Question: how many of these units do you plan to proxy, and what value do you provide for the $1700/unit you are charging for this service?
Hi,
We will proxy as many as our customers want to buy until Metabank.ru runs out of allocated chips from their assigned wafer lot.
The value we provide is this:
1)Trustworthy Russian staff: We have very competent trustworthy business contacts & soon to be employees in Russia that will receive the units from Metabank in Moscow. Depending on volume of sales, one or two of us may very well fly there ourselves for a period of time.
2) Secure testing & shipping facility We will setup a secure facility there to open each unit, test it to make sure it is working, package it for international shipping to you.
3)Proven Competency We are competent individuals as evidenced by our accomplishments in life and as evidenced by the information we provide in the questions that have been asked so far. You can also see 6 more pages of discussions here, prior to this thread. We recently moved the thread here so we could better manage it. Old thread worth reading:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2236564)Working hard to build trust with you We are trying our best to build your trust in us. Today I was verified by "JohnK" as requested by several people here. This basically means that all along I am in real life who I say I am. I personally I am not just hiding behind some alias, and have provided my linkedin profile and have also had skype calls with some of our customers, although this aspect is not something I can promise to do for everyone due to time constraints.
5) Highly technical Senseless, and especially Nigel have a very strong technical background in this area (FPGA & ASIC design, PCB design, assembly, etc). I am less technical in this area than they are, as my area of expertise is in Network Engineering and Data Center Operations, but in short, we know what we are talking about and have done extensive research.
6) Long Term Business We're not just a bunch of guys running an overnight operation, we plan to be around for a long time as a business and have recently incorporated. In short, we are here to offer support after you receive your units.
7) Building a customer support structure While it has been a lower priority compared to everything else we've been working on, we aim to at minimum have a basic website up and running where over time we will build all technical, support and product offering information on.
8 )Unique thus far As far as I could tell, though I haven't extensively searched the forums, we may be the only Western company providing this proxy service in Russia, though if you want to gamble there seem to be several other mostly Russian individuals offering a similar service, but possibly of questionable trustworthiness.
9) Keeping our customers informed on a frequent basis: One of the challenges I've seen not yet seen well resolved with just about every single ASIC board company thus far, is that their staff is not easily accessible to customers, transparency is often lacking and customer service is for the most part seriously lacking. It's easy to talk when we haven't had a chance to prove ourselves yet, as we are not yet handling anywhere near the volumes they are, but I can assure you this is one of my highest priorities. It is risky enough to venture into any one of these operations as a customer, it is even more nerve racking when there is a huge lack of communication and support structure for the customer base. I must admit that this is somewhat the outcome of a hashing speed arms race. It's all Engineers heads down doing the core work, while customers await with bated breath of any hint of what might be going on, often waiting weeks without any updates. Resources are extremely scarce in many of these circumstances, but now that some of these operations have millions in their pockets, those excuses should be gone, still customers are seemingly left in the side lines a lot of the times. I very much intend to improve on this circumstance with our company.
In short some of our profits are eaten up by operating costs and overhead in what we are trying to do (plane tickets to Russia, employee salaries, office space, custom exporting fees, shipping costs, etc), the rest is profit for us to re-invest in the future of our company and if we're lucky we may also end up paying ourselves some money for the countless hours we're putting into this at all levels.
Let me know if you have any other questions,
Cheers
Luis
