted at hardrock cafe
15 years experience in starting businesses and marketing them
Experience ranges from door to door sales of books to enterprise level software solutions (never had a marketing budget)
I use bitcoin and would like to see it succeed
Im not a developer
I talk to entrepreneurs and business people all over the world all day
I have no schedule
I have no idea about the technology that runs bitcoin, i just love the concept.
I would be prepared to spend some of my own money on it.
Is there someone with more experience than me prepared to work for free?

This is what id need from the community:
100 people to pledge support and volunteer hours per month to development.
If enough people indicate on this thread that they will support it then ill formalise the pledging process as ill need to know your skillset.

Here are some things i think about regularly:
bit-pay is great for merchants, by enabling the same security on the other side of the transaction (for the consumer)
this would remove any bitcoin risk to both parties.
Encourage bitcoin enthusiasts to meet and pool their spending power and target a place that everyone is willing to spend money.(a site to coordinate this would be the first thing i would develop)
if there are 5 people willing to spend btc in a shop then thats where adoption begins.  'Think globally act locally' has been used before but makes sense to this idea too.
Everyone has ideas, and their have been some great ideas mentioned earlier, but whats needed is someone to say - lets execute them.

So if we get 100 people to commit then I will volunteer to execute some of the ideas that get thrown around here.
If 100 people dont support the idea then everyone should support tony from bit-pay as he is doing a pretty good job already.

got it, would be great if all those gold offices had bitcoin exchange on their menu

The office doesn't need to have a long or short position, or assume any risk.  Think of them as just a retail outlet for bitcoin exchange.  They trade wholesale on the exchange for 0.5% and charge the customer 6-10x that much.

+1 i was thinking about this few days ago but i think i lack the experience atm to convince a gold buying office about bitcoin  

Get e-junkie or plimus to add bitcoin to their payment options and you might be into something

I wonder how easy it would be for http://www.merchantplus.com/ to add Bitcoin as a payment option to their business model. I think there are a few more companies like this one as well.

Thoughts?

~Bruno~

The average person is a customer rather than a business owner. PayPal heavily favors buyers over sellers so naturally the average person isn't going to see the any of the problems. It's not very hard to find horror stories from the seller's point of view, however.

On the other hand please don't misinterpreting my previous posts as discounting the desirability of usability improvements for the average user. It is important but the necessary mindset for improving Bitcoin from the point of view of the merchants is slightly different.

It's really a case of two parallel and only partially overlapping efforts - one targeted at the users and another targeted at the business owners.

I went on Omegle recently to try and convince the average person there that Bitcoin was for them!


It failed horribly.

But I learned a couple things. Most of the people there don't hate Paypal. But Bitcoin is best explained (and most intriguing to them) by creating a parallel to Paypal.

I don't think Bitcoin will be ready for the masses until the clients are superior in terms of ease of use and platform support to Paypal itself.

We're not there yet. It'll be awhile.

+1


I'm going to hold my breath until I come up with a counter-argument. (this may be my last post) 


Or as a Bitcoin Card sold at convenience stores near the register on its own stand with the caption "For Those Other Things in Life". (placed next to the Bic cigarette lighters)

I would certainly recommend advertising your service as a more reliable and hassle-free way for a merchant to turn sales into local currency in the bank. The fact that the underlying mechanism for doing so is decentralized crypto-currency is something that is not relevant to most businesses.

In fact, if it were my motto I'd make it:

Bit-Pay : Merchant Solutions for Small Businesses

Your customers are the businesses, not the Bitcoin movement. Bitcoin is not the reason your business exists, it's your competitive advantage. Really your customers don't even need to know how you are able to deliver payment processing that is faster, cheaper and more reliable than PayPal unless they're curious. All they need to know is that you can and do.

Yes, but there's another hassle too that I didn't realize until just recently.  One business owner really liked bitcoins and wanted to accept them, but he said "my accountant will hate this, how is he supposed to record this?"

With Bit-Pay, the merchant does not have to see, hold, or possess the bitcoins, ever.  They report the gross USD amount of the sale, and expense our commission fees, just like they record revenue and commissions from Visa or MC.  

One thing that is perhaps overlooked about us, and I probably need to clarify this on the next site update:

Our fee is a fixed percentage of the gross order amount they transmit to us, and is not affected by the amount of bitcoins we actually collect, or what we are able to sell them for.

So if a merchant sends us an order for $10.00, they get exactly $9.70.  the amount of bitcoins we collect doesn't matter, and the proceeds we get from their sale doesn't matter.  the merchant has zero bitcoin risk.

Another thing to consider is that if a business has a presence in the US and in Mexico and is involved in moving money from one to the other it's going to become entangled in the laws that make those other services so expensive.

I would never start a business in the US that had anything to do with remittances. Let people who want to send Bitcoins obtain those Bitcoins themselves and just be merely a currency exchange in the target country.

I agree but you don't need "cash for bitcoins" people in the developed countries - you need to set those up in the developing countries.

I have a small amount of personal experience in this matter. I am a US citizen that was married to a Perivuan for several years and we sent remittances back to her family frequently. You're absolutely correct that it's very expensive and inconvenient.

Now that you can make deposits to the exchanges via cash to the branches of major banks it's very easy for someone in the US to get their hands on Bitcoins to send back home. The far larger problem is enabling people in the developing countries to convert those Bitcoins to local currency.

That means partnering with locals and setting up brick and mortar currency exchanges in a lot of different developing world locations. I've got some ideas for how one of those would work and I've considered working with some of my former inlaws but it's certainly not an simple undertaking.

The cost savings for a business on a per-transaction basis will not be a huge selling point.  Plus they may have up-front costs associated with integrating and debugging a new payment system, whether they use a package like ours, hire someone to do it for them, or futz around with it themselves.  It will take time and money to get it working.  So saving money is probably the weaker argument for a typical business.  

The bigger benefits are

- no hidden fees
- no chargeback risk

Now if your selling point is "lower fees" then a better market to go after is Remittance.  This is where people pay outrageous fees.

Try sending $200 by Western Union from the US to someone in Mexico.  The fees can be as much as 20%.  Bitcoin can be one tenth the fees.   if one guy in the Mexican village will act as a local bitcoin dealer, then we can put Western Union out of business pretty quickly.

What we need are more individuals (like us) stepping up to be local bitcoin-for-cash dealers in each community.  Or getting all these "cash for gold' places that are popping up on every corner to add "cash for bitcoins" to their menu.  that would be better, as they already have an established retail location with staff.  just give them another product to sell.

In a thread about marketing bitcoin... this kind of user experience is not marketable. Who wants to make one of three choices at a checkout?! Most people just want to buy their shit.

Better marketing for bitcoin in this case would be 'buy with paypal' button next to 'buy with bitcoin' button and both are equally easy to use. That would be marketable. I reckon people would be more tempted to use bitcoin if that were the case. Offering a complex set of discount options is not what people want at the checkout and only heightens the 'bitcoin is complex' image.

I understand that attitude and in the long term that's where we want people to go but first you need to consider a different type of merchant.

The economy is bad right now. Margins are thin and many businesses are struggling. There are a lot of business out there that are barely hanging on and for whom a chargeback or a freeze on their PayPal account while they investigate a complaint could be devastating or even fatal.

If you start talking to those people about alternative currencies they will tune you out because they have neither the time nor the resources to investigate.

On the other hand if you talk to them about a more reliable way to get USD into their bank accounts suddenly they will be all ears.

Get those people onboard and give them a reason to prefer Bitcoin over debit/credit card or Paypal and they will have the necessary incentive to get more of their customers shopping with Bitcoin. When their own suppliers start pestering them to use Bitcoin then you'll see more of them holding on to them for B2B transactions.

A fair question. But I wasn't thinking about converting them at all, but using every single one of them on products and services I would normally purchase with fiat. I would still have dollars coming in via PayPal, cc, money orders, etc. That is until down the road when all my sales would be made with Bitcoin, as a myriad other companies worldwide would be.