Hey @Laurence thanks for bringing my attention to the latest updates to this discussion.
About the salary and budget for the marketing positions, I think the problem is often not the advertised salary but rather the discovery of suitable candidates. Very often the best candidates would come from a company’s extended network, and are often motivated by interests and motives that are not just monetary. I think as long as the salaries we are putting out there are not laughably low (which I think at this moment it’s not, though definitely not SF-style salaries yet!), it should not be a huge problem.
An economic incentive that can and often does work for the candidate discovery problem (at least in the Web2 world) is putting out a ‘referral bonus’ out there (aka a bounty), basically paying the referrer who successfully refers a candidate (who makes it past probation) a certain amount of money. Common amounts are in the range of €2000-5000 in Europe, though higher amounts can apply for more difficult hires. I think this is something we can look at, and either open it up to a trusted pool of community members, or to anyone, but use some kind of mechanism to prevent abuse (e.g. using PoH to prevent applicants from referring themselves).
On how and why to market, I think we were wise to focus initial efforts on ‘spear-fishing’ when resources were scarce. This has led to a lot of awareness, respect and interest within the circles that are ‘in the know’. This method is great for capturing product-driven DAOs and protocols, who view security and decentralisation as a number 1 priority (e.g. Reality.eth, Uniswap, Gnosis).
There are however many - if not more - projects out there that are primarily demand/community-driven; meaning if their users are not demanding improvements to decentralisation, censorship-resistance or the game-theory behind their governance model, then there is no push for those projects to adopt something like Kleros. Simply put, many crypto laypeople (and often among DAO founders as well) still need to become more ‘woke’ to the benefits of proper decentralised justice solutions like Kleros, and as customers of our customers, can in turn indirectly spur the demand for integrations with us.
I think it will be very interesting to do a proper market analysis and segmentation of our fan base (if not already done recently), and in marketing terms this would mean identifying the distinct subsets of the community, based on their homogeneity in certain attributes such as (but not limited to) age range, language, ethnicity, geographical location, gender, education level, interests, affiliation with other token projects and real-world profession.
Once the key market segments have been identified, let’s do the basic 4 P’s of marketing for each segment:
- What Products of Kleros to pitch to them (e.g. is it just buying PNK? or getting them to push their DAOs to use Gnosis Zodiac Reality +Kleros?)
- What Price to set (in our case this is a tricky question depending on what we are ‘selling’)
- What is the right Place to pitch our ‘wares’ to them (e.g. a specific subreddit? a certain country? a certain language)
- How to Promote it in a way that resonates with them
And we can have different answers to these questions for each segment, and that’s fine! The key is to be specific and targeted in our marketing.
Once we have made pilots to test the responsiveness of each segment to our marketing strategy, only then is it appropriate to pump big money and efforts into them.
About integrations, increasing the TVS (Total Value Secured) through backend integrations is important, but we should not forgot that there are many dimensions to the value of our platform, and TVS is just one them. There are also many low-hanging fruits like ‘read-only’ integrations (Curate, PoH) which are currently under-prospected and can greatly increase our reach without any additional dev work. Also to be honest, while we get a healthy number of prospects, most of them are too early stage to use us, or do not represent significant TVS to really move the figurative needle for Kleros.
Waiting for v2 is also not ideal, as it may be delayed by many factors out of our control, and may not happen in one big bang. Also, V1 already works well and the V2 migration is mostly transparent to any Arbitrable integrated in the V1 setup.
Also, this might be an unpopular opinion, but I think having a huge following of PNK holders who hold the token for no rational reason other than the fact that they like us, is not a bad thing at all! It increases the extrinsic social value of our platform and as Vitalik also pointed out, PNK adoption and MC increase is essential to the security of our platform. In conversations with partners, several earlier stage projects asking us to secure their platform are surprised that our MC is lower than theirs.
Some say that crypto is mostly a faith-based asset; you are either believer, or you aren’t. And I’d belief in an asset often precedes the understanding of it. Once a person starts holding PNK, he/she then becomes part of a new market segment which we could ‘upsell’ other products/use cases to (e.g. stake to be a juror, secure the platform). The key is to get them to believe and buy in first. Long story short, I feel it’s time for us to loosen our iron grip on only ‘rational and complete’ integrations, and leave a few fingers for the ‘irrational’ side of crypto 
I’ll pause here for now and summarise my main suggestions:
- Get out bounties/referral bonuses for candidate referrals
- Do a proper market segmentation analysis to guide our marketing efforts (if not already done recently)
- Embrace easy integration-free and/or standalone use cases of Kleros
- Embrace shilling PNK for the sake of it (reasoning above)
