Fyre & Steem A Cautionary Tale
Last night I watched the brilliant; Fyre The Greatest Party That Never Happened, a film documenting one of the most amazing, and glamorous frauds of all time.
Spoiler Alert Whilst not giving away the ending, I will be discussing certain aspects of the film in this article.
This morning as I contemplated the remarkable things I had learned about the doomed festival and its organiser Billy McFarland, I started to think about the parallels with Steemit Inc.
I'm not talking about legal similarities here, there were some blatantly fraudulent activities by McFarland and the Fyre festival crew, however I saw a kind of best-of-intentions-but-no-organisational-skills event unfold and eventually unravel which drew some parallels with Steemit.
Over Promise Under Deliver
There is a saying in business, under promise, over deliver, it means that you should be conservative with your promises of service, and you should go above and beyond those promises in order to create a happy customer.
For instance, you might open a fashion shop selling luxury men's suits. Your motto is something along the lines of only the best will do. In other words you are promising that all of your suits will be of the best quality, which is kind of the minimum promise you should make when opening a luxury suit store.
However you then surprise customers who spend over a certain amount, with a free shirt worth $100. By giving away a high value item for nothing, you have over delivered on your promise to sell high quality suits, win-win and everyone's happy.
The wrong way to do this would be to start off by saying, only the best will do, and then stating that everyone who buys a suit will get a fancy shirt too.
Well now you're in a pickle, because that claim is in your marketing and people are going to hold you to it. So in the scenario whereby the offer becomes so popular, that you can't afford to give all your customers a shirt, you now have a lot of angry customers.
Before you were able to stop the promotion at anytime you wanted, because you never said you'd give a free shirt in the first place. However customers won't be angry, they'll just be like, oh well, we missed that great promo, maybe these guys will do another one which we'll catch.
Fyre & Steem
Let me say categorically now, that Billy McFarland is a blatant criminal, and I am in no way claiming that Ned Scott is also. However I did see a lot of similarities between the way they run their respective companies.
McFarland seemed to live in this dreamland where everything was going to be fine, as long as he kept moving forwards and stayed positive.
In fact he fired people for saying no to him, or bringing up issues which he deemed to be negative.
I have also witnessed Steemit behave in this manner, in fact if you talk to a lot of ex top witnesses, you will hear similar things happen to those who disagree with Ned.
Another trait of the Fyre Festival CEO was that even though he had zero experience in pulling off any kind of music festival, he continually ignored advice from people with experience, believing that being CEO meant that he obviously must know best.
This is something I've seen with Ned and Steemit, there have been countless people (including myself) who have tried to pass on marketing and promotional advice, however it has been completely ignored.
When you ignore advice and things are going great, it must be easy to think that you are right to ignore all the advice you get. It must also seem like keeping this positive, anti-negativity attitude is the way to go.
However the dangers of these two things is that when things start to go wrong, they really start to go...
The Curse Of The Yes Men
Apparently Winston Churchill hired a team of people whose sole job, was to give the wartime British Prime Minister the bad news.
Churchill knew that in general, people did not like to disagree with those of great character, power and charisma.
Therefore he knew that if he let this happen to him, then he would be surrounded by people who were desperate to say yes to him at any cost, even to the detriment of the war. So he knew that if he set up a job whereby to do well you would have to give him the bad news, then he could be confident that he knew exactly what was going on, and could sleep soundly each night.
Unfortunately Ned has not employed such a group, quite the opposite in fact, by allegedly employing the use of the @freedom account, he has ensured that no witness in the top 19 will ever disagree with him if they want to keep their status as a top witness.
Paradise Lost
In the original whitepaper for Steemit, @dan made the assertion that social media users were fed up with the status quo. Why should we give our time to companies so that they can make billions of dollars by selling our metrics to advertisers.
Steemit was meant to be the answer to this, however we now see a movement away from this original dream. Now Steemit is attempting to do the very same thing of making money from its users from advertising.
In the same way the Fyre Festival moved from Pablo Escobar's private island to a heavily populated Bahamian island, Steem have reneged on their promise not via malice, more from poor organisation. As in both cases this is just a small detail held within the entire web that is Steemit, however it's an important one, that attracted many people to the product.
Moving On
Even though there were some parallels between Fyre fest and Steemit, the important difference is where Fyre had no product, Steemit does and it is not too late to salvage it.
Perhaps the hiring of the new Managing Director is a sign that Ned is finally realising that he is not an expert in everything, and needs to build a team of people who have expertise in the areas needed to make Steemit a success.
Maybe we are going to move into an era whereby the developmental focus is not just centred around the code and back-end functions.
Most of all, maybe we will see Ned taking a leaf out of Billy McFarland's book and he'll hire a Marketing Director and give them a budget to actually go and spread the word.
Because even though the Fyre Festival was the greatest show that never was, it at least had the promotion behind it to make sure we all knew about it.