HelloGold Foundation Update #3 — 8th November 2017
Business
As you’d expect, this is a very busy time as HelloGold looks to build the business following the completion of the token sale.
On the critical path is expanding the team so that there is more capacity to deliver on the roadmap promised. Consequently HelloGold have been recruiting heavily for the tech, marketing, product and support teams. This Monday there were 6 new employees inducted in one go — the team is now 24 strong and we are continuing to recruit. The joiners are:
- Deepan — UX/UI
- Adrian — copywriter
- Tawana — token team
- Xing Zheng — social media (you’ll be hearing more from him!)
- Izzy — HR manager
- Dan — product development
The team then took the (relatively) short drive up to the Smokehouse in Cameron Highlands for a short offsite. Given the amount of work and number of new people, it is important to ensure that everybody in the team has a clear understanding of our priorities over the next 12 months. Robin shared his original pitch document for HelloGold from 2014. It is amazing how little has changed and how much has actually been implemented. The key difference was the use of a smartphone app rather than text messages as the customer touch point for accessing gold. The team went through the Roadmap (page 23 here) and agreed prioritisation and delivery responsibilities including for tech, marketing and business development. The key takeaway: there are lots of amazing opportunities and the team needs to ensure they stay focused to deliver for customers and supporters alike. There is a lot of work to do!
On the marketing side HelloGold has made some changes to the advertising approach following input from 500 Startups, one of HelloGold’s VC investors. A/B testing of all advertising elements have been ramped up and the impact can already be seen, with the number of app downloads increasing by 78% and approved users (those who have cleared KYC) by 106%. Although it has only been one week since the start of this new approach, the model is now in place (along with the data tracking — see tech update below) for further expansion. It is very exciting to see this acceleration in customer numbers and there is a lot more to come from the new in-house creative team (design, copywriting and video).
Technical
As well as focusing on recruitment (HelloGold anticipates to double its team in the next 6 months), the technical team have been working on 4 workstreams:
- KYC v2. This will shorten the initial sign up time for app customers, so that they can get to the dashboard and see the functionality of the app without providing all the documentation. Full KYC information will still be required before completing any transactions — to ensure the app meets financial services best practices. The new KYC process has been prototyped and is currently being tested with focus groups.
- Customer in app tracking. 2 new tools have been added to the Android version of the app — Adjust and Segment. This will enable better data capture and optimisation for the customer funnel, thereby reducing ‘leakage’ of customers from viewing app in the Play/App stores down to (repeat) buying of gold whilst providing a significantly better customer experience, e.g. providing helpful information at the appropriate time.
- Testing private chain installation. As you may be aware, a solidity prototype was first built back in early 2017. The product was being re-defined so fast that that the prototype had been put on hold. The team has since revisited the original model looking at making everything more modular using enhanced ERC20 tokens, with ideas taken from the as yet incomplete ERC223 specifications at the core of the system. The blockchain devs have been building wallets on the private net for the core app based accounts and transactions. Another development that has been in the pipeline since Robin’s original pitch from 2014 is tantalisingly close to completion.
- Loan product. The tech team are working with business development and product teams to build the technical elements that will enable customers to take loans collateralised against the gold that they have in their HelloGold account. This will enable app customers to get personal finance loans at best in-market rates and through a smoother user experience.
Tokens
A small team has been set up that will focus on the token part of the business. It will continue to be added to over time. This team is already delivering on a number of fronts:
- GBT Those of you who saw our announcement last week on GBT as a publicly available stablecoin will recognise how significant a step this is for the crypto community. This stablecoin that is fully backed by 99.99% PAMP investment grade gold will provide the opportunity for anybody around the world to hedge/treasury manage crypto funds without exiting the crypto space. Entities such as FundYourselfNow are able to diversify funds raised via token sales. We are also working on specific products for utilising GBT in the corporate market — further announcements in due course.
- Exchanges We continue to hear requests from our supporters for HGT and GBT to be listed on more exchanges. We announced the listing of HGT on HitBTC on 26th October 2017 and have a pipeline of exchanges that will come on stream over the coming months. We are also excited about the decentralised exchanges that are in development and due to go live over the next few months. We think that they will provide additional functionality that will work well with both HGT and GBT tokens. Where it makes economic sense, we have paid and will pay for listing fees. However, we don’t believe it is a good use of funds (support money) to pay US$150k to be listed on a new exchange with no trading data to assess how much volume the exchange will command.
- Trading volumes We are aware of the trading volume levels. It is something we are working on addressing in the next month to ensure our supporters have the liquidity they need.
- Other Assets. HelloGold are also in discussions with global organisations to launch other asset backed tokens using the same infrastructure as the GBT. We look forward to making specific announcements once we are able to. There is much more to come!
One of the keys to make HGT successful is awareness. Hence we have brought in a dedicated social media manager to help promote HGF/HGT/GBT online. Please do get in touch with Xing Zheng in the different channels.
We are also building real world awareness via a number of events:
Devcon3 — Our lead blockchain developer, Dave, spent the last week attending Devcon3, the official ethereum developers’ conference which was held in Cancun Mexico. He described it as being “a place to learn what you have to study for the next twelve months”. Among the many things of interest were Whisper (a privacy conscious communications protocol), Swarm (decentralised storage) and Quorum (a private ethereum implementation with baked in privacy). In addition to reviewing the tech that we need for the future, he was able to make connections with many people that we have been in contact with online. It is great to be able to deepen these relationships to build a stronger community going forward (e.g. to help solve the scam/phishing issues etc)
We also attended the Hong Kong Fintech Week where we were in discussions with several exchanges about listing and the SCXSC, an event organised by Malaysian Securities Commission on Democratising Investments.
Next week the team will be busy in Dubai, picking up an award for the most innovative Islamic retail banking product at 3rd Islamic Retail Banking Awards 2017 as well as presenting at both the Singapore Fintech Festival and the Inclusive Blockchain Conference at the Singapore University of Social Sciences. If you would like to meet the team either in Dubai or Singapore please do get in touch (foundation@hellogold.org)
Next steps
GBT reward release
The next reward GBT release will be completed this Friday (10 November) based on management fee revenue for October. The average AUM for the month of October was 2,299.697 grams. As this is for one month, versus the previous reward based on 6 months fees, this will be a smaller amount of GBT compared to the first release. A separate announcement will be made showing the calculation of the distribution. NB Please remember to take any HGT you have off exchanges and store in a personal wallet to ensure you receive your share of the distribution.
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
