Google docs link: http://bit.ly/raiseweek2
1) Who are your clients/users? (persona of your user)
Raise targets local emerging market technology ecosystems and their diaspora members. This does not preclude participation from non-diaspora members.
There are two primary target markets:
Emerging Market Technology Projects (“Innovators”):
Industries: Any. Demographic: Young, technology savvy with a proven track record of creating products. Geographic: Emerging market technology ecosystems in countries with huge diaspora populations - Africa (Nigeria); Asia (China/India/Philippines), Caribbean (Jamaica), Latin America (Mexico), Middle East (UAE).
Diaspora Members (“Backers”)
Industries: Any. Demographic: Young tertiary educated migrants and international students (33.7 million from emerging markets in the OECD). Geographic: By greatest percentage share of immigrants of the total population: United States, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Canada, Spain, Australia, Italy, Switzerland, India, Philippines, China.
Market: 31 million tertiary educated migrants in OECD. The number of highly skilled migrants from Asia (tertiary educated) doubled in the last decade, with over 86% more from China and 76% from the Philippines. 2.7 million international students in the OECD, 251 million total diaspora members globally
Target Market Rationale:
Raise’s goal is to create a diaspora community platform with crowdfunding tools that allow diaspora members to participate in their local economies as long as they have access to the internet. This is a long-term goal and we need to evaluate the product and assumptions with a narrow problem set, discrete solution and limited number of actors. We therefore decided to narrow down our initial target market to technology innovators in emerging markets and technology-savvy diaspora members. These target markets are most likely to interact with new technology as well as ideally have the capital, education and basic know how to fund projects in their countries.
Our main target group are diaspora members and backers, who will actually fund projects on the platform and create the revenue for the platform to sustain itself. Mobile investment platforms are increasingly popular among younger segments of the population. Companies like Wealthsimple, an intuitive investment platform targeted at younger generations, enjoy most of their success from users between the age of 25 to 45. Younger demographics are also most likely to use social media and are therefore easier to target using marketing campaigns with online tools. Though we intend to target diaspora members, by targeting a younger demographic of users and using an intuitive mobile investment platform, we will attract a wider set of diaspora members of different generations (e.g. 1st, 2nd, 3rd generation) that are more likely to invest in their countries of origin.
User Stories and Personas (photos not included on Devpost)
We’ve reduced our personas to two users for simplicity: backers and innovators.
Backer (Diaspora Member)
Description This is a wide group of people - members of ethnic and national communities that have left their countries but maintain links with their homelands (2012 Inter-American Development Bank). This includes international students, expats, remote workers, labor migrants, refugees, dual citizens, ethnic diasporas and second/third generation groups. They are typically very knowledgeable about their home market, gaps and industries and can best relate to potentially successful products and investment opportunities given their intimacy with the local culture, customs and economy. Our diaspora member also has a background in investing, which will not always be the case. However, by focusing on this narrow set of users, we can create a platform that covers our most likely user’s concerns, as well as build a product that is easy and intuitive to use for diaspora members with no investment background.
User Story
- I left my country but would like to invest in opportunities there so that I can contribute to my country’s growth, support entrepreneurs and create my financial return;
- I would like to be able to easily view investment opportunities, including the investment's track record, team, funding history, product/idea, future potential, valuation, potential to deliver jobs/social impact to be sure that I am making a sound investment;
- I would like to make technology investments more liquid and less risky so that I can sell them if a project does not perform well or if instability in the country affects my investment;
- I would like to be able to understand tokens and cryptocurrencies so that I can use this platform and hold tokens;
- I would like to skip due diligence steps to save time, but still have access to that information anytime;
- I would like to track investments and see a potential positive social impact return on the investments I made to receive both a social and financial return;
- I would like to view an investment's competitor landscape before I invest to better evaluate other opportunities.
Innovator (Entrepreneur)
Description - An innovator in an emerging market that is pursuing an idea and product they believe can change their environment and create employment. They bootstrap their business but struggle to scale without investment or mentorship. At any point the entrepreneur should consider raising capital and interesting investors - including options to validate, scale and communicate their product to the outside world.
Story
- I would like to spend less time looking for and securing funding in early stages to be able to spend more time creating my product and validating my market; I would like to be able to understand tokens and cryptocurrencies and how I can benefit from them;
- I would like to have access to a crowdfunding platform without stringent equity crowdfunding regulations, high transaction costs and hostile regulatory approaches in order to easily access funding;
- I would like to be able to use tokens to my benefit without a steep learning curve;
- I would like to be able to use tokens to raise funding, but easily convert the cryptocurrency into my local currency with little transaction fees and issues.
2) What are their pain points?
We are addressing several pain points:
Innovators (1) Limited exposure to a global market to validate a product; (2) Inability to source investments and international backers; (3) No platform to connect directly with diaspora members other than through expensive remittance services; (4) Expensive donation and reward crowdfunding fees and little access to equity crowdfunding platforms.
Backers (1) Little data and access to venture technology investments in emerging markets; (2) Frustrated with high thresholds (accredited investors) to make minimum investments into private companies; (3) Frustrated with illiquid investments into startups that may never succeed, particularly into emerging markets where there may be foreign exchange fluctuations or political, social and economic instability.
3) What is your product's value proposition?
Local Problems, Local Solutions - Our team members are from emerging markets and intimately understand that sustainable social impact must come from internal actors themselves. The Blockchain for Social Impact Hackathon aims to find technologies that address social issues for financial inclusion, identity, supply chain and energy. There are many technologies that can facilitate and achieve those social goals in each basket. However, without local and enabled technology ecosystems in the countries meant to be the recipients of these technologies, emerging market communities risk being technology consumers instead of technology producers to solve the problems that they experience everyday.
Milestones - Raise’s value proposition is that it aims to reduce youth unemployment and achieve social impact by empowering local, young innovators to use technology to solve local problems. It enables the local innovators to connect with and get funded from global backers in a secure environment. Raise also empowers the backers in many ways. Where in a physical world it is difficult for the backers to identify the right projects and be assured that these projects won’t default after receiving the funding, Raise enforces that “code is law” by implementing milestone based funding. Also, where in real world the money invested by backers is locked for an unguaranteed period, Raise provides them with tokens equivalent to their investments thus adding liquidity to their investment.
Emerging Markets - Raise also focuses on a very narrow segment of users: emerging market technology products and diaspora backers. There are no diaspora direct investment platforms that make it easy for diaspora members to invest in their home countries. Blockchain technology and tokens are enabling this possibility for the first time. Diaspora direct investments are a huge source of potential capital for emerging market countries. With a focus on emerging markets and diaspora members, this sets the product apart in its goals, objectives and target market.
4) What is your distribution and go-to-market strategy? Who can you partner with?
Immediate Partnerships The Raise team will build strong relationships with a total of ten (10) reputable accelerators, two from each region: Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East. We intend to sign memorandums of understanding for the exchange of information, as well as to source investment prospects. Raise is also partnered with Emerge, a company that connects diaspora and local populations to create innovation. Emerge is organizing hackathons in emerging markets: South Africa, Hong Kong, etc. Raise will partner with Emerge to gain visibility in local countries.
We have already initiated discussions with accelerators in South Africa, Hong Kong, Barbados and Uganda. We were also able to interview them about platform features.
The immediate first MVP of this platform will be in a ‘batch’ approach. We will collect and source five (5) startups, one from each of the regions. Raise will create their campaigns, assist with marketing and test the MVP platform with a controlled group of startups from different industries. We will release three batches of startups (15 in total) over the course of the year to pull data on performance of different industries, control revenue, targeted advertising and other key performance indicators to prepare for the full version of the product, which will be a marketplace and allow any emerging market startup to create a campaign. The marketplace will uphold standards of due diligence that we will refine and improve during the batch releases, based on performance indicators and feedback from users.
Marketing To prepare for our launch, we will first create a comprehensive marketing and communications plan to outline our approach for communicating with target markets, media, and other stakeholders, while also establishing metrics and our implementation schedule.
The following factors are key to our success in marketing our product:
Establishing and confirming trust in and integrity of the platform; Tapping into diaspora member nostalgia and desire to see their country of origin thrive; Dispelling the notions that investors must be rich and/or that it is overwhelmingly complicated to invest; Releasing digestible statistics and infographics on the impact of investments and potential returns to entice users; Meeting our users where they are - backers at cultural organizations and communities, WhatsApp, social media, etc.; innovators at incubators and accelerators, on social media, etc.; User-centric UI and messaging (avoiding jargon, simple and beautiful experience); Expediting the “Aha” moment - the feel good and immediate ROI of a first investment that hooks users into continued use.
Key Messages
Backers We are communicating two key messages to backers. Our marketing campaigns and digital strategies will be built around communicating Raise’s value proposition to them:
Liquidity - tokens are liquid and backers can trade their tokens in case projects or environments become risky; Milestones - there are verifiable milestones so that backers can track the progress of their favorite projects. Milestones create a community around projects - the community has a direct incentive for the projects to succeed, so do the innovators.
To Innovators Innovators gain access and visibility on the platform:
Access - Innovators gain easy digital access to communities of diaspora members, investors and backers all over the world; Visibility - Technology entrepreneurs can be visible to investors and gain market validation for their projects from experts.
Marketing Strategy
Our launch strategy will be four-pronged: Creating user-centric, simple and beautiful branding to simplify the investment and cryptocurrency process (e.g. Wealthsimple); Building ties with partners around the world in order to increase awareness, coverage and engagement; Launching a global Whatsapp and social media campaign in partnership with accelerators; Supporting and organizing educational & habit-building Initiatives.
Branding and User-Centric Visual Identity (Pictures not included on Devpost)
- Potential Long-Term Partners for increased awareness:
In OECD markets, our approach would be backer-centric: international chambres of commerce*, international organizations (e.g. World Bank), startup communities and coworking spaces, universities and cultural student organizations*, niche media*, professional organizations and think tanks focused on underrepresented minorities, Angel investment funds and groups*, alternative funds, etc.
In emerging markets, our approach would be innovator-centric: government SME initiatives*, local startup coworking spaces and communities*, universities, media, local funds, entrepreneurship-focused NGOs, internet cafes, etc.
*Asterisk denotes relationships that have already been initiated or developed.
- WhatsApp and Social Media Marketing
Emerging markets are the heaviest users of WhatsApp globally. What’s more, is that as diaspora members, we are conscious of the rapidity with which news travels through networks in our regions - we use it everyday to speak to our family and friends at home and abroad. For example, during the recent Hurricane Irma, one of our team members from the Caribbean observed how quickly news, videos, aid requests and other media came through different WhatsApp groups, from friends around the entire region - in real time.
We can leverage the popularity of this platform to create a launch media campaign to specifically target groups and people within the application and platform. We are building out a marketing strategy around this.
Given WhatsApps’ similarity to SMS, we would focus our messaging on immediate calls to action - notifications on high-performing or newly added startups, feedback and customer service loops, and text/visual updates from startups post investment.
Other social media platforms, particularly Facebook and YouTube, also have high penetration rates in emerging markets. Therefore, our strategy will include both paid and organic content for both of these platforms. Most of this content would be educational and focus on the benefits of investing early on, potential ROIs, startup and backer features, etc.
Digital Marketing & SEO
We will also implement a few other tools in order to ensure our key messages are reaching the right audiences. These include: Google Adwords: This tool will allow us to advertise both locally and globally, to maintain constant online presence, and to reach our desired niche when they search for keywords such as investment, emerging markets, startups, Angel investment, venture capital, and more, tech, founders, and more. These targeted ads would optimize our visibility with the right audience segments, ultimately leading to increased awareness and new website visitors.
Marketing Research: Analytics and research would enable us to tie our ads to words relating to issues and questions unique to the diaspora community. By targeting emerging market regions, as well as countries with massive diaspora populations, we can increase the likelihood of social sharing among family and friends networks that are still in the countries where diaspora members are from.
Audience Segmentation: Tactics to monitor search and purchase behaviour, as well as circumstances of major life events (for example when someone has secured a new job) will help us determine who and how to market Raise. We would also curate Lookalike audiences for both our backers and innovators, to ensure we can find the top 1% - 10% of users that share similar traits to current Raise users. Facebook also allows us to layer targeting options, which means we can employ hypertargeting to find an exact target audience match.
- Educational and Habit-Building
Our content strategy would focus heavily on countering misconceptions that to invest, one needs to be rich and established. Our educational messaging and content would aim to demonstrate the benefits and ROI of starting investment activities early on, as well as on the ease with which it can be done through our platform. Our goal is to inspire diaspora communities to view this as a passive income activity that they can engage in regularly and that also supports their home countries or regions.
Evaluating Marketing Strategy Effectiveness
The effectiveness of our strategy will be evaluated according to the following criteria: Media Coverage (number of features) User Acquisition (customer acquisition cost on both ends, retention and churn rates, lifetime value) and Website and Social Media Analytics (visitors, engagement, followers, activation) Revenue Referral Rates User Feedback Number of Investments Made ROI for Backers Growth Metrics for Innovators
5) What are the risks associated with your solution?
Securities Laws We are conscious of the significant securities and regulatory hurdles surrounding the Raise platform. Some of those risks are KYC/AML rules, crowdfunding regulations, investment amounts into private companies and currency exchange controls.
Raising funds and ‘investing’ in private companies is never an easy task, especially when it is done across borders. There are significant legal risks surrounding Raise’s platform, especially given that many securities regulators are still unfamiliar with blockchain technologies, tokens and cryptocurrencies. As with any technology product or legal risk, you can never eliminate risk, only mitigate it.
In our previous equity crowdfunding memorandum provided in our Weekly 1 deliverable, we researched the concerns expressed by local securities about why equity crowdfunding platforms may offend securities regulations and distilled those concerns to: (1) KYC/AML rules, (2) auditable ledgers and (3) Minimum funding amounts.
Here are some of the steps we intend to take to minimize our legal risks:
Incorporation and Operation We intend to incorporate the Raise Foundation and Operating Company in a blockchain-friendly jurisdiction (Singapore, Switzerland), as well as organize the holding companies for individual projects in those jurisdictions. In other words, the tokens for projects will not directly be held by innovators in their corporate structures in each of their countries - but instead held in a special purpose vehicle for their benefit in a blockchain-friendly jurisdiction. Innovators will be able to ‘cash out’ their funds from backers using local exchanges. They will be exposed to risk at the level of cashing out their investment, depending on whether the exchange operates legally or illegally in their country.
Verifiable and Auditable Transactions The advantage of using blockchain technology is that we have auditable and verifiable proof of microtransactions at all levels. All transactions are recorded and if requested, we can provide proof of each micro transaction: where they were sent, to who and in what amounts. They can be provided in ledger formats.
KYC/AML Platform users will login and input relevant information to allow us to identify them. To simplify this process we are considering using Civic’s identity management platform via an API integration.
These are a list of non-securities risks associated with the platform: Failed Projects - there will undoubtedly be many failed projects on the platform, we are building a token and cryptoeconomics such that the value of the parent token will not be affected by individually failed projects; Fraud and Gaming Milestones - there is a risk that innovators can game the platform by exaggerating achieved milestones. We will protect against this and protect investors by creating tiers of decision making to validate whether milestones have been achieved.
6) What is the impact of your solution? How will it be measured?
Impact
Impact will be determined through KPIs created from local and global economic data that measure growth of the startup as well as their impact locally. The local data will determine the growth and impact of the startup on the global market, then compared on a global and regional scale through GDP to assess the welfare of the startup in relation to the market welfare as a whole. Measurements Locally
The startup will report relevant data on expenditures (outflow into local economy) as well as job creation data. Should there not presently be job creation at the stage the startup is in, this can be extrapolated from information about basic/modal lifestyle cost in relation to inflow into economy from startup. In addition, typical growth will be assessed from the opinions and time data held by local accelerators.
Globally
GDP and market performance data will be gathered to assess welfare of market as whole and regionally. This growth will be compared with the local growth of the startup to determine whether the startup is growing at typical rate relative to market.
Crowdsourced data
Users can opt into a tribunal program where their opinions are treated as aggregated data points weighing into the feasibility of the milestones and proposed timeline of a startup’s project.
Metrics
From the local data, a model can be formed that will indicate the current performance of the startup related to the pulse of the global market:
A metric could aggregate and weigh the health of the startup vs the health of the market locally and globally and score the startup based on their relative performance; Growth metrics concerning milestone achievement and period of time for a particular milestone can be developed using in house data reported from the startup can be generated and weighed against growth performance metrics regionally as well as internationally.
Market contribution/Social Impact on Community
Looking at capital expenditure of the startup can be used as an indicator of how the startup is contributing to job growth of the market. Market data will also be used to indicate cost of living and how many livelihoods are supported by the contributions the startup is making to the local market.
An opportunity arises during the collection of reported data on the side of the startups, their impact on the regional job market and effect on progressing the lives of those in the nation can be measured and make a stronger argument as to the benefits of startups, possibly encouraging growth while also helping investors choose startups whose traits point towards a higher score on a job creation metric.
Job growth created within the startup can be used to indicate the health and growth rate of the startup. By aggregating this data, we can begin to determine likelihood of a startup growing aggressively and creating a larger impact in the economy as well as a measurement of where they are in moving from ideation to MVP to successful market player.
7) Define the technical specifications and development roadmap Token Architecture & Design Strategy:
Raise is a decentralized application that uses Ethereum as the choice of blockchain technology and a token built on ERC20 specifications. Ethereum allows creating any arbitrary smart contract including smart contracts that represent digital assets called Ethereum tokens. It is also capable of creating escrow contracts which is vital for Raise.
Platform - We intend to build the platform on the Ethereum blockchain using ERC20 standard tokens. Data will be stored in an inter-planetary file system and smart contracts will administer funding, hold and distribute Raise tokens, charge a transaction fee and hold funds in escrow.
Payment Mechanisms - We will also use the BTCRelay protocol to allow funds to be accepted in BTC as well as ETH to the platform. When the innovator receives funds in cryptocurrency, in order to cash out, we are considering implementing the Beyonic API (a Ugandan company) for innovators to receive their cryptocurrency into mobile money throughout countries in Africa and Asia, our largest markets.
Milestone Mechanisms - The platform will make use of milestones to determine whether a startup is entitled to receive remaining funds based on their success of certain pre-determined factors. We are in discussions with Kleros (an Argentinian startup), which is a decentralized autonomous organization for decision-making that can adjudicate decision with anonymous jurors all over the world in different industries/tribunals in real time. With the Kleros protocol, we remove the need for investors to decide over investment milestones and return fairness to the startup by allowing a decentralized and anonymous decision-making protocol to decide whether milestones were met using Schelling Point theories in the Kleros platform.
Identity and Security - We are considering using an identity management platform like Civic (a South African founder) to increase security on the platform and satisfy any AML/KYC concerns by securities regulators.
Raise allows Diasporas to invest in their choice of projects pitched by the innovators on the platform. The funding is milestone based i.e. let’s say if there are 3 milestones specified for a particular project to receive the funding in entirety, and a backer wants to invest $30,000 in totality given that the innovator receives $10,000 after achieving every milestone. Then the money invested by the backer will be held in an escrow contract until it is notified of milestone completion. With every notification, it will release the intended fund to the innovator’s account.
Raise also leverages a native token. These tokens represent digital assets i.e. investments made by backers on the platform. These investments are a loan given by backers to the innovators in order to invest in their company. For example, if a backer invests $5,000 there will be 5,000 tokens created and returned to the backer by the platform. These tokens will add a value proposition to the backers as they are liquid in nature. They can sell them at any price they want or buy more tokens from other backers on the platform. Upon a liquidity event (IPO or acquisition), the backers will see a return on the investment in amounts relative to the tokens that each backer holds. In case it is a milestone based funding, the backer will receive tokens as and when funds are credited in the innovator’s wallet.
Client Side: 1) Perform a DNS lookup to receive a hash of your dapp 2) Download the dapp from peers on IPFS 3) Load your HTML/JS/CSS 4) Lookup the most recent crowdfunding projects on Ethereum 5) Each project will contain a hash of the pitch video, content, and rewards 6) Use the hash to download a project's content from IPFS 7) Send ETH (Ethereum's currency) or Bitcoins to fund the project
Ethereum Side: 1) The Funding smart contract receives the payment. 2) If it is Eth, it proceeds to next step. If it is Bitcoin, it goes to BTC relay for transaction verification 3) Once the milestones for the project have been achieved, the contract either pays the innovator or returns the funds to the backers. 4) The global state contains the list of current projects, references to their content, and simple logic for the payout. 5) IPFS contains the Dapp code and project content. Development roadmap We intend to develop the Raise platform over time as we wait for developments in the blockchain technology industry: Easier accessibility to cryptocurrency for non-sophisticated users; Plasma update and Ethereum’s scalability; Launch and development of platform APIs like Civic and Kleros;
We also intend to sequentially add features to the platform to eventually create a diaspora community platform. Each added feature will be based on the success of the last features.We also intend to have an ICO after, and only if, the platform is functional and successful. Here is a rough outline of our platform development.
Development Roadmap (Chart not included on Devpost)
Informational Pitch and User Interviews August 2017
Re-branding and Business Plan Dev September - October 2017
Solidify Partnerships with Accelerators November 2017
Financing for Development - Incorporate Legal Structures November 2017 - January 2018
Apply for World Bank Summit November 2017
Code Smart Contracts/Finalize White Paper Integrate Civic, Kleros, Beyonic APIs March - September 2018
Digital Marketing Strategy for Launch August - December 2018
MVP (Beta) Product Launch (Batch of curated startups) The first iteration of this platform will collect five (5) startups from each region, Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Middle East and create their campaigns, release their products online and control the investment process to test the platform. We will release 3 batches during 2019. February 2019 (1st batch) May 2019 (2nd batch) August 2019 (3rd batch)
Token Generation Event (ICO) December 2019
MVP (Alpha) Startup Marketplace Launch January 2020
Feature Add: Rewards Tokens can be exchanged for rewards. July 2020
Feature Add: Send-a-Reward Tokens can be exchanged for rewards and the rewards of different products from startups can be sent to family members locally December 2020 (in time for Christmas)
Feature Add: Donation Tokens can be exchanged for donations. List projects/natural disasters/recovery efforts that need funding using tokens. March 2021
8) Define your impact criteria and how you measure it We are narrowing our impact criteria to two quantifiable measures: (1) jobs created and (2) users. For our MVP, this will allow us to build the platform with quantifiable data and metrics to evaluate our performance as well as that of the innovators.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.