Karma 2018.Q1 Financial Report
Hello, dear friends!
One of the Karma team key values is transparency:
- We’ve open sourced our white paper from it’s early Alpha.
- We’ve published 2 financial reports in a month between presale and main tokensale.
- We’ve run a public discussions and voting procedures inside our community every time we’ve had something significant to decide on.
So here’s our first quarterly report after the tokensale.
Just like our whitepaper, we’ve made the report in Google Docs, so everybody can have comfortable data access: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jUUAtuwzosDRv3U203dd6N8RXMwJhQ7j-zYrcq1WlIA/edit#gid=1050347981
Here are some comments on the doc:
Due to the cryptocurrencies volatility our funds squeezed at 5M USD
Sure, you can ask: “why haven’t you cashed out immediately?”. The answer is simple: “it was about 20 sports bags of cash, and there’s no adequate bank that will allow us to just bring it to the office and put on the deposit”. That’s why we’ve spent 2 months to pass the KYC at the European legal licensed fiat-crypto-fiat exchange service (there will be some detailed news about this topic soon).
Now we can easily and legally switch between crypto and fiat, but guess what? There’s no sense to cash out crypto at the dip. We’ve had exactly the same situation in the autumn-2017, and our HODLing strategy allowed us to have extra 10% on top of our presale funds.
Karma is a rare example of crypto project with legal income
We have issued some loans, so we have received part of the monthly interest rates payments. It’s not so big, but we are proud to become a crypto project which not only delivered Alpha blockchain before the tokensale end, but also started operational business activity and delivered first legal income during the first quarter.
Optimize it
Economy should be economic ©, so we’re trying to analyze and cut the costs everywhere. For example, many of our community members saw how much time we’ve spent on discussions about paid exchanges listings vs. non-paid.
First, we’ve optimized the post-ICO bonus stash from 1.8M USD (planned in white paper) to 1.4M USD, because we’ve completed some parts of the work by ourselves.
Then we’ve analyzed the conferences and meetups expenditures. We’ve made a several round-the-world trips since September 2017, and participated in dozens of events. We also see the trends in crypto space. The main conclusion is the following: there’s no need to participate in most of the crypto events now, because almost all of them turned into useless ICO pitch fairs.
Our strategy now is only participate in those conferences, where we are invited as a speakers, for free. Because, we already have a lot of things to say, and we don’t need to make pitches. Plus, we will organize some private meetups for a very hi-quality and targeted audience. We hope that will reduce our costs on “Events” item in about 2 times.
Third, is a production subcontractors (UI, design, frontend, middleware, blockchain, translation, community management etc.). We’ve involved a lot of them until the end of 2017, because we didn’t knew the token sale result. Since January 2018 our strategy is to increase in-house team if it’s more cost and time effective than the external subcontractors. Now we have 12 team members and soon will launch massive software developers hunting campaign.
Our goal is to stay inside the 200–250k USD of monthly operational expenses as described in our white paper, and become operationally profitable asap. We need only 50M USD of loans provided by investors and managed by us as a portfolio management company to provide enough money to feed the team, develop the project and stop burning the tokensale stash. That’s achievable goal, not a rocket science for our team.
Cheers
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