Tokencard Update July 8th, 2017
Lots of exciting stuff happening. I’ve been in and out of airports, trains, planes, and government offices over the past two weeks and it’s been tough to find time to sit down and type out an update.
On Wednesday I flew into the lovely city of London and embedded myself near Canary Wharf. On Thursday I ventured over to the Tokencard office to meet up with Mel and David. It was a very productive conversation and I’m confident that the project is moving forward at an accelerating pace. We covered a lot of topics, and dived into some details on a few specific ones that relate to my job doing communications.
PR roadmap- Agreed to the structure of interviews and discussed conference and tradeshow appearances. We’re not going to be making appearances at every conference, but you’re going to start seeing Tokencard reps, as well as Mel, showing up to talk Tokencard.
Video content- we’re putting out an RFP to several video production firms who we think have the capability of making a really great video for Tokencard. We’re looking to make an inspiring and informative video that will bring a lot of awareness to Tokencard among the unconverted and undecided.
Customer Support- had a long conversation with David about setting up the customer support system, both in-app and on the website. We’re currently on our second round of meetings with a company here in London that has a good track record of providing a solution that includes a mix of live agents and chatbots for answering common questions. We want to build this system now so that it’s tested and ready for the MVP launch on October 2nd.
Community Management- still putting together the forums that will launch with the rebuilt website. Beware of suspicious links and emails from Slack right now. There’s a big phishing attack happening across a lot of projects at the moment. It looks like this:
CryptoFinancing 2017 Conference
This event took place on July 7th on level 39 of 1 Canada Square in Canary Wharf. It was a sold out event, and the purpose was to educate investors about ICOs, discuss the current state of the blockchain industry, and allow some new projects to pitch their upcoming ICOs. I’m not going to namedrop, but I had some productive conversations with several projects that are post-ICO, as well as possible partnerships with projects that are seeking funding later this month and in August. I’m not going to talk about which projects we’re in active discussions with, because it’s bad policy to discuss details while in the middle of negotiations.
A project that impressed me greatly for its real world application is Aventus. They’re doing two things that I love: crushing ticket scalpers and crushing ticket fraudsters. This is a big point of pain for anyone trying to get a ticket to a big concert or sporting event, and they’ve got a great solution to it. What I also like is that they’re looking for a $15 million target raise, rather than something extreme. I am not a paid writer or promoter for Aventus, by the way.
The growth of huge ICOs like we’ve seen over the past two months was a repeated topic of discussion at the conference, and although there wasn’t a consensus opinion, several industry leaders gave thoughtful responses. Richard Burton posed a great question, which I’m going to paraphrase since I don’t remember his exact wording, “Are there projects out there that are willing to not take a crazy amount of money, and instead overdeliver on value to their contributors?” Another individual who was speaking, and I regret to say that I forgot to get his name, stated “If a project is building real infrastructure that actually requires people and capital expenses, then they have a true need, a justification for trying to raise $50+ million. If a project is just building a blockchain app with a team of 4 people, they have zero justification for trying to raise double digit millions.”
There were also some great discussions about regulation. I think I’m going to save that for a future article though, because it’s worth a more in depth look due to the history and number of countries involved.
Heading to Dublin tomorrow, where I’ll meet up with the Wachsman team so we talk more in depth about our next PR moves.
