@solarguy
Alright. I want the best for Dash and I am assuming so does you. I am willing to engage in a productive conversation with you about this topic. Before we begin I need to know exactly what is your opinion and what things we agree/disagree. I'll need you to stop misrepresenting what I say with the Strawman fallacy (i.e. "
Yelling, "But we want it FASTER." actually has no effect.") and with just plan stupid arguments such as "
Why don't you go ask them? ... With your superior people skills, it should be a snap.".
Can you do that? Ok let's begin. My points are:
A) we are spending money on proposals with doubtful or zero ROI.
B) it's better for Dash if the money is not created than spent on these proposals.
C) these proposals are diluting our focus and there is a real loss in opportunity cost for better ones.
I want you to tell me if you agree or disagree with A B and C. If you disagree, explain why. Please don't make any other points so we can try to keep this short.
A) Zero ROI, no. And proving a negative is logically impossible, so that point is based strictly on gut feeling and opinion. Certainly ahead of time, you cannot prove that a proposal has zero ROI, and I cannot prove it has any meaningful ROI. After the fact, we have certainly had some proposals with zero ROI, but that's hindsight 20/20. It doesn't do us any good in the context we are discussing.
"Doubtful ROI"...this is not a binary condition, doubtful or not doubtful. Some will be more doubtful, some will be less doubtful. There are legitimate scientific methods to quantify risk, which is pretty much synonymous with "doubtful", but we rarely if ever have enough data and time to make those calculations in a useful amount of time. Now we're back to opinions, gut feelings, business acumen, the judging of character. These are all pretty fuzzy and hard to pin down. Certainly, there are some proposals that are obvious fails, like hiring ex-navy seals to rescue children from the sex trade, or giving somebody we've never heard about a million dollars to set up a Dash exclusive exchange. I voted no, and with enthusiasm. And some are obvious slam-dunk yes votes. Many are in the grey area.
B) You are implying that it's obvious which proposals are worthless or nearly so. And I would agree, some are obvious. But in my opinion, not as many as in your opinion. In reality, every proposal has to be analyzed with regard to the potential upside versus the potential down side. I certainly am not of the opinion that if Dash gets a benefit of even 5 dollars, let's just spend the money. I'd rather burn it.
C) your 'C' statement assumes two things. It's obvious which are the good proposals and which are the worthless proposals. I think it's a little more complex than that. And the second assumption is that even if the budget is not all spent, the borderline and/or the difficult to quantify ROI proposals somehow inhibit the adoption of the better high ROI proposals, or prevents them from even being proposed somehow. I don't think that's true at all.
Once you get real competition, and we have more proposals than we have money in a given budget cycle, then you are absolutely correct that picking loser proposals has definite opportunity costs if that bumps the much better, very high ROI proposals. But now we're back to trying to evaluate what's a good proposal and what's a bad proposal. So, either show me the objective method/math that separates the good from the bad, or we're right back to opinions and gut feelings, which you say you want to avoid.
Sure, I'm all in favor of doing effective broad scale digital marketing with very straightforward methods to evaluate success/ROI. They are working on it. Do I want it to be here really fast like today? Sure. But there's no magic wand that just makes that happen.