Hive marketing persona - The opinionated guy who wants to be heard

This post is an entry to @guiltyparties's marketing persona challenge. I encourage everyone who has not already seen his post to check it out here.

The idea behind this exercise is to describe a potential user in sufficient detail to help both developers and marketers empathize with their target audience. Thus helping them develop solutions that address their problems and to communicate in a way that makes the solution relatable to those problems.

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Name: Tom Ford

Lives in: Germany, but considers himself a global citizen

Age: 26

Education: Economics and MBA

Occupation: Young professional at EY. Considers his work alright, but not ideal.

Interests: Loves to participate in discussions related to how the future might look. Especially with regard to topics such as innovation, economics, politics, and philosophy. He thus loves it when he gets to attend conferences related to these interests with his job, and he also attends numerous public debates and political discussions in his personal capacity.

Needs: Tom has an almost endless appetite for discussions and a near-infinite supply of opinions. He would love to share his thoughts and ideas on the topics of interest with people and has a dream of one day giving a TED talk on some of his grand plans for humanity! However, he finds the idea of starting his own website or youtube channel, as well as growing an audience from scratch daunting and discouraging. He spends a lot of time searching the web for ways to start a website, build email lists of followers, and otherwise build an audience. In the end, he is mostly afraid that he will sink a lot of time, effort and perhaps money into building a site or channel that will not have any reach or bring him anything in return.

Opportunity: Any Hive-based platform can allow Tom to start his own blog or channel at relative ease compared to setting up his own website. Thanks to an existing community incentivized to welcome and retain new users, Tom is able to establish a small, but nonetheless loyal, early blog visitors. This gives him encouragement to keep sharing content, as well as providing the social proof necessary for him to want to show off his blog to friends, family, and others he encounters on the web. Additionally, Hive can provide him with some early motivation to keep growing his blog by making him a stakeholder in the network he is contributing to growing. Thus providing financial incentives that he would struggle to find at a similar stage elsewhere. Thanks to Tom's existing interest and passion for anything new, the idea of learning more about blockchain and cryptocurrency is not a barrier of entry, but rather additional excitement.

Additional comment: I very strongly believe that we have to focus more on creating a culture on Hive of collectively helping each other grow beyond Hive's internal community. The simple yet powerful concept of our shared incentives to grow the Hive ecosystem through helping each other succeed is one of our most important, yet most underutilized, value propositions as a platform for creators to join. It is also an important part of the pitch for our token, and why it has the potential to become more widely adopted. I would hope that we can use the example of Tom, which was also the example I gave of myself nearly 3 and a half years ago with my own introduction post. There are millions of people like Tom looking for a place to start sharing their thoughts at minimal risk and startup cost, with the best potential for fast and reliable returns (yes, we often mock that idea, and insist that blogging is a long-term game, but it is still true that this is what people are looking for first, and thus a target group we can and should focus on).