FUSION CMO Holy Kasun answered an incredible 46 community questions over multiple hours on the 23rd of August.

How do you plan on keeping investors informed?

The frequency and cadence of information about Fusion is dependent on what channels we’re using. For example, Twitter will be a steady feed of bite-sized chunks of information. Medium on the other hand will be less frequent long-format articles. Overall plans will create a mix of traditional mainstream content and more grassroots social media to address specific audiences.

2. What is the marketing budget?

First step is to get the strategy and action plan established. Once that foundational work is done, we’ll put numbers to it.

3. What do you see as your top 3 priorities to focus on in your short time at Fusion?

First, organization and structure. If the foundation isn’t established the most brilliant marketing plans will fail. Two, formulate the marketing strategy. This is in progress now — and will be done in the next week or so. Three, Start activating the plan. Messaging focus will be around educating audiences about Fusion.

4. Why is fusion so cheap at the moment & how will fusion make it against all other competitors? I mean, you want to be a top 10 crypto, right?

The entire market is bloody right now. Ups and downs are a natural part of a free market. Our job is to deliver the best possible platform and fuel adoption. If we do that over time, the rest follows.

5. What do you think about DJ and his vision ?

I think DJ is part of an elite class of pioneers. He is a very rare person. A visionary who can actually execute. I am most impressed with his vision of Fusion because of his discipline to focus on solving real problems in terms of finance.

6. You mentioned this is your dream job, working with a dream team. Why do you feel that way?

I am a crypto nerd. Certainly not an expert — few can legit claim to be in this new, fast-moving space. I have spent years in marketing, I’m hard-wired for marketing work. Combine those two things with the the ability to work with the leadership team at Fusion, DJ, Charles, Andre… that’s a dream combination.

7. So the yellow paper is not finished? Last I understand that yellow paper was submitted to the top cryptography magazine and in the process of publishing.

I didn’t mean to imply the paper wasn’t finished. Apologies. I was responding in terms of the milestone — that we’ll be developing and launching content around the paper.

8. How would you define marketing activities so far, and what are key areas of improvement?

I think Fusion’s marketing so far is completely normal for an early stage startup with highly technical founders. Fusion is ready to mature in many ways including marketing. DJ was smart in orchestrating the timing of these moves forward.

9. Hi Holly, what exactly was orchestrated? Which news or steps do you mean?

DJ put a hiring plan into motion bringing on the leadership team. He chose a good time in the company’s maturation cycle. He also ran a lean team as he was going through early phases of tech development — which was a good business decision

10. Who are Fusion’s audiences?

Crypto / blockchain enthusiasts

Forward thinkers and doers in the financial industry including fintech

Devs

Academics

Investors

Potential partners

11. Let’s moon. No seriously, do you believe in the long term ? What are your goals about fusion?

I do believe in the long term. Finance is perfectly suited to blockchain, making it one of the places ripe for early adoption. I think about us in countries where our banking and finance systems work. That is about 5–10% of the world’s population. So 80–90% of the world does not have access to working financial systems. Imagine the potential and the impact Fusion can have for so many. * There are real needs.

12. I would suggest a cooperation in marketing with Formula One or Lamborghini, something different, to approach different people outside of crypto. What do you think about that?

I see your point about marketing beyond the crypto market. And yes, we will be doing that but staying focused on the financial world.

13. Hello Holly, I just saw an article saying that the Chinese is banning crypto advertisements. How are you going to break through such barriers?

No matter what market we’re in East / West, traditional advertising isn’t the best tool to use for crypto. So I see the way forward in China for example leveraging a content strategy that fuels word-of-mouth

14. You can’t go against Chinese government!

You are correct! What you may not know is we have a marketing ace in China who is very experienced and understands the differences between what we can do in the West versus in China. I speak with her regularly. Once the marketing strategy is finalized, we will work together to figure out how to adapt the plan for China.

15. What are some alternatives to help in getting the message out about Fusion to all markets? I was not suggesting that you break the law, but what can be done to make sure Fusion is known by the masses?

The community will be a critical component. Our job will be to develop quality content that the community can share through grassroots avenues (decentralized!) which can keep efforts going as the cycle of regulations tightening and loosening happen.

The most powerful and effective thing is for Fusion to develop content that is a value add to people. Conveying relevant information that informs, inspires, educates, entertains etc. creating content in a way that allows individuals in the community to share it — make it their own — add their 2 Satoshis to it and use it to educate others.

I think about it like this — what if every one of us taught just one person about crypto and simply explained the impact we believe crypto will have on the world, using Fusion as just one example to illustrate a point.

Imagine the community growth that could happen in such a short time!

16. How might the team impact or limit your strategy and execution? Are you being given enough room to work on, and execute plans?

I have been given all the autonomy and resources necessary to formulate the plans. As with any company I will have to work within a budget. This is nothing new to me. I believe constraints spur creativity and like operating in that space.

17. How much of the work will you outsource to third parties?

No firm answer on that. I do know it will be a mix of in-house work and outsourced.

18. Will fusion develop exclusively as a public blockchain or will there be private options?

We’re focused on the public chain. Keep in mind that 3rd party private chains can connect to the Fusion platform, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see an interesting combinations of public & private chains used for specific business workflow use cases.

19. Why did we give a mainnet release date x, when we knew it couldn’t be hit? The brand has been hurt by this.

It’s important for the community to understand the realities of tech development and the nature of innovation that every company, entrepreneur, and artist faces when developing something new. Startups have to set milestones to guide and push the development process. If a milestone is missed, does that mean failure? Certainly not.

20. What challenges might you face as being a CMO of Fusion instead of a non blockchain project?

There are a few challenges being a blockchain marketer faces:

1. Crypto / BTC is unique. Many traditional marketing tools won’t work in the space, for example paid advertising.

2. Fluid Rules and regulations. In mature markets that are regulated, the marketing rules are clearly stated and have been in place for a long time (e.g. toys, liquor, tobacco etc). It’s easy to work within the guidelines. In crypto, rules come out of nowhere, and without warning (just yesterday, there was news out of China), and rules go away all of a sudden (Facebook)…

3. Instantly global. By nature, crypto / BTC is cross border, multi lingual, etc. Off the top of my head I can’t think of any other market like it. Any other business expanding into a new region is a strategic decision supported by resources and planning. In crypto you do not have that luxury — marketing complexity is there right from the start.

21. Are you a trader or hodler?

I’ve been in Crypto sine 2012 thanks to my brother-in-law! Recently I taught myself how to trade crypto. Not for moon/ lambo dreams, but rather as a fun way to structure my research. I wanted to know how certain audiences in crypto think \ operate. B/of trading I’ve been a part of loads of Discord and TG channels just like this one. It’s helped me develop a deep understanding of the power of well- managed and curated groups.

The second reason: trading makes it easy to discover projects and read loads of white papers!

I don’t have time nor the interest to trade now that I’m at Fusion. Fine — I’ll admit it. It wasn’t hard to give up — I was a fairly crap trader, 😂

Do I hodl? Yes. Various projects. An early area of interest for me was privacy coins / tokens. And, of course FSN.

Fusion’s marketing activities so far can be defined as “essential first phase”. What I mean by that is starting to market from scratch is a ton of work. Loads of setting up systems, platforms, run-and gun processes, team members wearing many hats — doing what needs to be done regardless of experience level. Loads of guesswork and intuition.

This so normal and typical for any startup — this is not unique to Fusion.

How to improve? The first and easiest place to start is with organization. Build a strategy, stop doing things that are no longer serving the business, get processes in place, staff accordingly etc.

22. What USP’s will you showcase to other projects and financial institutions, and how will it be showcased because we don’t have a mainnet at the moment? I would say testnet, but others have deemed that insufficient. Currently I’m aware of a yellow paper, and increased marketing on the Chinese end. How will this be for the western market? And when might we expect increased marketing?

What we can do right now in terms of marketing is to explain the tech which I think needs to be done in a variety of ways e.g. for newbies and for intermediates. Right now the tech is explained for techies. In these different scenarios we need to address the questions: “why”, the “so what”, the “how does it affect me, and my life”, “how does this impact current financial systems, businesses” there is loads of meaningful territory to cover.

I expect to see marketing ramp up in the next few weeks. It will start slowly and build to a consistent pace.

23. Do you have any plans to list on the new exchange? You know the current flux of FSN is very poor.

The main focus right now is tech, marketing and partnerships.

24. Do you have partners who are ready to use fusion for hire-purchase to lease assets such as land, real estate, cars within a short period of time?

I believe there are a number of partners who have been announced prior to my joining Fusion.

It’s Fusion’s policy to announce and discuss new partnerships only after the ink is dry on our agreements.

25. One minute we know 100% when mainnet is. The next we have no idea when mainnet is. This hasn’t been very well received. It feels like Fusion hasn’t been honest. If you say we think it may take 3 or 6 months more, we understand. We’d like greater transparency.

I completely understand your feelings. While I can’t change your mind — what I can do is offer some insight that comes from experience as a tech startup founder (before Fusion).

What happens when you’re a founder and developing something new (a product) from scratch, you have to start somewhere. So you make a lot of educated guesses and start working. At a certain point, in order to organize your team and resources, you identify milestones you want to hit and put dates to those milestones.

* Remember, you’re in uncharted territory- loads of unknowns*

So you keep working and dealing with problems, setbacks and challenges as they arise. You adjust accordingly and keep going.

What separates successful people and projects from the failures is not that they have problems, false starts, delays etc. — it’s how they overcome them.

What I can confidently say about DJ and the Fusion team is they are all pros. They know how to deal with adversity and push through.

26. How do you intend to get over the short term reputational damage of missing mainnet date?

Communicate as effectively as possible while providing information on how Fusion plans to move forward. * You can see an example of this approach in the delay announcement.

27. How can we educate those around us about crypto?

When my friends and family ask me about crypto, I do not recommend that they buy or get into trading. I talk about crypto and blockchain in terms of answering questions if asked. Or sharing info that is relevant etc. I believe if the people I talk to happen to figure out how to buy or trade on their own — they’ve DYOR’d enough to make their own decisions. If someone really pushes me on trading — I direct them to blogs that traditional traders write about the realities of trading, the mindset traders need, the horror stories, the stories about the grind of trading, stress, pressure etc. get folks to go deep on these topics.

28. What is Fusion’s marketing strategy?

First, there must be clear business goals. The Fusion leadership team has recently done a lot of serious thinking and work on setting clear goals.

From there, effective marketing boils down delivering the right message, to the right person, at the right time. Where things get clever, intricate, creative and/or inventive in marketing is in the tactical execution.

For Fusion, right now it’s about education. On the tech front Fusion has gone beyond incremental advancements.

So many people are still trying to understand the basics of blockchain and crypto. So the challenge for Fusion is to not only explain the basics, but go beyond — in an approachable way.

In my mind, the vision for Fusion is straightforward and easily understood. Next steps are to communicate using real-world anchors that people already understand to illustrate the future of finance.

29. Where do I get my crypto news / info?

Cryptopanic. I ignore TA / price prediction content.

Let’s Talk Bitcoin Podcast (on SoundCloud)

Folks I follow on Twitter send me down deep ratholes 😂.

Anything by Andreas Antonopolous : talks, presos, video series.

CryptoBriefing. I find Andre‘s writing informative and hilarious at times.

30. Where do I think Crypto will go in 1,3 and 5 years?

Okay! Here goes 😆

In 1 year: We’ll see weak projects drop out of the ecosystem. Projects that are not run as responsible businesses, especially financially, will go away fairly quickly. I wouldn’t have joined Fusion if it wasn’t project run like a business, by experienced folks who are budget conscious.

In 3 years the projects with gritty, focused teams will see adoption of their well-tested tech. Crypto moves fast, large companies do not, so enterprises who make the jump, will still be considered early adopters. In terms of Fusion, I’d expect to see it as a leading, trusted platform for asset digitization especially because of DCRM delivering on the ability to not just store — but efficiently and effectively manage assets.

In 5 years orgs that have adopted blockchain tech will see meaningful bottom-line payoffs. Somewhere around that 5-year mark enterprise adoption will really accelerate. Fusion in 5 years will be well established as the financial industry standard.

Side note: In terms of mainstream crypto adoption for individuals — I think the Lightning Network is going to be the game changer. Def a project to follow!

31. There is one thing that bothers everyone in the crypto world. When a project announces that something will be announced, and when the time comes usually the announcement does not meet expectations. Please avoid that in the future because that affects the price the most, imo.

Rest assured, I’m not a hype-machine style marketer. One of my mottos: under promise and over deliver.

32. What do you think about the aggressive marketing/advertisement strategies that a lot of crypto projects do. Which of those strategies Fusion will never use and which Fusion is willing to use in near future?

Let me define how I interpret “aggressive” based on reading your question: aggressive meaning “hype-shill style” and aggressive meaning “market coverage”

Hype/shill: This is a very short-sighted approach to marketing because it does little to provide a base of valuable content that has a longer shelf-life. It does nothing to build a brand that stands the test of time. I’m not a fan at all of this type of work.

Market coverage: This approach makes sense as long as there is a strategy for targeting specific audiences rather than using a “spray and pray” method. The real governing factor of this approach is budget. My approach is strategic, brand-building in nature and being smart about how I use the budget to get the best returns.

Fusion’s marketing activities so far can be defined as “essential first phase”. What I mean by that is starting to market from scratch is a ton of work. Loads of setting up systems, platforms, run-and gun processes, team members wearing many hats — doing what needs to be done regardless of experience level. Loads of guesswork and intuition.

This so normal and typical for any startup — this is not unique to Fusion.

How to improve? The first and easiest place to start is with organization. Build a strategy, stop doing things that are no longer serving the business, get processes in place, staff accordingly etc.

33. Could you let me know what kind of “strategic, brand-building in nature” that you are thinking to do?

The plans are to build a body of communications assets that address topics key to Fusion’s success by locking in on business goals. The sweet spot is to marry that work with the needs of the community. Over time, this type of work will lay the foundation for what Fusion is, what it stands for, and why Fusion exists — what solutions to problems it offers.

34. For your marketing, I would like to know what is your goal. If your goal is Fusion price to go up, then media coverage, Twitter, Reddit, meetups, etc will be focused. Marketing for the real world adoption, you need to start talking to the institutions and let them use fusion blockchain. What exactly is your role?

Pumping the price of Fusion is not the purpose of marketing — nor should it be. That’s hyping / shilling.

In my recent posts — you’ll see how I feel about that 😊

35. So your marketing for the investors?

Not marketing exclusively to investors. They are one audience of many including partners, academics, devs etc.

36. It’s good to have new investors but to have fusion long lasting for years to come, we need to have mainnet first and real world adoptions. Have the use cases like what the YouTube explained start going on. The real marketing I thought should be focused on the institutions

Now you’re talking! Agreed. Institutions are a terrific focus 😊. Aligns with business goals!

37. Buggy mainnet? Do you have insider info from team? Are they close to deliver mainnet?

No. I don’t have insider info. I was speaking generally about any tech project (blockchain or other) that isn’t diligent and focused about delivering spotless tech.

Fusion is in the category of being a diligent, responsible type of organization that will not release a product until it’s truly ready for prime-time.

38. We need to be on binance. Without that I really don’t think we will move forward

The first part of getting on Binance is proving there is a large, active Fusion community.

If you want to see Binance, do your part in helping to grow the community through education (not shilling / overhyping) in your personal networks 👍

39. It seems part of this community is very worried about price in short term. How would you address that point?

Short term price concerns are typically fueled by traders. They have a different agenda than the hodlers, the business, partners etc.

There’s room for everyone to have their own motivations.

The mission for Fusion is to focus on tech, fueling adoption through marketing that centers on education.

If we do that well, the rest will follow.

40. Investors are emotional, especially in crypto industry, and they easily panic, so i think short term price cannot reflect the value of a project in crypto.

That’s exactly right. Couldn’t agree more.

It’s very interesting to hear Charles talk about this topic. He is very insightful due to his trading and financial industry experience.

Perhaps a Q&A with him on this in the future? I could see it being informative and helpful to many in the community.

👍👎. Thoughts?

Crypto has been a very interesting thing in terms of giving access to investing and trading to an entirely new group of people.

With that, many folks are newbies to the realities of this world.

They will gain experience over time and work through the process of understanding natural market fluctuations.

For those of us who are more experienced, we can help these people by giving them information and reference points (not trading or investment advice).

41. 300+ people left our lovely group 😞

I’ve seen members drop off big time in communities across many types of projects in the past few months.

People are taking a break. Doesn’t mean they’re not interested or invested in any given project.

42. Were you a co-founder of Flybrix?

Yes.

43. What I’m saying is I hope the marketing approach for Fusion aligns with the current cryptosphere. Old habits die hard in this space and it’s important to understand the elements that result in positive results, both for the project and token holders.

I’m interested in your thoughts. Could you elaborate on:

Where you think the current cryptoshpere is at?

What are the old habits you see in place?

44. Head of adoption should be focused on getting fusion dialed in with financial institutions. Not being focused on trading. IMO

Bingo.

45. Hi Holly, as you know Communication has been one of the weakest links for Fusion, how do you plan to make it more transparent?

Hi there. I just realized I may have missed answering your question from yesterday.

In my opinion — Fusion’s communication so far has been typical for the maturity of the company. We need to give it a fair comparison.

Solving for transparency will happen once we get the marketing machine working, meaning consistent dissemination of quality marketing assets.

46. I think the web site is an important aspect in marketing. The web site should be informative, giving brief intro on opening and further links to details for those who want to learn and investigate more. Right now it is difficult to get some data from the web site, things like token metrics or even info where token is listed. Do you plan to redesign the web site in the future?

Yes. A site update is in the works.

I wouldn’t classify this as a full redesign which will come later.

The goal of this update is to clean up the site and use the majority of existing assets, not generate a lot of new content. Mostly copy rewrites and rejiggering organization.

We’re breaking the site improvement project into phases. The first iteration is optimized for speed to go-live.

I wasn’t planning on even making a formal announcement on the phase 1 site update, since in my opinion it’s “housekeeping” versus being a big flag-waving initiative.