Sorry guys, only 2.1 / 5.0 from icocritic.org
Mostly because the idea and strategy. Anyway, good luck and wish you success. You ICO looks like really professionally organised, so I guess you will not have problems to rise funds.
Rating and review:
https://icocritic.org/ico/crowdholding-yupie/Hello smartJEV and thank you for taking the time to review us. We would like to discuss some discrepancies after reading your review.
"The idea of a project is not unique or new one. Crowdholding platform is a mix between crowdsourcing and crowdfunding."Ideas don't have to be completely unique or new for them to be the foundation of an amazing product. Facebook improving on Myspace would be a great example, or Slack improving on mIRC.
Likewise, we aim to improve on the current options available for crowdsourcing (Crowdsourcing 2.0), and feel that our product is already beginning to achieve this. Pushing development forward and getting market share is the next challenge, which the ICO is helping address.
Crowdsourcing is a specific sourcing model in which individuals or organizations use contributions from Internet users to obtain needed services or ideas.
Crowdfunding is the practice of funding a project or venture by raising many small amounts of money from a large number of people, typically via the Internet.Crowdholding is a consumer-to-business model in which individuals contribute services and ideas to build a better businesses together with entrepreneurs and then fund the ventures by contributing small amounts of money.
Both has a huge competitors, such as kickstarter.com and indiegogo.com in crowdfunding, also blockchain based cofound.it, weifund.io, kickico.com, waves and many more. We are not aiming to become Kickstarter, KickICO, Indiegogo or another crowdfunding platform. The model behind our business promotes collaboration and co-creation between the businesses which share their revenue with supporters, so you can experience the entrepreneurial venture and help businesses succeed. Only after a business has been verified by the crowd, it opens up for raising capital.
And Innocentive, IdeaConnection, Yet2.com, Hypios as a crowdsourcing platform. Does the market needs 2 in 1 solution? Probably no, as most of crowdsourcing users in general are not investors and having low purchasing power."And how can you support your claim that the market does not need a 2 in 1 solution? Crowdsourcing users are the ones building the business with ideas and services, but individuals with higher buying power will join the platform, feeling secure about investing as the businesses are already supported by a crowd of supporters.
Let’s dig deeper in the examples of competitors you have provided:
Innocentive users consist predominantly of people from higher-income coutnries: 37% US citizens, 10% Japanese (
https://www.similarweb.com/website/innocentive.com#overview).
IdeaConnection also has a majority of their users coming from USA (
https://www.similarweb.com/website/ideaconnection.com#overview)
The other websites mentioned Hypios is ranked at 5,000,000 by Alexa (
https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/hypios-ci.com) and Yet2.com is at 3,300,000 in Alexa (
https://www.similarweb.com/website/yet2.com#overview); Not only crowdsourcing users are originating from countries with high purchasing powers, but also the competition is weak and there is enough space for new player.
High commission, 5% of ICO campaign. To compare, already established kickico.com platform offers 4% commision. Moreover kickico.com is specializing in crowdfunding, their users purchasing power potentially is much higher. We don’t take 5%!
Example: A new Game Development company launches on Crowdholding and dedicates 5% of the revenue from game. Supporters contribute ideas on how to improve the game and get awarded a share of earnings. Let’s go through the math:
The Game Development company makes 500,000$ in sales;
Supporters receive 5% or 25,000$;
Crowdholding takes 10% fee or 2,500$;
Subsequently, the Game Development company decides they want to scale operations and increase awareness, for which they need 15,000,000$. Now, the company already has an active following and can easily spread the word about the crowdfunding campaign. Together with the crowd, we ensure the success of the crowdfunding campaign and take a 5% fee from the funds collected.
Kickstarter operates with 5% commission and KICKico specializes in crowdfunding, not in building better businesses that are worth to be funded. An average ICO investor contributes around 70$ which not out of the budget for individual investors. After all, a campaign is more successful when backed with larger number of smaller investors rather than a few players holding most of the company’s tokens.
Lack of information about business development... There is a whole section about “Business Development” in Whitepaper so not sure where this is coming from.
...no information about marketing steps.We use and will continue to use promotional tools/channels aimed at covering the whole Marketing Funnel and they are are as follows:
Awareness:
Youtube: Interviews with startup CEOs, Firechats with CEO and other C-level executives, Live Streams with Q&A, Summary/Elevator pitch of Crowdholding projects.
Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn: (Groups related to different topics such as Finance, Crypto, Startups and etc.
Twitter, Pinterest (Regular posts with relevant hashtags)
Events & Presentations: Participating in Meetups, attending and presenting industry events in Europe, Asia & USA).
Journalist Promoted Articles (Proactive outreach to influencers in the sphere and sponsored articles)
Blog Posts (External blogs about our business created by thought leaders, influencers and active supporters)
Google Adwords & Facebook advertising (Upper-funnel targeting: Affiliate, Interests, Demographic and Geographic targeting.)
SEO
Interactive Media (Repurposing content and turning it into Infographics, Powerpoint presentations, GIFs that will be actively shared through all channels)
Reddit & Quora (Broad topics on economy, finance & entrepreneurships).
Consideration:
Google Adwords & Facebook advertising (In-market/Similar Audiences/Topics/Affinity)
Google Search (category generic/mid funnel).
Rewards (Additional stimulation in the form of YUPIE tokens for signing up and contributing)
Guest Blogs (Regularly bloggers will be invited to contribute to the corporate’s blog with their own original content. The favor will be returned when we post on their blog).
Sharing Contests (Enlarging the pool of people who potentially will be interested in our platform via people who already have expressed interest).
Reddit & Quora (Relevant topics on crowdsourcing & Crowdfunding, Financing).
Action:
Email (Acquiring and contacting email lists from events we attend and from relevant media outlets).
Online Chat (Continuous support via chat to attract people closest to the conversion point)
Google Adwords & Facebook (Lower-funnel targeting, Dynamic Remarketing/Remarketing/Contextual product-drive)
Google Search (Brand/Product Lower Funnel).
Repeat:
Newsletters (Delivering regular updates & promotions to Newsletter sign-ups)
Notifications (Email push notifications linked to actions performed on Crowdholding)
Affiliate (Third-party websites that can deliver leads on a CPA basis).
Ratings (Increasing the number of websites that review projects on Crowdholding and rate it).
Loyalty:
Loyalty Rewards (Different schemes will be introduced to reward loyal users with additional YUPIE tokens).
Referral Bonus (To stimulate adoption, current users will receive bonus whenever they refer a great business to join Crowdholding).
Exclusive Content (Users of Crowdholding will receive exclusive access to internal reports, updates about the startups and promotional activities available only to them).
Webinars & Consultations (Organizing regulars webinars with educational purposes, holding consultations with active members to make the best users feel completely involved in the process).
The above is only a brief outline of the activities that we plan for marketing our platform and expanding the user base.
Crowdholding plans to be backed by 10 fintech startups, and because of that they are hoping that eventually startups will join the platform themselves. We already have had several startups who have joined the platform during the Alpha and Beta stage. The projects can be found in the ‘legacy’ section of the website. With our launch, we will have 10 fintech startups (already 3 are onboarded) and we have a list 35 startups to chose from. As we are awarding 5% of the YUPIE tokens to these startups, we are taking time with onboarding the best startups.
No clear information about allocation of funds.Spending allocation is clearly shown in the Whitepaper under “Spending Allocation”
Unsold tokens will be burned (+)The team tokens will be reverse vested with a 6-month cliff and then linearly vested over 18 months, with the team wallet publicly auditable.
Huge difference between soft and hard caps (-)Initially, we had a clear idea of how to utilize the 50M$ and that involved opening new branches and starting additional services parallel to the main business. However our priorities shifted and the focus is now entirely on the business itself, therefore we realistically aim for 10 million $. Nevertheless, we burn all unsold YUPIE tokens and that supports the value of our token.
To finish this up, this rating makes us an underdog, and as a team we love to see this. This motivates us to prove to you all, we are the real deal. Follow us on our journey, and let's change the world to make a decentralized market where you the people choose who you want to work for, not the other way around.
PROJECT TEAM
CEO Ethan Clime has an experience with fundraising on Kickstarter and project management, also other team members have experience, but they’re not very well known.And can you please specify if popularity is the factor by which you judge team members? What about checking how many friends on Facebook everybody has? You say the team has experience but give a ⅗ rating, please elaborate.
INVESTMENT POTENTIAL
Short term Milestones are relatively soon (+)
The clientbase at now is very small (-)The platform is still in BETA, before launching their ICO, KICKico had only a couple of projects. There are 35 businesses in the pipeline and the best will be presented on Crowdholding.
Long term: Big competitors (-) This only means there is a market. The big competitors you state are either in their initial stages of development or are not a direct competition at all.
No clear vision about the future (-) We have clearly shown in our Roadmap what we should achieve in the next 2 years.
No visible competitive advantage (-)The difference between us and cofound.it for example is that we utilize the “Wisdom of the Crowd”. It is proved that the crowd makes better decisions that individuals or experts.
With us, the community aspect is key. Businesses are nurtured and launched into success by the crowd.
There are blockchain-based competitors like Cofound.it and Starbase.co which rely on experts to foster startups just like an accelerator. Also, there are non-blockchain competitors like Quirky.com and Firstbuild.com which have the community to produce ideas, but these companies take the ideas and act as the Marketing, Sales, Development, Legal, Distribution for those selling the products at expo festivals and via their online stores. We facilitate the collaboration between businesses and society, ensuring mutual prosperity for both.
The next paragraph describes in detail why the crowd is better at making decisions. The wisdom of the crowd makes decisions better than individuals or even experts.
We are building a decentralized open innovation platform where the power does not fully reside in one expert, and many of the important decisions are better made based on the local and specific knowledge rather than by an omniscient or farseeing expert. It is a platform that fosters and is fed by specialization. The closer a person is to a problem, the more likely he or she is to have a good solution to it. The greatest weakness of such a decentralized system is that there's no guarantee that valuable information which is uncovered in one part of the system will find its way through the rest of the system. Sometimes valuable information never gets disseminated. However, our decentralized system can produce genuinely intelligent results as there is a means of aggregating the information of everyone in the system.
The are academics like Scott Page (the professor, not the saxophonist) wrote the following equation in his book related to the diversity prediction theorem:
Collective error = average individual error – prediction diversity
The average individual error is a reflection of ability, and the prediction diversity reflects how different the individual answers are. The equation basically states that if you have a group of incentivized, or otherwise motivated individuals, with diverse backgrounds, the crowd will always predict more accurately than the average person. Yes that is always, not sometimes. Of interest, the collective is often better than many of the experts in a particular field.
