@pally
as expected, your answers leave a lot of open points behind.
1. Does it matter how long a company existed? I know that Airbnb experiences launched just one year ago, but still they are a huge DIRECT competitor for you. And, most of the other websites that I listed have been around for at least 4 years. And, they are not keeping the price high because they want, but just because experiences are time consuming for the providers and time is money. Plus, the website needs to take commissions because it cannot sell "tokens" to get money but it needs a sustainable business model.
2. Of course you can create a company. But in this case it is crystal clear that you are not innovating anything. You are adding the blockchain to the product just to sell tokens, because you were not able to raise funds in a conventional way.
3. You are claiming that you have product and traction. So, where are the product and traction that you claim? A website or app with a marketplace costs barely nothing..there a are white label and even open source software. And, adding blockchain with ETH costs even less. So your product without users has zero value. Therefore, where are your users? Where is the traction? Where is your business model, where are your sales and number of active users? Why if you want to raise money in conventional way (giving away equity) you have to prove that you have all of them and instead, in this case, you can just claim something?
Then, you claimed that you have already raised money in private market...where are the documents?
Too many people are throwing money without any proof of anything.
PS. You claim that you have been around for 18 months. I see from SimilarWeb that your website is online only from May. So, where were you? Another name? Do you have press release? Do you have some facts to sustain what you are claiming?
Hi @realuser, again, we appreciate your questions but do think that you have an unnecessarily accusatory tone.
1. If you read any of the press releases, articles around us or listen to any of the upcoming podcasts we're appearing on, you will find that we time and time again mention Airbnb as a competitor, we are not denying them as a competitor. Another point to your list of competitors is that almost half of your list of competitors are exclusively food-experience apps. You forgot to mention projects such as Backpackr, Tripr, Partywithalocal, CoolCousin and a few others who are also present in the space...
Challenging the supply has proved to be a fairly easy hurdle giving that people are receptive to receiving the more than 20% commission fee taken by Airbnb themselves... Furthermore, these other companies and Pally can easily live in peaceful holistic co-existence since we do not recruit hosts to work for us full-time. If they would like to be listed across multiple experience sharing sites, we will not oppose that. The above comment coupled with anecdotal conversations with hosts who have been dealing with some of the other websites and who have had very poor experiences liaising with these companies likewise paves the way for Pally.
2: We just mentioned that we have been through a private fundraising round, yet you still claim that the reason behind adding blockchain technology to our product is because we aren't able to raise funds in a 'conventional' way. VC funding is a relatively new phenomena in itself and if you are so bound by 'conventionalism' that you can't see the advantages of opening up crowdfunding to the masses then there isn't much we can do to change that perception. Additionally, a wealth of VCs are currently exploring [Suspicious link removed]panies and are getting involved. Alternatively, you can read the piece our founder put up a while back which also spells out some of the broader advantages to blockchain crowdfunding as opposed to 'conventional funding'.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/blockchain-n-roll-oliver-f-andersen.
"Private fundraising at large falls prey to capitalistic short-termism, seeking immediate return on investment (ROI) as opposed to having an in-depth look at the company roadmap and to have the company’s long term interest in mind - two key factors leading to sustainable growth. This in turn lead companies to spend several months (and sometimes years) at distraction from what really matters; the product and the end-user experience"
Taken directly from the article.
3: Going from an idea to a fully fledged concept, to recruitment of a team, to capital raising, to marketing to operational set up, to technical development, to information architecture to legal set-up is not as easy as spelling it out and there is a world more to it than what you are making it out to be. In your opinion, this may be 'easy' to do, however, most other companies in our network and most business biographies would argue that taking products to market and developing a brand is both extremely challenging and quite costly.
It seems an unnecessarily bearish view towards the new paradigm of blockchain technology from your perspective and it would seem that you somehow have taken a personal offence by our concept which we of course regret to be the case. We'd be interested to hear your thoughts on a bunch of other projects such as Storj (decentralised storage, competing with cloud storage as we know it), Swarm City (marketplace competing with Amazon), Ahoolee (search engine competing with....Google), LaZooz (ride-sharing competing with Uber) or even Bitcoin and Litecoin (currencies that are challenging the fiat world) who all seem to be in "Direct" competition with a conglomerate-like centralised counterpart.
You are correct that 'Pally' only has been around since earlier this year... our name prior to Pally was
PenPal. If you follow this link you will find a whois picture which states that the domain has been active since March 2016
https://i.imgur.com/g6OsVdb.png. It seems that you'd like us to share every statistic, incorporation document and private correspondences with investors we have had with you.. we will be happy to share these with you when we prepare for our Initial Public Offering (IPO) sometime in the distant future...
Good Labor Day weekend to you @realuser.
