I'm a huge proponent of Hive Mass Adoption ideas and I've spent countless sleepless nights trying to figure out a good strategy to make the Hive Blockchain grow in terms of users and the retention of said users. I've had some ideas in the past that have worked great and some others that fall short of the goals in hand, but overall, I can safely say that in the past five years I've been part of this chain, a couple hundred users have joined our blockchain thanks to these initiatives and ideas of mine. It's not a huge number, but I'd like to think I'm doing my part.
Last Friday I retook my Magic: The Gathering hobby and went to the local store. This store is not a card game store, but a coffee shop with a huge space available for people to go, borrow one of the 100+ board games the store has, and play while they order a coffee, a bagel or a beer.
It's not a profitable idea, the owner actually has a couple more businesses and this is his hobby, running a coffee shop where people can join every day and play board games. They offer culture nights, movie nights, workshops to learn role playing games, host chess tournaments, organize community activities and much more.
It's like a house of culture but instead of hosting painting workshops, they host Dungeons & Dragons workshops; instead of hosting sculpture exhibitions, they host Medieval themed festivals; instead of hosting a wine tasting, they host Magic tournaments... you get the point.
Last Friday I posted about going back to playing an old hobby of mine and I realized that there's no community for geeks and nerds to post in about their hobbies. Yeah, there's a geek community but that one is mainly focused around tech.
I was actually looking for a community to post my content on, and I couldn't find one that fit just right. A community for sharing content around topics like card games like MTG or YuGiOh, role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, Comic Book and Manga related, board games like Catan, Wizard or Risk, serious games that nerds dominate in like Chess or Scrabble, videogame related content like a game review or analysis and not the gaming per se, programming and coding as a hobby and as a general topic, indie art & movie which is something off the beaten path, cosplaying and costumes, hell, even reading and writing could be considered a nerd hobby, especially if the genre is related to sci-fi and fantasy, one could even say that drawing fantasy stuff is a nerd-like hobby.
I realized this is a huge niche to focus on, both on Hive and in real life, mainly because of two reasons:
Geeks and Nerds that engage on any of these two topics are blockchain and crypto oriented, even if they don't know anything about these topics or they have no interest whatsoever in learning about them or get immersed in the crypto world.
Why am I so sure about this statement? Because I am one of them, I surround myself with them, and I have actually made a lot of marketing research oriented to this subculture.
A mathematician is more likely to be a programmer or a chess player than to play soccer in his spare time; a comic book reader is more likely to have an interest for role playing games or writing sci-fi stories than to learning to play the guitar.
Who do you think would be more interested about Crypto, Hive and Blockchain... a Chess player that reads comic books and writes sci-fi stories for a living, or a gym bro that goes clubbing and has every Stacy from uni drooling for him?
There is a big opening for Hivers to invite and onboard their local nerd & geek hobby enthusiasts to join Hive because these tribes usually have a gathering spot, whether it is a store like the one I described above, the local comic book store, the chess club, the comic and manga forums, etc.
Coming up with a strategy to reach local adoption is not so hard, and it definitely beats my ideas and initiatives of achieving mass adoption in one punch (and several ideas from other Hivers that strive to reach the same goal), mainly because this strategy would be a focused effort that will be easy to implement for other Nerds & Geeks who are already part of Hive (let's face it, there are many of those on Hive, it's probably one of the biggest and most underrepresented tribes on Hive, myself included.
It would be easy as hell to approach those tables, ask for 1 minute of their time, hand in some QR codes designed in a cool, geeky way that clinches their attention and voila, you will have at least a couple curious people peeking at Hive and creating an account using said QR code.
You might end up with 3 new Hivers per week, and if every nerd & geek does the same in the their local nerd gathering spot, Hive might end up as a Geek & Nerd website if other communities keep resting on their laurels (yeah, that was a challenge for all the communities out there).
I went ahead and created a community that you can already join to.
Geek & Nerd Hobbies
I didn't hesitate, not even one second, to create this community using two fringe words that used to be something to be ashamed and used to describe the outcasts ten years ago because thanks to companies like Marvel and DC Movies, series like Stranger Things, Big Bang Theory and others, Geek is the new sexy & Nerd is the new handsome.
I have several ideas for this community and I already created the $HOBBY token. I will put in some weekly time towards growing and developing this community with a business mindset, and hopefully I'll have the time to give continuous updates and develop some progress towards this. I already know how to code, perhaps a frontend is coming. I already know a hell lot about tokenomics, so a token launch might be coming. Growing this community and growing the hive ecosystem is now my hobby, who would have thought.
Who knows. In the meantime, if you are a Nerd or a Geek, you are more than welcome to join this community and start posting here.