Community Update #26: 2019 Year-In-Review, Q1 2020 Progress, Our 2020 Focus, Token Unlock, & More
Hey Everyone, 👋
With 2020 ahead of us, it’s time to reflect upon the year before, celebrate the wins and acknowledge areas in which we can grow. Each year, we take time to review these areas in order to quantify any shortcomings and make improvements to the overall company. There was a ton accomplished in 2019, and while there is still a long way to go, we are extremely excited for what the new year has in store.
Here are some of the company’s key achievements from 2019.
We built a great rewards product for both iOS and Android, hitting a record number of active users, reviews, and revenue in December.
Throughout 2019, we spent much of our efforts building and testing with a focus on growth towards the end of the year. There was a consistent upward trend in user growth month over month, much of which was attributed to organic growth. It’s no surprise that Q4 was our strongest quarter to date, having surpassed 250,000 Monthly Active Users in December. This translated into record-high revenues across the same period, which isn’t much of a surprise. December is usually the best month for any business earning revenues from any form of advertising and data, as advertisers deploy most of their budgets during the holiday months. However, we’ve continued the upward trend from both user growth and revenue perspectives, having surpassed December’s figures in January, which is notoriously the worst month for any business earning revenues from advertising.
Other Notable 2019 Highlights:
- We delivered over $120,000 in value back to our users.
- Current users on average play over 500,000 tracks a day.
- Current fills north of 150,000,000 ad impressions per month.
- Our users open up their phones to our lockscreen player over 30,000,000 times a month.
- Our top regions are the USA, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, Brazil, Philippines, Mexico, Germany, Nigeria, Singapore, India, and Russia. (With the majority of users being from the USA)
- We partnered with several notable celebrities such as Ludacris, Charlie Sheen, and several others who further drove installs to Current. One of our more comical “meme-like” creatives did tremendously well with Ludicris’s audience and drove tens of thousands of installs in December alone.
Our gross margin ended the year much higher than forecast, suggesting the variables of our revenue model are dialed in for an increased scale.
As we began to scale in October, we were able to significantly increase Gross Margin (GM = 1-Cost of Redemptions/Revenues) through December, hitting well north of our goal of 20% for Q4 (Big improvement from when had a negative gross margin in Q1 & Q2 of 2019). Some of the variables where we’ve made improvements include adjustments to the points system, eliminating fraud, along with optimizing ad units shown per user. We remain confident for Q1 to continue the same trend as we’ve already surpassed these figures in January. While we believe this percentage may change over time, due to the seasonality of advertising revenues, we’re confident we can stay above our target. Further, achieving strong margins while maintaining healthy user retention demonstrates that our underlying business model is sustainable as we continue to scale.
Our engineering team’s ability to increase the frequency of deployments into production.
Through trial and error over the course of 2019, we have fine-tuned the way our engineering team delivers App updates. This small change has started to pay dividends and is a large reason as to why Q4 has been our strongest quarter across the board. This was accomplished simply through treating each segment of a release as it’s own release. Whereas beforehand, each segment would be added to a much larger release. This left the opportunity for unnecessary impediments if any there was an issue with one of the components.
Our iOS and Android products hit a record high app store rating of 4.4 for Current.
Throughout 2019, our users have used the Google Play Store and Apple App Store reviews to both praise us when they love it and punish us when issues arise. We’ve monitored both of these very closely and sifted through all feedback from our users — good or bad, as they tend to leave a review before contacting us through support channels. Having the ability to prioritize and address the issues that arise from this feedback is the exact reason we’ve been able to increase our ratings across the board from a low of 3.2 at the beginning of October, to a high of 4.4 by the end of December. Additionally, both products surpassed major milestones of over 55,000 organic reviews on Android and 15,000 on iOS. We also brought down our reward processing time from up to 7 business days to 2 business days which greatly improved our rating.
We partnered with two leaders in the Digital Securities industry to ensure we met all requirements to compliantly distribute, and create a market for the $CRNC Token.
Back in July 2019, we formally announced a partnership with Securitize, the first SEC-registered transfer agent for digital assets. Securitize’s platform allows for Current to maintain real-time financial records of security token ownership, track account balances, and payout dividends among holders. While we are not legally required to utilize the services of a transfer agent at this point, we feel that our partnership with Securitize truly demonstrates our commitment to compliance.
As secondary markets for security tokens are still developing, we are acutely aware that secondary markets are important to our ecosystem. In October 2019, we announced our token would be listed through Openfinance, the leading platform for the secondary market trading of digital alternative assets. As new distribution partners and exchanges become available for security tokens, we intend to evaluate all opportunities to expand the footprint of our token.
We updated our token economics to include deflationary mechanisms for buybacks and dividends to further tie the token to the success of Current’s platform.
The major updates made to our token economics include (i) our intention to burn approximately 300-450M $CRNC Tokens from the total supply, (ii) using a portion of revenues from our Bonus Bucks (or similar revenue sharing) product feature, along with revenues from direct ad-buys, to purchase tokens off of the market and subsequently burn them, and (or) (iii) providing a quarterly dividend royalty to token holders with revenue generated from our product to further tie the products to the token.
To learn more about these deflationary token mechanisms in further detail, we encourage you to read this post. For our announcement on dividends, you can get the update here.
We’ve made the commitment to become a public reporting company in order to be the first unrestricted digital asset; making our token available to all retail investors.
One of the realities of conducting our token sale in the fashion we did, is that there may be reporting requirements once the number of tokenholders exceeds a threshold of 2000 holders. That is, similar to a company with publicly-traded equity, we would have to make quarterly and annual filings (10Ks and 10Qs) once the number of holders exceeds this threshold. These reporting requirements would be required to commence within 1-yr from the end of our fiscal year in the period in which we unlock the token. However, we are considering the commencement of this reporting process prior to the statutorily mandated deadline as a way to provide further transparency; allowing the market to make better investment decisions. This unique path would make us the first digital security to self-report without being required to make these filings pursuant to an SEC order requiring reporting as a penalty (e.g., Paragon or AirFox).
Top Product Themes for Q1 2020
- Product Stability & Reduce Bugs
- Improve User Retention Features
- Increase User To User Virality
- Increase Revenue Per User By Source
2020 Commitment To The $CRNC Community
With our most successful year to date behind us, there’s much to improve on in order to hit even more ambitious goals in 2020. Just as the engineering team made adjustments to their processes to ensure timely delivery of production updates, our marketing team will be making similar changes.
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As opposed to writing one large update within every 6 weeks with an AMA follow up, where time and again, we’d get held up by one small component, we’re going to transition to much shorter updates at a higher frequency. These updates may include product features, brief progress reports, issues that arise, partnership announcements, hitting key milestones or thought leadership pieces, just to name a few. This will allow the team to increase our frequency of communication.
At the end of the day, we wouldn’t be here without our community, we understand that, and we’re extremely grateful for the opportunity. Moving forward you’ll be hearing from us and seeing us much more.
January 2020 Product Highlights
iOS and Android’s release updates from January
With the increase in the speed of production deployments, both of Current’s products received two major production updates since the end of December. These include a few minor changes such as (i) updates to the discover screen, including reorganizing curated stations and genres; (ii) battery optimizations; (iii) improvements to our Android-only lockscreen feature (one of our largest revenue drivers); (iv) new options to share and refer friends; and (v) the addition of Bonus Bucks on both platforms.
Our Bonus Bucks feature was launched on January 15th for both iOS and Android.
To learn more about how this feature works and understand its impacts on the $CRNC token, read here.
Product Goals For Q1 2020
There are many features still in the pipeline for the remainder of Q1 2020, some of which involve large partnerships and will provide our users a whole new suite of features to both save cash and maximize earning within the product.
Launch improvements to our user referral system
First to launch in February are further improvements to our user referral system within both products. We expect these updates to create a solid foundation of network effects as each user that refers another, earns an automatic 500 points, and an additional 5% of the referred users listening points for the lifetime of that user.
Launch user-curated stations
Soon thereafter, we’ll be introducing user-curated stations and an improved search system, giving our users the ultimate flexibility to choose artists, genres and share them with friends. This has been one of our most requested features among users.
Another large volume of requests has come in for us to add podcasts into the platform. Our users asked, and they shall receive it! Soon, our users will be able to pick and choose from 50,000+ different podcasts that they know and love across many different categories — News, Business, Comedy, Murder Mystery, and many more.
Launch the Bill Reducer feature (U.S. Only)
Two major features we’ve discussed before, Bill Reducer and Card Linked Offers, will both be piloted in the U.S. and should be launched by the end of Q1. Bill reducer will be launched first and will allow users to save their hard-earned cash through reductions on their bills. It works by uploading a bill — a utility or cable bill for example, and then an advocate would be assigned to fight on their behalf to ensure they’re getting the best possible deal available.
Launch the Card Link Offer feature (U.S. Only)
Finally, the final touches to our Card Link Offer feature are being made and will be submitted for a final review with our partner mid-February with a launch date to be announced soon after. This is one of the largest features we’ve developed for both products, and are excited to provide the capability for our users to earn even more cashback through their daily spending habits; being partnered with over 50,000 retailers around the US and works with Visa, American Express, and Mastercard.
Teaser: Last but not least, we will have a major product announcement around the end of Q1. Something we have been working on since early 2019 and we believe will really propel Current & $CRNC to the stratosphere. More on that in a future update!
Token Unlock & Listing Timeline Update
While we collectively continue to make progress across the board, there are still a few requirements left to satisfy ahead of announcing a revised unlock timeline.
The Openfinance team continues its work to approve additional countries where Current’s investors reside and are going through the final stages of adding four new major markets, bringing their total supported jurisdictions to over 50. In conjunction, Securitize is implementing a few improvements to the investor portal to accommodate a larger volume of new registrants. To date, there have been hundreds of new registrants for KYC/AML and wallet registration via Securitize.
We expect many of these requirements to be satisfied in the following weeks. Once we have a clear picture and coordinate with both partners, we will update the community as soon as we have details.
Reminder: For those interested in registering for Openfinance ahead of trading, you can do so here. We encourage everyone to register regardless of whether or not they currently support your country as they’re continually adding more. Once they do support your country, you’ll be notified by email. Additionally, if your country is currently excluded on Openfinance and would like to transact p2p, or through OTC once the token is unlocked, you must register through Securitize, you can do so here.
How to Get Involved
- Chat with us on Twitter!
- Add Questions here for an upcoming AMA
- Have someone in mind that you think is a perfect fit for one of our open positions? Send them a link to our job board. As a reminder, we pay a referral fee for any employee we hire!
If you ever need to reach out to our investor relations, or leadership team, please feel free to email info@current.us, and we assure you that we will respond in a timely fashion. Please keep an eye on our Telegram Announcement channel or Medium for all future updates. If you’d like to ask a question specifically for one of our upcoming AMAs, reach out to us on Twitter or add a question in our Google Form that we’ll use from here on out for all future AMA’s.
[PLEASE READ] Important legal disclaimer: No money or other consideration is being solicited by this communique, and if sent in response will not be accepted. Our discussion may contain forward-looking statements that are based on our beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to management. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by the following words: “may,” “will,” “could,” “would,” “should,” “expect,” “intend,” “plan,” “anticipate,” “is designed to,” “believe,” “estimate,” “predict,” “project,” “potential,” “continue,” “ongoing,” or the negative of these terms or other comparable terminology, although not all forward-looking statements contain these words.
These statements involve risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and other factors that may cause actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements to be materially different from the information expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Although we believe that we have a reasonable basis for each such forward-looking statement, we caution you that these statements are based on a combination of facts and factors currently known by us and our projections of the future, about which we cannot be certain. Forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, statements about developing and designing the Current network, including the $CRNC token and its future utility; the anticipated development and growth of the Current Network; maintaining and expanding our base of users; our anticipated growth and growth strategies and our ability to effectively manage that growth and effect these strategies; our expectations regarding regulatory developments and their effect on the Current Network, including the ability of applications on our network to develop a user base and a successful business model; and potential future listings on an exchange or ATS. We cannot assure you that the forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate. Furthermore, if the forward-looking statements prove to be inaccurate, the inaccuracy may be material. In light of the significant uncertainties in these forward-looking statements, you should not regard these statements as a representation or warranty by us or any other person that we will achieve our objectives and plans in any specified time frame, or at all. We undertake no obligation to update any forward-looking statements publicly, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.
Openfinance is the leading platform for the secondary market trading of digital alternative assets. The platform enables market participants to buy, sell and list a range of alternative assets in the secondary market in a more efficient and secure way. It also provides access to investment opportunities and liquidity in the $8.8+ Trillion alternative asset market that was not previously available. Backed by a team of industry veterans and technologists, Openfinance represents the next evolution of alternative asset investing. For more information, visit www.openfinance.io. Securities offered through Sageworks Capital, LLC, Member FINRA/SIPC.
