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by catwell 2896 days ago
It does not matter that the average grandma has no idea what that means. New products need early adopters, and the average grandma is not a potential early adopter, neither is the average grandpa or anyone average, really.

Any argument, including being Open Source, is good to get early adopters. Communication can change later on.

Too many products try to appeal to the general public too soon. This is not how user acquisition works.
1 comments
ljw1001 2896 days ago
> It does not matter that the average grandma has no idea what that means.

My 23 year old son and 18 year old daughter didn't know what open-source meant.

If you could build a social network around tech people we'd all be using Google Plus.

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catwell 2896 days ago
You don't build a social network around tech, you bootstrap it with a community. Bootstrapping it with Open Source enthusiasts is fine. If you say "we're yet another social network" you have no value proposition. Not that I think that "we're yet another Open Source social network" is good either...

Also, the fact that a grandma doesn't know what Open Source means doesn't really concern me, but the fact that the children of someone who posts on HN and works at Google don't, does. Maybe that's part of the reason why proprietary, centralized services are winning.

Anyway, I do have concerns along the same line, not because "Open Source" is on the front page but because:

- The team is not diverse enough in terms of experience. The COO is an "information-security expert"; the CMO is a "security and international relations expert"; the Chief of Product is a "pragmatic software engineer" and "crypto-geek". This is a problem, even though not necessarily deadly.

- They plan to allocate 70 % of the budget to software engineering, and basically 0 % to marketing / user acquisition / community management. This is the biggest red flag for me.

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richardawk1 2896 days ago
Just googled the COO, she is pretty big in the security community. Also was CISO at a Dutch Telecom, and they have Phil Zimmerman!

Im not worried about the budget for marketing, they seem to have managed to get themselves into a few leading publications already and the early backers will provide initial beta users + word of mouth marketing.

What remains to be seen is if the team can execute, I guess only time will tell. Overall good initiative though.

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