Our lead marketing advisor Jeremy Epstein wanted to address you, our dearest ARK community with a few words from his perspective, how he wants to better ARK and bring it to the next level.

Dear ARK Community,

I was overwhelmed by the passion and energy of the responses to the announcement that I had joined ARK as a marketing advisor.

To assess a project’s potential, I have a model that I call T3CG.

T3CG basically looks at a few things:

Team: how strong is the team?

Token: how well thought out are the token economics?

Technology: does the network actually do what is claimed?

Community: how passionate is the community?

Governance: you get this.

ARK scores VERY high on the Community side and that is invaluable. Thank you so much for your passion and energy. Please keep it coming. Any and all feedback are valuable data points as we strive to navigate the waters ahead for ARK.

Ok, couple of thoughts/observations that I wanted to share. Then, I’ll talk about what we are doing.

First off, ARK has an awareness problem of significant proportions. I’ve seen this based on what I hear in focus groups like the one I conduct quarterly in Crypto Valley and in talking with other industry thought leaders, such as at the Satoshi Roundtable. I knew it wasn’t great, but it’s become pretty obvious that despite being a top 100 coin, most people have no idea what ARK does.

So, while normally I would prefer that we do a proper brand and messaging platform first, I felt that the problem was so acute that we needed to get moving sooner. So, here’s what we are doing. We are executing a survey of key blockchain opinion leaders to assess the true status of ARK awareness, both in terms of ‘have you heard about ARK?”, but also in terms of “do you know what ARK does?”. It should serve to drive awareness as well, but we have to have a baseline from which to grow. That’s what we are doing. Diagnosing.

We have to simplify our story, so we are kicking off an engagement with a brand storyteller to do exactly that. There is SO much goodness in ARK, but we don’t have 2 hours to tell everyone. We want to more succinctly, clearly, and passionately tell the story so that all of us (and you) can tell it to others and they GET it immediately.

Build awareness among devs. If you are dev and you are thinking “oh man, I need to get into this blockchain space”, then the 14 different API integrations that ARK offers to interact with ARK blockchain should be pretty freaking compelling. So, we’re doing some initial digital ad testing to drive awareness among that community and figure out which types of devs are most likely to try out ARK first. Then, go get more of them.

Technical writer — the ARK DPoS model is awesome … it’s just not easy to understand. Neither are SmartBridges and what encoded listeners are, so we are testing out some tech writer candidates to help us explore how we can do it better.

Influencer outreach … we need to tell our story to those who understand blockchain interoperability. There aren’t that many, but we need to just tell them what we do in a clear way. If we do that, we can begin to turn the tide. If you know one of those people, let us know. We have a target. We call them “the 100” because that’s the most number of interoperability crypto experts there are in the world.

Here’s the thing about marketing…it’s a lot like software development. Perpetual beta. Agile. Feedback loops. That’s what we are doing now and we are going to do it with small, relatively low cost initiatives, until we figure out where to go. Bottom line: it’s unlikely you will see an ARK Super Bowl ad or Times Square billboard any time soon (but you never know!).

We also have brought in a marketing manager who is helping with a lot of day to day stuff and driving many of these external activities so we can increase our clock speed on many activities.

To be candid, we do have some work to do internally in terms of how the founders reach consensus and drive execution at a fast pace, but I know that they are aware of this unnecessary weight they are carrying around.

There’s probably a few other things that we are looking at from the marketing perspective, but I think that’s a good start.

Hope you found this helpful and please keep those questions/comments coming. Trust me, the intelligence about the market that you provide is invaluable. Worth 1000s of ARK, in fact ;-).

Thank you again for the warm welcome.

Jeremy @jer979