Bitcoin Forum

I'm working on a presentation to showcase Safebit to investors as an investment opportunity and I'd like to get some yes on the presentation before I wrap it up.

Please let me know what you think, and if you have tips for me, let me know!

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1290056/btcfx/04-08-11/Cover.jpg
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http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1290056/btcfx/04-08-11/Page%209.jpg


For those who are interested in knowing who's behind Safebit:

Safebit is a project started by myself, Eli Sklar - my full real name as registered in Israel
I own a registered company in Israel, the registration number for my company is 514543479
You can check the full details as it is registered in Israel: http://147.237.72.24/WebOJSite/CompaniesDetails.aspx?id=514543479 (Hebrew only, I'm afraid).

This: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1290056/Gridct.pdf is a signed document by the Israeli Department of Justice that this company does exists and is a registered business in Israel, it's in Hebrew but you'll get the spirit of things...

I can provide any other details that you may need to prove that this is a legit business.

good work, looks good.... just need the members now.......

You're looking at him...  ::)

How come you didn't show the price blip and dip?

I just took a quick glance but I noticed several spelling errors on slide two.  "Indevidual" (twice) and "architectureral."

Eli, I think this is great.  This is exactly what Bitcoin needs to help move it more into the mainstream and out of the domain of techies.  You did a nice job on the mock-ups of the UI, it looks very polished.  What tools/languages have you been using for development? 

Question: Is this a self install service or a centralized service (i.e., wordpress.com or wordpress.org)?

If it's .org, I wholly support. If it's .com, not in the least bit interested in another centralized service.

Because for me it's not a representing the overall trend, as you noted it was a blip and dip, these things happen and they are only interesting at the time of their existence, afterwards it's just a tiny anomaly.

Like Wordpress - Both.

Safebit remote will allow access to your wallet from anywhere, something like a hosted wallet (not exactly though).
Safebit local will let you use it locally on your own hardware with no strings to the remote service.

It's up to the user to select what kind of security they chose.

All of the investors that I have ever done business with take a very dim view of hiding pertinent data.

And if you don't think the blip and dip are important then we think very differently.

Good Luck

you need to get someone who knows how to use a spellchecker to go through those slides, it hurts my eyes.

its gonna be difficult to get users to trust ANY form of online wallet with the mybitcoin fiasco.
how are users to know you just won't pack up and leave with all our btc

An online wallet is only a part of it, for the most part it's a local wallet designed to work directly from your computer.

I'm not hiding any data.
The way the numbers are factored in is by taking the first week of every month and looking at the numbers. You can see in [utl=http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/j423v/im_trying_to_get_some_historical_data_on_bitcoin/]this reddit post[/url] that I've asked about this and got little to no help, and also check out [utl=https://spreadsheets.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsACp255EvXsdFFpMTRmX2lrdHl0aHZ5bHltaGQxVEE&hl=en_US]this google spreadsheet[/url] to take a look at my numbers.

And whether it's important or not - perhaps now it looks important to you, but I believe that if we take things into perspective, it's not going to count much in the near 3-4 months. There were quite a few such blips and dips before and they are simply ignored today because they are not more than a slight change in the historical data, practically unnoticeable. How important they are? I simply don't know...

man, when i said members

signups

members=signups etc etc

How much are you looking to get from investors? Can you or will you take smaller "seed" investors (such as myself?). Have you valuated your company/project yet?

I second that. Could be interesting if that is done properly -as investment.

Yes, I'm considering all my options, and a small seed investment is something that is the best way to go.

I'm generally looking to secure around $200-$300k for a year of development, but that's including some (3-4) employees and the general mishmash of managing a full-blown startup, and I have a hard time believing that someone will drop a $200k in advance in a Bitcoin project.

To be more realistic, I need $45 to support myself and the company that I have for around 6 months, and I would really like to have a full time Python developer, that would be around $50-$60k for 6 months as well.
Those sums are not exactly big when it comes to investment, they are not small nonetheless, and my guess is that the investor that takes up the offer will setup some kind of a milestone for two-three months after the initial investment to see where things are going and if they're heading in the right direction, and then invest the extra funds needed.

Regarding valuation, if anyone offers me a $50k check with my companies name on it, I will most probably sign 10% on the spot, for anything other than that, we'll have to discuss about it, and it would probably be a bit more personal (skype/face-to-face meeting).

How do you justify your present half a million dollar valuation? Does your power point presentation worth that much or is there something else?

That's what I'm willing to sign off if offered on the spot, like I said, for other numbers we can have a private talk.

I don't justify the valuation, I need the sum of money presented above, for a period of 6 months and the 10% is what I feel comfortable signing off from my company for that kind of investment, we can talk about shorter terms (2-3 months milestones) and different valuation - again, privately. And I'm open for counter offers that sound more reasonable to you...

Although the project is in its infancy, it does gained some popularity in the 6 weeks that it exists, and I feel like I have a decent plan going with it financially, both for the long and short terms. But I may be wrong an this maybe over estimated, let me know what numbers you had in mind.

Your development budget is way off. I could hire people here on the spot for about 1000 euro a month - happens you should look into countries with a better income structure for you than maybe the US (I moved to poland some years ago). Also 3 months won't hold and even then at the current state of the economy I fear this is not going to be a significant income maker for quite some time - pretty much based on the number of people using bitcoins.

That said, I am intrigued by the project. I like it. Make sure it is a job well done.

In Latvia you can hire full time professional Python programmer with good English for about $800-$1000/month, for 6 month it would cost not more than $6k.

Do you have access to such developers?
If I can get 1-2 guys that will be accessible to start development, I could ask for a lot less in the initial investment.

If that's true, I'd be more than willing to hire them when the time comes.

No taxes, insurance and overhead etc? Here in The Netherlands it costs almost double one's salary to employ someone...

In my pricing that was already included ;) Add another couple of hundred for work environment and you are set.

In Latvia add about 1/3 to salary to know the real employment cost.

The design of that client and the slides are beautiful. Really nice work, looks very professional.

Always supported you with this...until I saw that you are going to charge :\ I still support you but I would seriously think about the charging part...I could just put all my funds on a wallet that isn't connected to the internet at all and never on an OS easily to secure my stuff.

Charging will be only for additional services that are not necessary for regular day-to-day use by regular users.

Additionally, most of the services will have a free version that will be enough for regular users, it's called freemium business model, think Dropbox that provides 2gb for free, and if you need more than that you need to start paying.

Again: Safebit is and always will be free and open-source. Users will not be required to pay for anything just to use the software (sending/receiving and securing their coins). Ever.

Safebit is FREE.

I can imagine a simple interface to do all sorts of things in one place, for example this series of actions.

Add an existing Britcoin account with "Britcoin", [username], [password] information.
Add a new MTGox account with "MTGox", [desired username]. [desired password].
Add a new Tradehill account with "Tradehill" where the username and password are presumed to be the same as a global one you log onto Safebit with.

Add £5 to the Britcoin wallet you just associated with your Safebit account, would presumably involve getting shown the text from there description from there website which involves internet banking and direct transfers of money. So you then presumably have to go and do that sort of thing sepratly still, but at least there would be one "go all" place to find out how.

Transfer £2 from the Britcoin account you have just created to MTGox.

Buy £2 of bitcoins with MTGox that end up in your MTGox wallet at the market price.

etc... (could also include other things like bitcoin banks as possible entites, although obviously they have different avalible options if you add accounts on them)

At every step of the way, every time there is any being charged fees for anything you get informed with an "are you sure" before it happens.


You could supply a decent miner as well, one that looks at all the available hardware on your computer that can compute and lists it, with recommended items ticked. There could be a pool chooser with a good default option so all you have to do is click mine, then you get an estimated time for however many bitcoins.


edit: You could have "offline wallet" as an addable option as well to the "user assets list".

Like add-ons for browsers? That would be cool. Someone writes an add-on for their sportsbetting site, etc.

I think it would have to be hard coded into Safebit.

I soo want this sort of interface to be in it. I would definitely use it.

Not mentioned here, but this is also a reply to your recommendations/wish list.

Safebit is designed to be extendable, meaning that people will be able to create add-ons to the application without me (or whoever eventually running Safebit) needing to be involved.

Like TTBit suggested, it will be something like browser addons. And technically it would be done in the same way, using Javascript and HTML5 (the most popular languages used by developers to date).

I'm happy to hear that you guys are waiting for these kind of features, and these features are planned to be implemented inside Safebit when it launches.