Incent Community Update26.08.2017
As most of you probably know, I spent the last 10 days in Sydney with Rob, Tara and the rest of the Incent team. Let me be blunt with you from the start – the purpose of my trip was to see with my own eyes if the project is still worth investing my time and effort in, particularly as I felt like being left in the dark since pretty much mid of July, and to communicate my findings to you, the community. The above-mentioned communication issue reflected in our Slack team and Bitcointalk thread – communication from my side was at an all-time low. Working remote doesn’t make such a situation easier, neither for me nor for Rob & Tara Down Under.
In this community update I want to mainly make you understand and realize what lead to this unpleasant situation. Allow me to be extensive as there were numerous different factors and fronts that caused all of this. Moreover, I am going to give you an insight into our current team, our reworked concept and where we stand development-wise. Last but not least, I want to make you aware that all of what you’re going to read in this update is my view on things without anyone else interfering.
The “Incident” & its aftermathSo, before I kick off I want to state that I can’t share any hard facts as the lawsuit is still on-going. Actually, I don’t even want to talk about “the incident” but solely focus on the aftermath and my view on how the story (hopefully) pans out.
Let’s dive straight into it: So, Peter quit the project from one moment to the other without any succession planning in place. The Sydney team didn’t have access to anything related to IT: Servers, BitBucket, E-Mails, Intellectual Property, Google Firebase, any online service/account as well as several crypto wallets. The Sydney team, in particular Tara, spent a tremendous amount of time throughout the course of 1.5 months just on getting access back to the above-mentioned services and infrastructure. The mission was a success, we regained access to everything, the last missing piece being our servers just a couple of days ago. Also, Rob had spent pretty much all his time on the lawsuit and other issues associated with it; luckily this has decreased down to 1 or 2 days per week. All of us can’t wait for the day when this story is finally settled, we can put all our efforts back into the project and look ahead towards a hopefully bright future.
What I find more important to stress here, however, is the mental impact. Please allow me to be blunt and upfront with you: Rob had difficulties sleeping, lost his appetite and was more occupied with sorting out the legal case than with anything else. This is both very frustrating and health damaging. This resulted, understandably, in a lack of communication with the community and me in particular. I’d like to take the opportunity to admit that I can fully understand that behavior and do not hold any grudge. It’s actually quite the contrary – Rob (and Tara) proved a level of integrity and commitment to the project only a handful of people have. Last but not least, I’d like to emphasize the commitment Guy showed right after “it” happened – he did not hesitate but booked the first flight he could to Sydney. Trust me when I say that it’s not easy to find such people.
The Incent teamFirst things first, we are going to update the team section on our homepage within the next couple of days; the old, outdated team picture has already been removed.
At the beginning of June, when the world was still intact, we employed Matt and Nadia. Both of them started working for Incent Loyalty without having had experience with blockchain applications before and are slowly but surely finding their way into this new technology. They weren’t even working for Incent for two months when “it” happened. Nonetheless, Matt and Nadia continued their work seamlessly which I personally don’t take for granted. Both have displayed their integrity in this difficult time and that can’t be emphasized enough. I experienced them at work over the last couple of days and can openly say that I am impressed – they are diligently working hand in hand, supporting each other for the sake of the project. I am super happy to have them on board and am confident that they will continue to have a positive impact on the project.
Jins was originally brought on board to organize the business: Implement internal processes, take care of Human Resource Management, upgrade the internal communication and more. He is also instrumental when it is about turning Rob’s ideas and concepts into an understandable task list for the developers. Jins also did not hesitate and was ready to fill in as CTO, even if it turns out to be only temporary in the end. Considering he had his own startup and brings in an IT background, we are lucky to call him a part of the team.
Rob also brought in Mary as Compliance officer and she was a vital part of the team from the very start, particularly at the beginning of July when the story kicked off. However, her main task is to make Incent Loyalty’s business model compliant in accordance with the domestic regulatory framework.
Our re-worked conceptOur original concept was aimed at online businesses, rather than brick & mortar businesses, in the form of self-deployable plug-ins. This in itself was fine, the problem were the many dependencies in our original approach, e.g. real-time purchasing of Incent on a centralized exchange. Not only does this put a lot of load on the applications back-end, but also does the model, as mentioned above, create massive dependencies on external services over which we have no power. This became evident when we tested the concept in ICOtech – we never managed to achieve real-time purchasing of individual Incent orders.
Furthermore, Rob talked to a top-notch marketer and her impression of Incent was positive: It’s sexy. Her educated suggestion was to not roll-out with online merchants but brick & mortar businesses, aim for millennials in their hot-spot areas and grow from there. Combining all these findings, it became clear that we have to change our approach.
The concept we have worked out during my time in Australia is a little different as we decided to include an Incent customer card. There are two QR-codes on the customer card – once a private key to scan and set up a user account, once a public key to have it scanned at the check-out and receive Incent. The intention for the MVP is that the merchant scans the QR-code of the customer either from the application or the Incent customer card, enters the billing amount and Incent get dispersed to the customer out of the merchant’s account. The percentage of Incent a merchant wants to give customers as cash-back is either defined in his profile or individually adapted per client through a slider (which overwrites the default settings). As we decided to not buy Incent in real-time from the secondary market, merchants have to hold Incent themselves. Basically, a merchant tops up his account in-app, distributes Incent to his customers until he starts running out of Incent and then tops up his balance again. In consequence, we are buying Incent in bulk from the market rather than buying back every single order individually.
Our TrumpThe most significant difference from our original plans is a natively implemented affiliate program. Whenever a user or merchant on-boards a new user (by sending out a referral link either over text or e-mail; phone-to-phone by reading their QR-code or by providing his Incent card to scan the QR-code), he is going to earn an affiliate payment on every transaction ever done by that user. This is made possible as we charge a percentage commission on each transaction issued using our application or as Rob calls it – “clip the ticket”. The ultimate goal is to have existing users and merchants on-board new customers, earning an affiliate commission on every transaction and therefore seeing their own balance increase in real-time.
Let’s visualize this fee management assuming the sender, who was on-boarded by Merchant A, wants to send reward value to a random recipient. The commission on the transaction by Incent is 2.5% and the affiliate, Merchant A in this case, gets 20% of that.
The sender gets charged the reward value he intends to transfer plus a commission.
Incent receives the commission of which 20% flows to the affiliate.
This model is set to become one of our main revenue streams.
I’d like to add that each user, be it a merchant or a consumer, has an affiliate. The affiliate can be Incent Loyalty, a merchant which on-boarded a consumer or merchant to the program, or a consumer himself who on-boarded another consumer or merchant.
Call to action! We are very interested in hearing your feedback on this re-worked concept and particularly the fee management with the implemented affiliate program.
Development ProgressI hate to admit it but there is something that I want to bluntly break down to you: The work that has been done on the project development-wise from February until July was pretty much nothing, sadly. Things are brightening up, though. Matt is in the process of turning the mock-ups we shared with the community into an actual application and he’s almost done with that. I have the TestApp on my phone and it looks great. Our current main focus in terms of development is to turn the new concept into a task list for programmers. We expect this to take another week or two – this is when we are finally going to be able to push the actual application forward. We are planning to have the application development managed, lead and mostly realized by RoundTable who is in Tyro FinTech Hub too, right next to our desks. If this time things turn out the way they should, we hope to have an MVP ready for roll-out by the end of the year. Last but not least, I’d like to admit that development updates in the past were very rare and that this will change.
On another note, we only managed to get back access to our server environment a couple of days ago. Matt set up a new Waves node and Incent is soon going to actively support the network again. Hurray!
Some last wordsWe have a very, very tough time behind us and it’s not yet over. However, things have brightened up significantly, development is finally moving as it should and hopefully the law suit will find an end anytime soon. Rob and Tara both have proven an incredible level of integrity over the last weeks and as Rob said to me: “We will definitely get that fucking MVP out there”. The only reason for giving up on the project really is not finding a market-fit – nothing else will stop us from getting Incent Loyalty out into the wild!
To close off, I also want to take the opportunity to thank you guys, the community. Even though shit went down and you were left in the dark, the majority stayed calm and supportive. At no point in time I felt like we lost your trust and goodwill. I cannot express how much appreciated that is from our side – it makes us work even harder for the success of Incent!
