Dear Karma Community;
I write this letter to you thinking about the road ahead. It won't be the easiest journey that a coin has taken to success, but I think you'll see that it is the right one. Right now Karma sits in a vegetative state, ready for new lifeblood to be pumped through its veins.
Right now the largest Karma wallet with nearly 16 billion coins is an active and stolen wallet from our largest (now defunct) exchange. What's worse, the person who now controls the coins is the moderator of this thread and no longer cares about Karma. (See the first post of this thread, which has been that way for quite a while, even though this person posts here several times a week.) It's a sad state of affairs and, indeed, bad karma.
However, by making the
right choices (at least most of the time) and work together as a community we can better our chances for success and place us above and beyond most other coins. We can not only get to 10 satoshis, but 100 and beyond. For me, however, most of the value of this project is not just in the price of each Karma coin but in all of the wonderful experiences we can create around Karma. That is priceless.
Here are my thoughts on where we are and where we can go.
The GoodThe Karma community is amazing, and a big reason why I wanted to get involved with this coin in the first place. The coin attracts a different kind of user and community member than, say, a coin for online anonymous transactions or guns. While those coins can be interesting and profitable, it is the spirit of 'giving' that makes Karma what it is, and will drive us to do great things in future.
We can make Karma succeed
and do good things.
The BadIt is good to 'give' but even better when you have something to give. The more you have, the more you can give. With that in mind, I'd like to focus more on adding tremendous value to Karma first, then the 'give' aspect. (Actually, we can do both by providing a facility for website visitors to donate Karma to website owners.)
To put it another way, Bill Gates is able to 'give' more than Billy Bob Geldo because he first made his fortune. There's no reason why we can't do both at the same time, of course, but what we need to do is build an economy around Karma to increase the value of each Karma, allowing us to give much more than if we had done the 'giving' first.
The benefit of this being a near-dead coin is that we can learn from our past mistakes. Many of the same faces are here, hoping that Karma can make a comeback. This makes making the hard choices much easier. What else have we got to lose?
Some of the hard choices that I will make involve the nature of business. Business doesn't care about your feelings, unfortunately. That's not how it works, that's how it breaks. If we make friends here, that is a bonus. But most of us didn't come here to make friends. We came to make money and feel good doing it.
The higher Karma goes in the market, the more people that show up. The more people that show up the more community we have, the more we can do, and the more awesome it is. Imagine being able to build a school in SE Asia for ₭2,000,000 when Karma hits 150 satoshi. That's pretty powerful, isn't it? The power is in our hands, right now, as we hold Karma.
But first, let's hit 150 satoshi
With the big picture in mind, your feelings will
not come first. If I had a choice between your feelings and bringing Karma to millions of people, I'd climb the latter without hesitation. Nothing personal, of course, just business.
And Karma is a business whether or not we want it to be. Non-profits are also run as businesses, as are charities and churches. (Some of the most ruthless businesses I've worked with are charities, who aren't tamed by having clients that get upset.)
Capitalism is the greatest charity there is, in my opinion, because it teaches people to do for themselves. It's good to teach a man to fish rather than giving him a fish, but if he must first pay a small price to learn the lesson you can bet your a$$ that he's going to pay attention in class. If it's free, he would see little value in it (and may not even show up).
That being said, Karma comes first (not your feelings). You are free to volunteer but I will not rely on volunteers to get things done (we tried that). When people have enough incentive to do things then they are likely to do it. If you want a particular thing that costs time and money, you will probably need to pay for it yourself or spend time doing it yourself rather than just complain about it. Karma is a bitch, so the saying goes, but not
your bitch
Also, in order to function Karma should not be run as a democracy. There are no true democracies in the world because they're ineffective and simply don't work. Do you want the government providing your internet service or delivering your pizza? Of course not. You want a business that is competing with others to provide you with the best internet or pizza they can. Even the girl scouts sell cookies and have a corporate structure. Do you want to be beaten by a bunch of girls holding cookies?
If you want to volunteer, thank you! But note that I will probably ask you what you've done before and to show evidence of what you can do for Karma. You don't want to waste time, obviously, and this way will save a lot of time for all of us. Don't be offended, though. Just buy more Karma and continue sharing your thoughts in our forums.
However, if you don't like something, I honestly don't care
that much unless you're my grandma. I care when your concerns have been validated by others. But even then it doesn't mean something needs to be done. (Because maybe you're all wrong, and logical reasoning can demonstrate it.) You can find the cutest videos on YouTube with thousands of dislikes and wonder what kind of person would hate such a thing. But it doesn't mean the video should be deleted to spare their feelings. Now, if you can qualify your feelings with reasonable intelligence (such as good market research) or a good argument, then we can talk about it. Otherwise I don't really have the time.
The BetterThe future is bright for Karma. When I first looked at the coin in 2014 it was only at a $200,000 market cap. Here we are, a few years later and a near-dead Karma is worth a couple of million (thanks mostly to Bitcoin and satoshi minimums). That's a kind of life support you can't buy. We're still alive! When people consider that Karma has a bright future, they will exchange their Hahacoins for Karma. From 1 satoshi we can only go up. If we die, it's only because we hesitated to make good decisions.
Our community will grow as we grow. We have people all over the world, and our target demographic is also spread all over the place. But the first step is not so far away. In fact, it starts right under your feet, today.
The Next Few WeeksOver the next few weeks I'd like to throw some details and info up on karmacoin.net. It's not the best choice of domain, but it's what we have for now. I'd like to have a consumer-facing website that is also good for media, with sections for potential investors and miners.
We also need to identify a demographic for our core service, which I think should be catered to bloggers and people that use blogs. (Possibly mostly women, though we'd have to check that out.) It's a huge, relatively untapped market for cyptos. And Karma has the perfect name for it. (Even Reddit has a way to give 'karma').
We need someone to focus on development, which will come once we have a plan in place.
The schedule I'm thinking about would bring us to a January 2018 launch of our core service. This gives us some time to get our ducks in a row.
I've talked about having a CEO and proper structuring of Karma, and getting it incorporated. This will come in time, but now we already have enough to get going. When we have built some momentum, then the right talent will be attracted to
us and our vision. Right now getting the more experienced and connected leaders we need would be a difficult task. The shark bearing his soul for Karma in this post? It's what you've got for now.
So:
0) talk about what we'd like to do <---- you are here
1) website draft 1, to make the vision more clear and get more people behind the vision. ("Look, ma! Pictures!")
2) plan to execute the vision
3) get a dev who believes in the vision and has a good reputation in the crypto world. Hard to find to work for free, but much easier when you dangle enough BTC in their face. (Update wallet, make a Linux version, etc. No fundamental changes yet, however.)
4) when the price of Karma is @ ~6 satoshis, exchange a few million coins from Kosmost's pockets to take care of expenses (you're welcome to donate, but it's not necessary)
5) complete the specs for first consumer offering (plugin for bloggers, browser wallet for users)
6) develop the first offering; test; deploy
7) continually update website with number of installs and users. I'm aiming for 1,000 installs for the first 2 months after launch, based on ad budget and predicted conversion rates.
(This is a rough outline, but I hope you get some idea)
Who Am I? How Do I Think?My name is Tony and I'm Canadian. I've been an entrepreneur from an early age. I've done work for some of the biggest companies in the world, including Leo Burnett, Energizer, Thompson, KPMG, Unilever, Proctor & Gamble, and more. At age 20 I was the youngest executive in the history of the largest financial public relations firm in the US, reporting directly to the board of directors of Fortune 100 clients such as EMC and several others. I was also the sole project manager for the City Colleges of Chicago's 'Year 2000' project where I was responsible for auditing 27,000 PCs, workstations, and servers across 19 locations (on-time and under budget) with a staff of 30. Then I thought about making my fortune in Hong Kong. (yeah, I know.. crazy idea.) From less than $200 in investment capital I was able to build a portfolio of multi-million dollar internet businesses within 15 months and become a self-made millionaire by age 30.
I am sharing these things with you not to impress you, but to ease the pain a bit when I begin to make the difficult choices for Karma. I do have some experience under my belt, but also important is having a good strategy to be able to execute any plan. Many of you won't like the way I get things done. I tend to move fast and break things you might have liked. But it's all for the best, and if/when Karma is at 150+ satoshis we can crack open a beer and feel much better about it.
(I'll probably put my name, a photo of me in a clown suit, and some additional info on the website. That way, you know who your daddy is! I would encourage most others who work on Karma to also put their names. It will build trust, sorely needed in today's crypto world.)
Also, what is important for Karma (I think) is to bridge the gap between the two worlds of crypto and the everyday consumer. It's what I've been doing all my professional life: making the complicated easier in order to increase value.
Which leads me to...
My PhilosophyI've been building bridges for many years in that way and realize the importance of making something easy to understand for the average person. Many of the "hard choices" I'd like to make for Karma are directly related to the following:
1) make it easy to understand
2) make it save people time
3) make it easy to buy and use
4) create experiences that people love
5) create experiences that people want to share with others
6) make a way for people to do things with others, using the product/service
Those are my six factors of business success. Number 7 is to reap the rewards. I'd like to also apply these to Karma to make it one of the great crypto success stories that you can tell your grandkids about.
Karma always comes back, you know. Together, we can make Karma
awesome.
Thanks for your time!
