Hi jlp, I'm one of the Crowdholding team. Thanks for voicing your concerns, I'll see what I can do to address each of the points you made.
Crowdholding claims that they have a working beta, which is good news. However, I can’t find it on their website. Have you used it? Have lots of people used it to help guide a startup to success?
Our beta app is
https://crowdholding.com. We ran an alpha since October 2016, and beta has been going since March 2017. We've been trying a lot of cool stuff with it, but it's absolutely open to further change and improvement. We are working on making it a smooth PWA (progressive web app), but it's more desktop friendly at the moment.
Their white paper says that the problem is that too many startups fail due to lack of market need. Their solution is that funders (YUPIE token holders) will be able to tell the startups how to find market needs.
This is ridiculous. If this is the case, then companies would be asking their shareholders on what the market needs. Google, Apple, Facebook and the hundreds of thousands of companies should be asking their shareholders about market needs. They don’t. Why not? Because the shareholders do not know.
I don't believe this is a good comparison. The idea of the website is that absolutely anyone in the world can join the community - it's not a walled garden for YUPIE token holders. It's as we describe it - an open innovation platform.
The only people who will know are the end-users and customers. That’s why companies spend billions on market research, focus groups, free samples, surveys, product trials, etc., etc. The only people who know and will tell the truth are those who have to part with their money and will get enough value in return to justify it. Anyone who has studied Marketing knows this.
Well, we certainly aim to encompass end users and customers in the community! Personally I have a lot of respect for market research, and I don't think our app is going to suddenly render it useless, but I do believe we also have great value in what we are undertaking.
Let’s say that there is a startup that wants to sell Japanese seaweed snacks. How much are you willing to pay for the snacks? What would you recommend to the startup? Even if you wouldn’t eat this, how would you know others won’t? You may never have tasted it before, so you will have no idea. The only way the startup will know if these snacks will sell is if they do market research, in the right target markets, with product trials, etc.
You're right, some questions aren't necessarily appropriate, and probably wouldn't yield valuable results. A more appropriate question might be
"Here's a couple of designs we're planning to use for the packaging of our new 'Japanese Seaweed Snacks'. Do you like 'A' or 'B'? Why?" Of course, this is a really basic survey question, and surveys are nothing new. However, the nature of putting the question to people has a lot of space for improvement.
Also consider that the value is not always in the result, but in the discussion itself. Probably one of my favourite examples of businesses connecting with a crowd is the 'Do us a flavour' campaigns (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lay%27s#Do_Us_a_Flavour_contests). Crowdholding is all about this connection between businesses and the public, which I have good reason to believe has enormous space for improvement.
Being able to actually discuss topics with a company can not only be a good chance to impact change for the better, but it can actually be fun too. Again, this absolutely has more potential for some types of business over others. Consider the gaming industry for example, there's plenty of places to discuss games online, but we feel we can facilitate that exchange in a much more meaningful way for both parties.
Even if Crowdholding's idea has merit, how do you, as a YUPIE token holder, know for sure that startup companies will reward you after they succeed? The tokens are not legal contracts. You cannot get a judge to force the company to pay.
You're absolutely right - we don't use the tokens to enforce contracts. We use separate contracts! During our beta we have been experimenting with the concept of 'crowdshares'. Basically this would involve a contract between the startup and the company committing a share of revenue, with specified parameters. The tokens are there to function as a currency, which simply put, is a great use of a token. For now we want explanations as simple as possible, because just like the traditional system of shares and currencies, it can get enormously complicated! If you think including this discussion in our core materials is needed though, we're really happy for the feedback. Personally I'd like to keep it to other documentation, FAQs, etc. Ultimately we need to improve on this, but we're still a fairly small team and are desperately trying to prioritise.
Startups take many years before they are financially successful. Most companies are still losing money when they go IPO on the stock market. Amazon is barely making any profits. Twitter is still losing money. Facebook took way longer than most companies to IPO and they barely showed a profit. Technology and growing companies rarely pay dividends. How long will you wait before Crowdholding’s startups start rewarding you?
A crucial point to note is that we are not suggesting profit sharing, but revenue sharing. And how long you wait before Crowdholding's startups start rewarding you is a really good question. Currently we are setting a threshold for a company to pass a certain annual revenue before any is shared to the public. However, we are absolutely open to changing this model if we have good reason to. The idea of a fixed sum bounty can be a much simpler alternative, for example.
Also, consider that while you can invest in companies using YUPIES, we don't believe this is suitable for everyone, or even most people. The typical case for most users will simply be as an active community member, meaning you would have the potential to receive YUPIES, which (if you want to cash out) can be exchanged for other cryptocurrencies, or used in the Crowdholding economy - investing in companies, or purchasing products directly.
I do not think Crowdholding is trying to scam anyone. They likely think that they have a good idea, but do not see the flaws. Most ICO buyers do not see these flaws because they haven’t spent enough time in the business world and are impressed by lots of jargon and big teams with fancy titles.
There's definitely a lot of challenges here, but also enormous opportunity. If it was easy then someone probably would have done it ages ago! We don't want to ride off jargon - but you're absolutely right that our language can be improved. If there's any specific ways we phrase things which stand out, I'd honestly appreciate feedback on them.
Hope this clears some points up!
Cheers,
Henry
