The BELA plan for Q2 2020

As we move into April, I want to share a few updates to our 2020 Plan, which was outlined here in late January: https://medium.com/livebela/the-bela-plan-for-2020-40d3d791f5bf.

The Good News

In late January, we were at the make-it-or-break-it point for Belacam. We had enough in our bank to cover one month of server costs. For Belacam to exist past February, we had to do something to bring in more revenue.

The 2020 plan called for building out and scaling BTCsurveys.com — a spinoff of the Paid Surveys feature on Belacam (belacam.com/surveys) that pays in Bitcoin rather than BELA and is more targeted towards American users. BTCsurveys.com has been successful, and it does provide enough revenue to fund Belacam’s servers. This is an amazing success on its own — it buys us time to continue letting Belacam and BELA gain traction and wait out the current Bitcoin and economic downturn.

The Current State of Belacam

Belacam is currently in a holding pattern: all parts of the site are operational and will remain operational as long as BTCsurveys.com continues to retain the users and revenue it is making. However, we are not currently adding many new features to Belacam or doing any marketing for it outside of running our referral program. Still, Belacam grows at around 300–500 users per day, which I consider to be healthy, steady growth.

I anticipate this holding pattern to last for another month at a bare minimum. There are two things to watch for that can quickly break us free from this holding pattern:

1. If BELA’s price rises above $.01, then our monthly server costs are fully covered, and we can focus on scaling Belacam and BELA up again.
2. If BTCsurveys.com sees another leg-up in revenue, then our monthly server costs are covered and we have funds to begin scaling as well.

Right now, with the funding we have, we just don’t have enough to focus on adding many new features, paying for exchange listings, or running new marketing campaigns.

A Couple Upcoming Changes

To better work through this holding pattern period, I will be making a few rather minor changes to the site that will help make a big difference for work on my end.

1. We will institute a minimum withdrawal of 100 BELA. We’ve never had a real minimum withdrawal before, but we’ve tested one on BTCsurveys.com for a couple weeks now, and it’s done wonders for cutting down on spammers, scammers, and freeing up time spent processing withdrawals. Less time spent on moderation and withdrawal processing means more time we can spend on revenue generation, which will ultimately lead us back to scaling Belacam and BELA up again.
2. We will move to process withdrawals on a weekly basis. We’ve always tried to process withdrawals within 48 hours, but with the recent team restructuring outlined in the previous update and with time spent on BTCsurveys.com, I’ve been slow to get withdrawals sent out. By committing to processing withdrawals on a weekly basis, we can again free up time spent on customer support and withdrawal processing.

What Can You Do to Help BELA?

Anything you can do to help promote BELA speeds up our process of putting our full weight behind BELA’s promotion once again. I encourage you all to consider building small, real use cases for BELA. BELA is an ERC20 token, and therefore building applications that use BELA won’t be as difficult as it would be for other cryptocurrencies.

I encourage you all to stake BELA too and to recruit others to stake BELA. Staking BELA nets around a 36% annual return, and a healthy and growing community of BELA stakers can raise the price of BELA as people hold BELA longer and buy it off exchanges to stake it more.