Thanks for the reply. It seems there are similar restrictions governing both projects.
In your whitepaper, your App Go Live date is Aug 31st. What will that entail, do you have a more detailed roadmap I might have missed? (By comparison, TKN aims to release an MVP and an initial card batch in September and version 1 about 4 months later.)
Given TKN's poor post ICO performance and that you have an additional 7 day period if the soft cap is reached, I think you're likely to raise considerably less which may be a competitive disadvantage unless of course you're able to get some pre-commitments from larger exchanges to list/trade your token, which is unlikely, but good luck.
ROADMAP
Aug31st is going to be a limited qty launch - we will ship the cards to contributors and open a waiting list to general public, issuing few hundred cards per day max.
The MVP app functionality is: top-up, exchange, p2p send (free real-time sending between Monaco users), withdraw
Following versions will include: cross-border transfers, budgeting, instant loans, travel insurance
It's hard to talk about timelines, but 4 months is an eternity. We run weekly sprints and will have an R&D centre in Shenzhen with 20, maybe 30 engineers. We can do a lot in a month, let alone a quarter.
Roadmap will naturally evolve, especially we are planning to have regular feedback gathering sessions with the community.
POST ICO PERFORMANCE
We will have a dedicate team to keep the community up-to-date after the Token Sale is over. We'll get exchanges onboard to align the dates with the closing of the event.
We have a firm believe that the performance post ICO depends on 3 things:
- delivering the product into the users hands in schedule
- over-communicating with the supporters, including interim milestones that get us to launch
- growing the user based and transaction volume rapidly post-launch, to maximise the 1% contributions to the Asset Contract (which in turn will drive performance of MCO price)
We are committed to deliver on all 3 fronts.
Regarding capital, yes, if we raise substantially less, they can have an early advantage. But the reality is that we have already raised 3x more than we need to launch the product. And once it's live, we have higher token reserves to raise again at better prices and turn the capital advantage to our side. TKN mismanagement of their post ICO performance will be extremely costly to them, which they don't understand yet, because they think US$20m is all the money they will ever need. Shows lack of scaling experience.
Last, but not least, as a serial company builder, my core skill sets are:
- assembling a world class team and lining them up behind a singular vision
- pushing them to achieve things they thought not possible
- acquiring & retaining customers at a fraction of cost
That last piece is what investors should always look for in founders. Anybody can burn through capital to build user base. Can you do it without money? I bootstrapped my e-commerce startup in HK without venture capital to almost 1,000,000 users by the time it was sold for $21m. That's like 20% of online population in HK.. Mass market adoption.
We're taking all these learnings and using it to make Monaco better and deliver a fantastic product for the community.
Support us & have your friends support us, too!
Kris