Range.Trade — a story of a blockchain startup
Week 1.
Project status: We are testing public alpha. Acctually, we are more in beta than alpha. We already have MVP and the platform has been under rigorous testing by our team and a number of external testers for months. We have also deployed about 100 bots to imitate human trading paterns. These bots gather intel on the traders’ trading tactics and adjust to their approach to maximize investment returns.
A few days into August and our TOP 5 Bonus Fund is growing. To attract the best traders we need to make it worthwhile for them to participate. It is their participation and performance will assure inflow of passive investment capital. So far, human traders are easily beating the “machines”, but the gap is narrowing. Our thoughts are that with increasing number of human traders, the bots will learn faster since more information will be available for them to compute.
Just to remind you that we are not marketing the platform yet. We are simply establishing communication channels and feeling them out for interaction. Our hope is to attract 30–60 knowledgeable traders to get feedback on our new derivative trading platform.
Alpha — Beta Engagement plan. We have decided to allocate 900 Ether in paper money (max allowed by testnet) to fund our testers with 0.50 initial wallet deposit. Once we complete beta, all wallets above the initial deposit will be converted to RANge tokens when they go on sale during ICO in October. I know this really means nothing as far as tangible income, yet it’s still something that we can use to reward our earlier supporters.
RTBO pronounced [r-tee-bo] is our AI project, and so far it has provided some actionable intel for traders to maximize forecast earnings and minimize risks.
During the first week, we have picked up 15 new testers (mainly from someone we know) but about 8 were delivered by ongoing limited solicitation for testing this past week.
After review of various online articles, we have decided to engage;
- Reddit subs for alpha-beta testers — despite solid number of viewers (278) we only go a couple of registrations so far
- Facebook — nothing and nothing is expected since this is a new channel with no followers. To test FB marketing PPC channel we started a very simple 7-day campaign.
- Twitter — The microblog is doing much better than FB due to massive crypto postings. During 5 days we gained 12 followers.
- Telegram — not really pushing yet.
- Blogs — LJ and Medium — views and claps from friends have not yielded any traffic.
- Betalist.com — about 30 days queue to be reviewed for illegibility, or can pay $129–299 to jump the queue. Since we are not in a rush — we decided to ride the free snail-rail.
- Betapage.co — reached out to us (must be monitoring feeds) with 28$ option to be featured, we decided we cannot go wrong. So far — 39 likes and 7 in referral action.
- Betabound.com — submitted project and advised to patiently wait for review
- Usertesting.com — this is one of the big guys. Requested a quote and were contacted by ‘account executive’ sales team. Will update next week. Hoping for less than astronomical quote.
Just to remind, this is not a marketing campaign. We want some feedback from complete strangers while testing marketing channels. So far we got a couple of comments and have already implemented them (client on-boarding and wallet creation). We have also recorded and released “How to …” videos on Youtube and integrated them into the platform’s help function.
Lessons learned so far. If you are planning an ICO start establishing your SM feeds. Being one of those who never had time to post anything, I kind of wish I had.
Expectations meter: All as it should be, except, I thought the Reddit will do better. I do realize it could be the project, but with 9–12 people online in alpha-beta subs, not much can be gained.
I guess this is not 2007 when Drew Houston’s PDF presentation of Dropbox increased the beta signup from 5000 to 75000 in an overnight. (Not comparing our projects) The market space is getting overcrowded with solicitations based solely on vague idea and two-pager info sites.
