HelloGold Foundation Update #4–22nd November 2017

Business

Last week, HelloGold participated in the week-long Singapore Fintech Festival. As members of the Finlab accelerator run jointly by UOB and SGInnovate, HelloGold was invited to present daily at the UOB booth in the Singapore Expo. Both Robin and Dave were then invited as panellists at the Inclusive Blockchain Conference held at the Singapore University of Social Sciences, while HelloGold was one of the co-sponsors of the ACCESS Singapore party.

During the week, Singapore University of Social Sciences appointed a number of individuals who are experts in their field as Fellows. Robin was appointed as one of these Fellows and he will be providing support and giving advice in his area of expertise in the university’s FinTech education and research activities.

The Festival was a good opportunity to meet other projects in the blockchain space as well as those in the broader fintech landscape. Discussions for partnerships on various fronts were initiated including on KYC, smart contracts, exchanges, and on-ground marketing.

Robin presenting on HelloGold at the Singapore Expo

Dave on the panel discussing Blockchain, Identity, and Security

The year end party was a good chance to catch up with other members of ACCESS

In the same week HelloGold received the Most Innovative Islamic Retail Product of the Year at the Islamic Retail Banking Awards held in Dubai (victory dance here!). While in Dubai, early discussions were initiated with parties interested to invest in HelloGold in the Middle East as well as with National Bonds on the setting up of gold-backed sukuks.

Robin with the CEO and CCO of National Bonds

On the recruitment front, HelloGold has added two more new members to the team in addition to the 6 new employees introduced in the last update. They are:

• Gary — QA tester
• Nate — Marketing analyst

Both of them will provide key support functions to expand the reach of the HelloGold app.

Since deploying changes to the marketing approach 3 weeks ago, customer acquisition numbers have been trending up — over the last week total KYCs were 3x higher than in the first week since changing the approach. We now stand on 5,000 registered customers. Most importantly this was achieved while significantly dropping the customer acquisition cost.

As a result, HelloGold will be looking to double marketing spend over the next month. So what worked? There were 3 main factors:

1. Better creatives: moving from showing figures to showing a gold bar improved response rates by nearly 100%
2. Malay language ads: estimated cost per registered customer of ads in Malay is nearly 50% of those in English
3. Better optimisation

Moving forward there are reasons to expect even better performance. In the marketing pipeline are:

1. Better ads — the recently published ‘nasi lemak’ creative has delivered customers at 30% lower cost.

2. Content and email marketing

3. Improved website and SEO

4. Roadshow events

5. Offline advertising, PR, brand building

The ‘nasi lemak’ creative

Furthermore the marketing team is doubling in size. As people are hired and settle in their jobs, execution of marketing plans will accelerate.

Technical

The following are updates to workstreams currently worked on by tech.

1. KYC v2. With additional resources in the Product Development Team including UI/UX Designer, QA Tester, and Mobile Developer, HelloGold has completed a review of existing processes and artifacts. The team will move from an MVP-focused to a Product-Delivery focused approach. This setup will allow the team to better meet product delivery goals.
2. Customer in app tracking. Marketing has reported good progress on utilising Adjust and Segment, even though it has only been implemented on Android. The same tracking SDKs are being put into iOS and it is currently in the testing stage. This will enable better data capture and optimisation for the customer funnel, thereby reducing ‘leakage’ of customers from viewing app in the App store down to (repeat) buying of gold.
3. Testing private chain installation. R&D has been completed for creating the wallets on the blockchain. This is currently just a simple API to prepare the groundwork for migrating the current HelloGold product to be on a blockchain, private or otherwise. At the Singapore Fintech Festival, the team also met with the Quorum team lead for Project Ubin. Project Ubin is Singapore’s initiative on digitising their national currency, while Quorum is an enterprise-focused version of Ethereum that allows for high throughput processing of private transactions within a permissioned group of known participants. Elements from the Quorum blockchain may be highly useful for HelloGold’s product blockchain where privacy of transaction details are paramount.

As mentioned before, we are solving the problem of a shortage of blockchain engineers by having Dave train our in-house engineers to build on the various parts of the new system They will in turn train new recruits to maintain the current (non-blockchain) system. Dave is also planning to run a number of community training sessions in 2018 to build the local ecosystem. The current in-house training helps him develop his course material.

Tokens

The ‘Token Team’ is settling in to the various functions and are hard at work on multiple fronts:

1. GBT. Recent news on the USDT has only strengthened our desire to provide a stablecoin fully backed by assets to the crypto market. We are putting the final touches to the GBT product. GBT is anticipated to be ready for sale in December 2017. Initially GBT will only be sold OTC through HGF as we refine the process and product based on market feedback.
2. Exchanges & Market-making. The team continue to discuss with various exchanges on listing of HGT. Two of these exchanges are also in discussions with us to provide market making services. We met with representatives from several exchanges at the Singapore Fintech Festival and are confident that the in-person introduction will help us to develop long-term working relationships with them, including the listing of both HGT and GBT at reasonable prices.
3. Marketing. We recognise that there has been a lack of marketing of HelloGold to the crypto market. A marketing plan is currently being worked on with partners in the crypto space. We hope to conduct a comprehensive campaign highlighting the GBT product (increased sales of which will drive up HGT price as the community sees the underlying value backing HGT) as well as on HGT itself. This campaign should be rolled out within the next few weeks.
4. Community management. With the additional resources now available to work on the tokens, we will finalise migration to a community channel soon. We are also continuously looking for passionate and trustworthy members of the community who are interested to help HGF with community management, especially in communities that are not English-speaking. If you are interested, please drop us a message at foundation@hellogold.org. An example of a community driven group discussing HelloGold is here: https://t.me/hellogoldchat.
5. Events. Following the Singapore Fintech Festival, HelloGold will also be participating at other blockchain conferences around the world. We will inform supporters of these as they are confirmed. The team are also interested to arrange meetups with local communities (Robin’s earlier visit to Viet Nam as an example). If you would like to arrange a meetup with your local community or for us to participate in a particular conference, please let us know at foundation@hellogold.org.

We will continue to provide updates every 2 weeks. Please do get in touch with us in between if you have any thoughts, suggestions or recommendations.

The HelloGold Foundation Team