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I am working on a blockchain startup to help small businesses with marketing. I am looking for feedback about my logic and idea so please help me out!

To start, I think there are some strong commonalities between a successful business and a thriving blockchain project:

Commonality #1 — Solution Focused
Business: Any successful business needs to be solving some sort of problem for a group of people. It can be as simple as “I want a coffee shop at this corner on my way to work” or it can be “I want to get survey results faster”.
Blockchain: Time and time again it has shown how institutions have failed us. The lack of transparency and their drive for self-interests at others’ expenses left all of us feeling frustrated or even betrayed. Blockchain aims at solving that problem and eliminates the middleman.

Commonality #2 — Trust Earned
Business: No one would trust a restaurant that constantly causes people to feel ill nor will we trust brands that violate their own value. Earning trust from others is difficult but highly rewarding when obtained. Unfortunately, trust can be lost easily when things go wrong.
Blockchain: It is the first real alternative that has shown potential in solving the trust issue with centralized institutions like banks or government. Through the use of smart contract within the blockchain, users no longer have to trust another human being to handle their transactions.

Commonality #3— Network Growth
Business: Throwing money at advertisement can only go so far. It is normally the referrals and returning customers that will ultimately make or break the business. A business that has already earned customer trusts can acquire returning business much easier than from a brand new customers.
Blockchain: A highly involved network of users is key to success. There are contributors and then there are beneficiaries. Sometimes it takes just one person’s influential action to get it going. It wasn’t until someone bought 2 slices of pizza with 10,000 Bitcoins that people realized this “digital money” can actually be used and have value.

Current Non-Blockchain-Based Marketing Options
There are so many options for businesses to consider. Aside from social media, there are e-marketing, print media, radio, TV, billboards, direct mailing, and all sorts of other ways. And in each categories of marketing methods, there are countless companies trying to compete with each other. While I doubt that blockchain can truly disrupt all the ways of marketing, I believe it does have some unique advantages that businesses can benefit from.

Our Answers to Use Blockchain to Benefit Business Marketing

• Blockchain makes cryptocurrency possible and it can be a unique reward system that stands out against thousands of loyalty program out there
• Blockchain's decentralized mechanism allows us to implement a platform-wide user contribution process that connects them with businesses, which in return can potentially give them lots of exposure

For more detail, you can read the original content from my full article on Medium -> https://hackernoon.com/what-can-blockchain-do-for-small-business-marketing-7a1458f1784c

Thanks for reading and please feel free to comment below. I love to hear what this community thinks and if we are on the right path.

The blockchain technology has been identified as a means of supporting and boosting upstarts and small businesses. The open source protocol, transparency, and peer-to-peer interactions makes it suitable.
Your idea looks good on paper. Time to get to work.

I am not sure to understand, from a company point of view, why a company should implement a cryptocurrency instead of the traditional loyalty program. And the same, from a customer point of view. Why a customer would prefer a cryptocurrency instead of the loyalty program.

Are you talking about a cryptocurrency that could be listed on an exchange? Or just a token usable on the site only. Because in case it's about a crypto I see a problem in. Let"s says the token triple or more within months, the company will so start to see reduced profits and so losing money.

Your views are very good. But there are too many barriers to using blockchain. Since the technology has not really been applied, there are no laws and many countries have not really recognized.

This is a very good advantage of bitcoinchain. I think a sincere government or society will welcome blockchain because of this transparency and trust that it builds. With blockchain, you don't have any doubt about any transaction. Sometimes, when you are even making a transfer transaction, even without total confirmation, you can see the transaction already in motion and you are assured of no manipulations.

Your logic is mostly correct "although I did not understand the third point" but you have to rephrase it to be attractive.

For example, you can set up a coffee shop and use Blockchain to ensure transparency.
The coffee was grown on day X, using the equipment x, and then harvested using x, packaged x, and made by x, all these steps checked using blockchain to ensure the highest quality.

High transparency leads to trust, as the customer will ensure a high-quality product with the accents requested, leading to confidence in the store without the use of trademarks.

For the rest of the points, I think you confuse the concept of "Blockchain" and "Cryptocurrency," correct me if I am wrong.

check storiqa.

storiqa is a E-Commerce for small sale products.

Thank you for your encouragement! We are working hard on the product now. We have done market validation and it returned an overwhelming 60% acceptance rate by small businesses. Now, when I introduced the product to them, I barely mentioned blockchain because my experience tells me that will confuse them like crazy. It'll be best when the product is done so I can show them how blockchain will benefit them.

And don't forget about more particular examples like smart contracts. For example, I follow closely SciDex. They are creating a new type of smart contract generator for complex transactions. So that even regular businesses that need legally binding contracts can be on the blockchain. That’s improving the whole blockchain ecosystem, if you ask me.

These are really good questions. In fact, I've asked them to myself and the rest of the team a number of times. Below is what we have came up with that helped us to solidify the use of blockchain for our solution.

First, we want to utilize blockchain's ability to gather consensus from all users for marketing purposes on an immutable and transparent ledger. Nodis.io allows businesses to post up Challenges for people to participate and receive crypto as reward. Upon completion of a Challenge, participant will submit the proof (image, video, etc) on our website for validation. This is where blockchain comes in. We will open up to all users on our platform to validate the submissions. Majority side of the voters will receive a small portion of tokens as reward for the effort. All votes will be tracked and recorded for transparency. This community validation process will give businesses significantly more exposure. The best part of all is that this whole process can be automated. All businesses have to do is post a Challenge and done. This can potentially solve the lack of time issue. And when participants/voters are paid in crypto, it'll resolve the lack of money issue. The only cost is that businesses are required to post up discount vouchers for exchange with tokens.

As for the token pricing fluctuation issue, that's truly a tough one. We will be listing on an exchange as we are looking to do token sale. Our current option is to have a fiat-to-token conversion calculator so that people know how much token to pay for each voucher.

I hope these explanation helps!

Yes, this is totally still a new frontier. Legislators and governments are still trying to figure out what to do. I live in Canada and they recently published regulation about token sale. The window is definitely tightening but I think that's a good thing. At least this can help eliminate many of the questionable blockchain projects out there and help the good ones to be exposed.

Totally agree. When you have immutable ledger and transparent system, the overall process can become automated. We no longer need to rely on a few elite middleman to help us validate each transaction, everyone can participate (and be rewarded) during the process.

Thank you for the feedback! I love your examples and how easy you make it connect. I will be thinking about your logic to better my message in the future. THANKS!

As for your comment on confusing blockchain and crypto, I probably didn't explain it properly. I meant to say... "Blockchain makes cryptocurrency possible and it can be a unique reward system that stands out against thousands of loyalty program out there". Hope this is more clear!

Proof of Completing Challenges lol. It might work, might not work, but it would depend on having people solving the challenges. What about the nodes? Does each challenge solver have to run one, or can they join a pool?

How do you protect the system from 51% attacks? The challenge solvers might collude and hard fork the project.

Love that idea. Blockchain has so much utility in this day of world. We just need to make it so that non-techy average joe can easily use it. Just like WhatsApp or Messenger, once installed, even my parents can use. (my dad had difficulty figuring out how to copy-and-paste file from one folder to another)

Probably not. If it involves cryptocurrency then its not going to be very good for small businesses as it will be manipulated. But if its just for the product manufacturing, accounting and licensing and whatever, this blockchain technology will be one of the greatest of all as it can be traced back down to where and who the product were because of transparency.

We are considering to build the solution under NEO blockchain so I don't think we will have enough volume to over take the platform. So Challenge participants will just simply sign up the Challenge that got posted. Then when they complete, they are rewarded with tokens. They won't be having nodes nor voting power under this structure.

That being said, we have considered to build our own blockchain in the future. In fact, our co-founder is investigating the idea now as we suspect it may cost a lot of GAS for the community validation mechanism when we are scaling. We prefer to have registered businesses to be nodes instead just anybody. We are targeting specifically at small business owners, which mostly aren't techy/interested enough to coordinate a global 51% attack of a blockchain. Business owners will have to option pay tokens to post Challenges so should be in their interest to be a node as well.

I agree with you that crypto manipulation could be a serious risk for this idea. I am really looking forward to here the experts about this subject. I will be grateful to learn how people have dealt with it.

What you do not understand is that data has become the main backbone of businesses and most of this information is not easily acquired. It is certainly not just about cryptocurrency but for the fact that adopting the blockchain technology into one's business would help in revolutionizing some of these processes that have always been lacking in the traditional way of doing things.

The idea of the distributed ledger is something that brings about transparency, let alone when it comes to the idea of cutting out the middleman, verifiable data which would even help commerce industry businesses a lot, and I believe all these on its own are a very huge benefit.

Already market giants started adopting blockchain technology whereas small business are now studying the possibilities of adopting it for their better tomorrow. OP must be very much right as blockchain technology will revolutionize our daily life through every business we do deal from early morning to late night in our routine life.

Why did you decide to use the NEO platform if it would make your tokens easier to he listed in exchanges if it was an ERC20 token issued in the Ethereum platform.

Have you considered less known but time tested platforms like Burst maybe?

The transparency aspect is actually a very good way to start when it comes to new businesses utilizing the blockchain technology. At least for one thing, blockchain allows the secure sharing of business processes within companies and partners, which can be related to business activities, contracts, records, and so on.

All these things make sense for a business trying to bring the future quickly into the present and I believe it would go a very long way for the development and growth of such business in a short time. nevertheless, we should still not forget that all these depends on how well the team is ready to work as blockchain technology itself will not just be some magic wand to make businesses successful out of nothing.

I believe on the same thing. While cryptocurrency is at the turmoil right now and greatly riddled with so many scams and frauds, the technology behind this all which is the blockchain that is the one which is more important and has the potential to revolutionize many sectors including the SMEs players. Small business can be lean and can easily adopt to new technologies provided there is already an available infrastructure they can easily use...this is now the challenge of many providers to come up with the effective, robust but very much affordable platform for small business that can bolster their business and can level the field in the face of so much competition for customers' attention and purchasing power. This is the time for small business to shine...

A currency like bitcoin can help many businesses that have very low profit margins, and this is possible because if you were to process the very same transaction with a bank, the bank will subtract a portion of that transaction and keep that money for themselves, but when it comes to bitcoin the buyer only needs to pay the transaction fee and you keep the rest of the money for yourself.

Do you do a bank transfer when you’re buying coffee? Or do you do bank transfer when you buy stuffs in a supermarket? I have no seen where it’s being done and what they make use of is POS (Point of Sale) which they request just for your credit card and deduct the total money for what you bought, and that is way much faster than it will be if you are using a Blockchain wallet. I don’t know if anyone is really getting what I’m saying.

Good question. I actually JUST posted a thread in the link below about why we are using NEO. And no, I haven't checked out Burst yet, but I will!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5030347.0

Small businesses in their custody will face certain difficulties in terms of capital and scale but they on a small scale they can diversify their investments and can reach the blockchain.

I agree. I believe the blockchain technology has the potential to reach every sizes of businesses. Whether it’s from the obvious financial, supply chain, or data information, there are other possibilities too. Just like the internet how it was when it first got started to how it is now. The biggest bottleneck is always how we can make it more easily accessible to the general public that aren’t techy. Blockchain needs to one day be usable even for mom and pops in order for it to go main stream.

Thank you for that comment. Yes, we are working hard to make sure we are constantly researching, validating, and reacting in our development. We had 3 separate research done in the past 9 months. 1 general survey about people’s needs in marketing and acceptance to blockchain, 1 survey regarding the message and solution based on the our solution and the blockchain, and last research of actually visiting 150+ businesses to see their feedback of our prototype. We don’t want to just use the hype of blockchain as our main advantage. We want to make sure our solution actually needs the market’s needs and will be beneficial to our users.

So true. In our research with small businesses, their biggest bottleneck to gain more online exposure is a lack of time, budget and expertise. Blockchain's inherited advantage of cutting out the the middleman while still being transparent allows for automated activities. In our idea, we allow SMEs to set up promotional Challenges for people to participate. Then participants submit their completion on Nodis.io and allows it to be validated by the community. Both Challenge participants and validators are rewarded with tokens for their effort, which reduces the marketing cost of businesses. In the whole process, businesses are also getting exposure without them actually have to do anything (except in the beginning to setup the Challenge). This can then significantly reduce the requirement of time and online marketing expertise.

Correct. We just got to figure out how to stabilize bitcoin as well as other top cryptocurrencies. Without a stabilized economy, it's hard for businesses to remain profitable as they have monthly fix overhead to pay. Obviously, if bitcoin goes up another 200-300%, no one will be complaining, but it's only when there is a crash like the one we have now that it becomes a problem. While individuals may be able to hodl for longer but businesses don't have that luxury. Utility companies, banks, employees, and investors do not have the patient to wait 6-12 months before crypto's next spike.

These are definitely valid points and will be a big hurdle to overcome for bitcoin and other altcoins. We at Nodis.io recognize that issue and so we only allow people to buy vouchers on our website using their tokens. Then shoppers will take those vouchers to redeem at stores. Much like how Groupon work. Shoppers earn tokens through participating in promotional Challenges.

Agree! However, like I said in my previous replies to others, we really need to make the technology more easily accessible for the non-techy users. It needs to be simple like WhatsApp for online messengers or Newsboard like MSN.com.

Yes, blockchain can be combined with manufacturing and service industries. They are about to change the world. Otherwise the blockchain will be a bubble. But the cryptocurrency is not a bubble.

I think blockchain make a lot of changes in all business marketing and not only in small business. Through this, the system of business becomes more convenient and easy to operate.

I want to believe we are gradually seeing the adoption of the blockchain technology in a lot of businesses gradually and even though it is minute at the moment, it is still a big start. At least, like someone rightly said, this would bring about some level of transparency when we are talking about partnerships within the business and the need to always do things right.

However, every of these things we are saying is all still on the whole team behind the business, how ready they are willing to work, how effective they want to make their business solve a problem and bring a solution to the world and how they can integrate the blockchain technology in achieving all of that.

I kinda feel the opposite. I believe cryptocurrency is more likely to be the bubble (as we have seem with many of the ICOs). But the blockchain technology is here to stay due to its immutable, transparent, and automation benefits. Many big companies and banks have already started to patent different applications with blockchain.

Right. We just got to make sure the technology becomes a no-brainer solution that's absolutely easy to use even for people that aren't techy.

So with Blockchain who do you think is safe, the seller who is offering the products and services or the customer who is buying them? And what kind of small business are you referring to, the online business or the offline, cause if you’re referring to the offline business which we do outside the internet, then you’re very wrong by putting digital currency to go together with such businesses, it’s a bad idea. Cryptocurrency is only fit for online businesses.

Great point. I am actually writing an article on the value of a solution to solve a real world problem. Transparency and automation through smart contract can connect business directly to their customers. We want to create a platform where we are simply just a point of contact. Like a cross road where people meet up to decide what they want to do freely and not like meeting in a restaurant where the people need to follow the schedule/menu. And the solution is meant to be completely dummy-proof that even my parents can use. It'll be tough but that's where we are heading.

Those are definitely valid points. In fact, we understood the difficulty of spending crypto in offline business and adjusted to it. I have personally visited over 150 small businesses (mainly retail, cafe, or restaurants) in the Greater Toronto Area. One of the biggest Challenge that they face is lack of traffic and awareness. Many of them have turned to social media for exposure but most are not successful. It takes a lot of time, expertise, and money.

This is where we come in. The idea is to enable businesses to post a Challenge on nodis.io for the community to participate. All participants that complete the Challenge will be rewarded with tokens. Then they can take the tokens to buy vouchers listed by the businesses. Vouchers will then be redeemed at the store level. This creates awareness, engagement, and ultimately traffic into the store. This essentially eliminates the need to have offline cryptocurrency transaction.

I hope this helps...?

We are all in it surely for the technology and the whole scam thing is just a distraction from scammers and those who are looking for different means to get rich over night without having to take their time to study and understand the market they are in and how to play safe.

I believe with Small and Medium Scale Enterprises, adopting blockchain technology, it will certainly help in boosting their business in a whole lot of way than we can even imagine. I guess we are already beginning to see that gradually anyway and I believe over time, we will get to see more.

Yes. We all know that major corporations are adopting blockchain in some shape or form. When the technology becomes more dominant and cheaper to implement, more use cases will be developed for different niche markets.

In fact, I argue that blockchain was really invented to help to grassroot population and not meant to make rich people or major corporation richer. It was meant to cut out the middleman so regular people like us can have access to financial or data systems directly. And then as stakeholders, we all get to vote on what we believe is right. The blockchain consensus mechanism has the potential to significantly reduces lobbying-type of influence, fake news, or manipulation of data.

this is a pretty good thought especially in collaborating between blockhain technology and small business systems. I think this will be an evolution that might be applied to all small business fields. but of course, to fulfill such achievements, of course, it takes quite a lot of time, especially in terms of socializing blockhain technology to the small businessmen.

That's the idea. Thanks for the encouragement. We constantly think about technology and how it can interface with real life. Chances are that real life users are likely non-technical so technology needs to be easy. To make blockchain easy, we find that we need to utilize its non-middleman benefit and automate processes so businesses save time and money.

Any business that never cares about their customers has never started. Whatever you’re doing you should always put your customers satisfaction first on the line. If you don’t do things in a way that it will satisfy your customers they will never patronize you.

I have seen a lot of sellers/business owners talk about using Bitcoin and their main point is always that Bitcoin has no way for customers to ask for their money back just like they will do with PayPal; payment made has already been made, which means it is not safe for customers.

Yeah, it takes time, great knowledge by small business owners when it comes to the blockchain technology to be able to see it revolutionizing small businesses. It is something we will get to keep seeing in the long run. I am sure over time, small businesses will be able to come up with something and be able to find a way they can integrate the blockchain technology. The good thing about this technology is that it can be applied to various sectors and anyone who is taking the bold step in this fresh state of things, will really be happy they did.

Thinking about that is what has actually brought about huge innovations over the years and why we will keep seeing small businesses with great ideas thriving if they can take advantage of this very interesting technology. Automating processes is something that is gradually becoming a norm, finding easier way of doing things is something that is also becoming a general thing and seeing small businesses in the forefront of applying the blockchain technology, all these things can be achievable when done right.

I don't see small company using blockchain can boost their business. I mean why go to blockchain when they can used the traditional database itself? For me, big companies is the one who are going to get the full package of using this technology. Start ups should go with the grass roots, using time and tested marketing strategy and when they grow that's the time to used blockchain, just saying.

It's all about the network affect, right? Just gotta get a small niche to buy in and then the rest will follow.

Blockchain technology really brings a great deal of marketing and promotion to companies, but I think that in order to research and apply it, big corporations around the world will have a lot of advantages. Applying blockchain technology. There are many companies that have successfully implemented blockchain technology and I believe that this number will grow.