The BELA Plan for 2020
Our story this past year has been about establishing our foundation in an altcoin bear market. In 2019, we watched hundreds of crypto projects and startups shut down. If we could keep pushing, better times would come. We’ve survived, and we’re approaching those better times now.
Six years and one day ago, BELA was launched as a fork from Litecoin. Today, we operate with a 100% updated codebase from the original fork and 350,000 users on our flagship product: Belacam. We’ve brought online earning to hundreds of thousands of people who benefit from the extra income. We’ve seen our users spend their earned BELA on feeding their families, buying coffee, and funding a knee replacement surgery. We only expect more growth in 2020, and here’s how we’re going to make that happen.
A Team Restructuring
After a couple months of deliberation, Tanner has decided to move on from the BELA team, and our company has bought back his shares. Tanner and I have worked on Belacam without pay for more than 3 years, and that’s a tough situation to continue for such a long time. Fortunately, Tanner gradually phased out of the COO role over those couple of months, so there will be no abrupt change due to his absence. Tanner parted on good terms and still holds BELA in support of all that we do.
This leaves me as the main guy on the front end of Belacam, although I hope to grow the BELA team over the next few months. Zan is ready to help promote and grow BELA as soon as we can establish a more official role for him, and Doni and Sergey remain steadfast supporters as well.
Our Two Challenges and How to Solve Them
Over the past year, we’ve been constricted by a small budget and BELA’s low trading volume. Solving those two problems will be the focus of the first part of this year.
Since the summer of 2018, Belacam has teetered on profitability, with some months being profitable and others not. Without clear profitability, we haven’t been able to scale the company or engage in marketing because our first priority has always been paying for server costs, which are a little hefty. I’m a firm believer in that if we can permanently establish our profitability, most other things will fall in line. The key to profitability lies in the paid surveys we introduced in October.
We pushed surveys hard on all of you on Belacam, and unfortunately were only able to achieve about 25% of what we needed to cover monthly server costs. Even with the new referral program that rewards users for promoting surveys to their friends, we failed to see the activity we needed around Belacam’s surveys. In short, surveys on Belacam aren’t cutting it. However, we spun up a new sister site based around earning Bitcoin from those same surveys, and this site is showing promise.
I’d like to introduce you all to https://BTCsurveys.com. We’ve been developing it for a few months now and launched it publicly two weeks ago. BTCsurveys.com is fully owned by Belacam, so what’s good for BTCsurveys.com is also good for Belacam and BELA. That is, money that BTCsurveys.com makes is money that can be spent on promoting and scaling BELA. Even though it doesn’t use BELA, we should all root for the success of BTCsurveys.com.
And success is coming. In two weeks, we’ve gained 1,200 users and seen survey earnings increase at a satisfactory rate. The profit margin on BTCsurveys.com is less than the paid surveys on Belacam, but the volume of surveys taken is higher. Our earnings on the new site have been very volatile, but I’m very happy to report that we are on pace for a profitable month. As long as the site holds its current traction, our bank account should be growing little by little, and we can get back into promoting BELA and Belacam as we did in 2018.
It will take a couple of months to get there as we get paid a month after the earnings are logged on BTCsurveys.com. This means that revenue logged in January will make its way to us in late February, and revenue logged next week won’t come in until March. Things are looking good, and I firmly believe that we are almost where we need to be as a company to begin growing again.
Given extra money, we will deliver on the Belacam iPhone app, build tools that help users stake BELA, and promote our current exchange listings while pursuing others. BELA is currently listed on Mercatox.com and Altilly.com. These are two reputable, middle-tier exchanges that offer good places to trade BELA. Of course, there are always higher-traffic exchanges to get listed on, but I think we could first do more to promote trading on the exchanges that we already have. Better volume on these two exchanges also makes listings on future exchanges more likely.
To pursue this, we will soon be merging Livebela.com’s website with Belacam.com, so all the relevant information about the BELA token can be found on Belacam.com. This will make the token more accessible and easily understood to the 350,000 users on Belacam. There won’t be a need to visit a second site to learn about BELA and see where and why to trade it.
I hope this gives the BELA community a good overview of where we’re currently at and where we’re headed over the next few months. I’m in good spirits about the future of BELA, and I hope you all are too. We have a lot of great things unfolding right before our eyes, and we only have more great things to come.
