Proposal description
Marketing Videos:
Expenses Log:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XQvoacJyY-JOz7iIs1IbcE74u5hca4eQeGX6Fw2TBME/edit
Marketing Strategy:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gQ12kMQoX6ahfSbJBebaqdZYWPActG8sfjWLvIOEmX0/edit
Update Thread:
https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/ewallet-uk-fiat-dash-exchange-update-thread.28462/
Marketing Site:
https://ewallet.co.uk
Thank you for all the fantastic support - if you have any questions you can always reach out directly to me on Discord (Ash#8776), the Dash Forum (AshFrancis) or by email (ash@ewallet.co.uk).
Cheers!
--- Initial Proposal Below ---
Budget: 25 Dash per month for 8 months (full escrow by dash core team)
Click here to read as a PDF (in case of rendering issues)
Click here for our pre-proposal discussion on the Dash.org forum
Creating a better user experience to drive adoption of Dash in the UK and improve Dash marketing.
Summary
The marketing efforts in the UK of Fernando, Feedband, et al. are having a serious impact, driving discovery and awareness of Dash at a key time in the 6th largest economy in the world.
This spend is being ramped up even further over the next quarter with an aggressive 65% of the budget targeting the UK.
Our goal is to create a frictionless user experience for UK adopters and provide Dash marketers with a complete picture of the user journey from discovery all the way through to adoption. Dash will be the first and only crypto to have a completely holistic marketing approach.
Pain point 1: The user experience of UK investors and adopters of Dash in the UK is poor
Okay so there are other ways that aren’t quite that bad, but even Uphold (which from our research we’ve identified as one of the best) constantly pauses payment by credit/debit card. They also have high fees and require slow bank transfers that have to be sent to Portugal - not very reassuring for someone new to cryptocurrency especially with bad actors like bitconnect being prominent in the media.
And that’s just how you get Dash, there is a huge user journey before even looking to buy Dash that can be improved and we have extensive experience in this area. We’re going to be far more than a tool, we’ll be an educator and a point of reference - even an authority figure. We want to make discovering, learning and acquiring Dash as frictionless as sending it. Our intention is for a user who is both new to Dash and Cryptocurrencies in general to feel confident using our site and, even with no prior experience of cryptocurrencies at all, leave our site feeling that the process was explained to them clearly and they have some understanding of cryptocurrency fundamentals.
We’ll also be providing use education to the offset, converting speculative investors who see crypto as a pump and dump to Dash advocates with an appreciation for the technology and future adoption of cryptocurrency.
Pain point 2: We’re marketing without the full picture.
Dash marketing is great - we’ve got an experienced team from all over the world with millions of spend in history, however it has potential for improvement. From our research there is no other crypto that has a complete view of their adoption journey - right from discovery through to purchase. We could be the very first to have a complete view and a holistic marketing approach.
We don’t expect Dash.org to recommend our exchange over any others, but the data we provide will be a representative subset of Data that can be scaled to understand the trends in the wider marketing campaign. This data will be invaluable in optimising the user journey and the adoption funnel - to be the very first crypto to have this data will allow us to outmanoeuvre any others in the space.
Quick note: All data we provide will be anonymous and at campaign level only, tracked through UTM & Gclid parameters - the technical side of this is out of the scope of this proposal but I’d love to chat through it on discord or telegram.
Okay so now you can see how much this project can help Dash, but who are we and why are we the ones to do it?
Meet the team
LinkedIn - Telegram
Accomplished Digital Marketing Manager with 10 years experience working with small to medium brands, has managed builds of complex, enterprise level websites & applications. Led the digital marketing efforts for businesses like:
Scrap Car Comparison - UK comparison website, managed rebuild of site & backend systems
Leaders - One of the UKs largest real estate groups (100+ Branches)
LinkedIn - Telegram
Our Software Engineer has over 8 years experience, including projects ranging from bespoke applications, to high-throughput forex trading systems, to managing the enterprise stack for an hosted communications provider.
LinkedIn - Telegram
With 8 years in financial services, Rich will be managing all aspects of compliance including anti-money laundering and know your customer laws. He’ll also be performing various operations duties including customer support and weekly reports to the DAO. His record includes:
Harwoods Wealth Management - Publicly listed financial planning group
Affinity Financial Awareness - Financial services firm representing over 100 advisors
What We’re Building
Our first goal is to make direct purchase as simple as possible, we’re going to build an instant fiat to dash exchange for the UK market with marketing reports for Dash marketers hard baked in from the offset.
If you’re interested in the technical side of the development we’re going to be building everything to be deployable to the AWS cloud (EC2, EKS, SES and SMS) with security, speed-of-development, platform reliability and the ability to scale quickly being the main contributors to our decisions. We've opted for Kubernetes orchestration and a microservice approach with the majority of our backend infrastructure being written in GoLang. React will be used to connect the front-end.
The app will be separated by a subdomain from the marketing site which will be built with wordpress on DigitalOcean in the first couple of months to get the ball rolling from both an SEO point of view and to generate some email sign-ups for initial traction (for all the details see the full roadmap down below).
For payment we’ll be accepting credit & debit card utilising the developer favourite Stripe as our payment processor.
Compliance will a key factor early on, registering with the FCA and meeting all KYC and AML legislation.
We’re also going to be enforcing key security measures including 2FA and following best practices (SAML, https, etc).
Budget Breakdown
All payments will be through Escrow with the dash core team, we have a full roadmap with set targets and will be reporting weekly along with monthly video reports.
We’re asking for 25 dash per month for 8 months to fund the full build and launch of this exchange. The breakdown of average monthly spend is as follows:
Worth noting that the Salaries are for 4 people and are based on £125 per day (£2.5k per month) this is a cut from our normal salaries and after tax allows us enough to live on whilst being able to dedicate full time (40+ hours a week) to building this project to the best it can be.
We’ve broken down the other costs in our open google sheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_JNy2xBsR2-Uz-ptuMCO9tOaRQZk3equ_JxBVanjHcQ/edit?usp=sharing
We’ve based this budget on the current Dash price and significantly reduced any marketing budget to accommodate for rises in Dash price, all additional funds from fluctuation in Dash price will go firstly towards any infrastructure shortfall (unlikely) and then towards marketing & growth.
Project Roadmap and Deliverables
This is based on us getting funded in the next superblock:
As mentioned before, all these deliverables will tie in with our funding and Escrow from the dash core team - we don’t deliver, we don’t get funded. We’re confident in our ability as a team and know that accountability matters.
Thank you for looking at our proposal, we invite any feedback you might have and you can nearly always reach one of us on the dash nation discord, our public discord for eWallet here or any of our Telegram accounts (Ash is probably your best bet though!)
Some questions we would like to answer in advance:
Please note, if you have a question please make sure to check out our Google Sheet - it may have been covered there. Also for more urgent queries please chat to Ash on telegram here.
Q. What will you do with any excess budget from pricing fluctuations?
Excess budget will be first routed into any infrastructure shortfall first and secondly into marketing and growth.
Q. Why is your marketing budget so small?
We’ll be working with other marketers working within the Dash space as well as investing our own funds into this and we’re also funneling any additional funds gained from fluctuation in Dash price to marketing.
Q: How will you source the Dash for the exchange
Until there is a peer to peer element to our exchange we will source the Dash in the most financially effective manner, we’ll be seeking out access to the interbank exchange rate to convert to USD and buy at the best possible rates we can. Interestingly there may also be demand from other Dash projects to convert their budget into fiat.
Q: Who is your front end developer?
We’re currently in talks with 4 front-end developers, all of which have shown significant interests. The project conceptualisation comes from us 3 and the 4th head is unlikely to be invested in crypto (in particular Dash!) like ourselves.
Q: Will this be open source?
No we’re not planning on building this as OSS, however we’re happy to share the source code and/or aspects of it privately with developers / dash core team members.
Show full description ...
Discussion: Should we fund this proposal?
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It will be great to have a platform I can confidently direct people to, when they ask me how they can buy Dash.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kIvjn8a6Aw&feature=youtu.be
UK Fiat To Dash Exchange & Marketing Integration by AshFrancis
https://dashwatch.org/files/1535386222002.pdf
The public demo is here for anyone else who wants to give it a go (running on the testnet)
https://exchange.staging.ewallet.co.uk/
Test credentials are given as you go (testnet faucet address if you want somewhere to send the funds and sandbox card details)
For anyone looking, Demo is currently down as we reskin the UX ready for launch on livenet, updates will be posted on the forum (including pics of the new UX!).
what the latest on actually getting the go ahead of VISA ? without the rest is pretty much pointless.
We're also considering our future expansion plans and crypto-dash pairings will likely be added after launch in a similar vein to changelly / shapeshift. This can also be utilised by an API and could be integrated directly into wallets along with an affiliate program to generate funds for developers.
UK Fiat To Dash Exchange & Marketing Integration by AshFrancis
https://dashwatch.org/files/1530053201537.pdf
UK Fiat To Dash Exchange & Marketing Integration AshFrancis
https://dashwatch.org/files/1527510589063.pdf
https://www.dash.org/forum/threads/ewallet-uk-fiat-dash-exchange-update-thread.28462/
We require a higher attention for detail in your market research. You should be more honest with your critique of your competitors in the future.
Therefore we do not believe the case has been made for justifying establishing a new exchange and all the risks associated with it, compliance, etc. when you can purchase crypto using Revolut, unlike the case you made above.
We are voting NO
Opera Node
www.opera.consider.it
https://community.revolut.com/t/send-bitcoin-eth-ltc-to-and-from-revolut/18427
https://community.revolut.com/t/bitcoins-and-others-cryptocurrencies/10993/3
Please consider doing proper due-diligence or approaching the proposal owner before you make serious accusations like the above.
At any rate I think more Dash on and off ramps are a legitimate investment and the budget is not too crazy - especially as the UK is turning into a police state.
Voting yes.
I'm quite disappointed to see operaincubator make such an ignorant and unfounded claim. It does nothing to inspire confidence with the proposals we've already funded them with..
Walter
YES given for this project. On ramps are important.
Future more I find your chart very deceptive, there are different way uptain dash as well, which makes me not able to trust you.
I would change my votes to yes if there would be a reasonable change for becoming a "coinbase like pound to Dash" platform. I would not mind to vote for such a proposal even it would cost millions of dollars (do masternode owners definitively need to earn a stake in that company)
With regards to the chart, that was just one recommended route and in both the video and the proposal we acknowledge others - no intention to mislead here and we've discussed many others on the comments here and on discord.
1) We'll be reducing barriers and friction for UK dash adopters, to do this we'll minimise the fees involved to obtain Dash and offer a smooth, succinct process for obtaining it. One of the reasons why Coinbase is so popular is that it offers an easy, convenient way for novices to obtain crypto. We'll be doing the same but with very much a Dash focus, and due to the DAO subsidising the build we'll be able to offer this at much lower fees as well as empower UK dash holders with the ability to sell their Dash (spreading Dash around will help stabilise the currency and create more Dash advocates). We'll also be creating UK targeted content & media to encourage adoption - our goal is to be a self-sustaining entity existing outside of, but working directly with the DAO & other Dash initiatives. We've had a lot of UK Dash enthusiasts come to us in support of this as they've experience the same pain points we're trying to solve. By making Dash vastly more accessible to the UK (the 5th largest economy in the world) we'll increase it's adoption, helping establish it as leading cryptocurrency. It goes without saying that the UK is home to the financial capital of the world in many eyes along with a significant investor base and wealthy population.
2) We'll be providing valuable insight & conversion data to the Dash marketing teams, to put this into context:
- Feedbands will be targeting the UK with localised Dash Informer landing pages
- Traffic from those pages will be sent to our exchange with tags that allow us to attribute their Dash acquisition to the campaign they originally came to Dash Informer from.
- We'll provide access to that data to Feedbands & their team to optimise their campaigns accordingly.
This data will provide a reliable model (a data sample) that can be applied at scale to optimise all Dash performance marketing campaigns to lead directly to Dash acquisition and advocacy.
I think is the most important aspect of the project.
Upon successful funding of this project, and upon successful completion and launch of a functional, reliable and well designed fiat exchange, Dashinformer will list this fiat exchange as the preferred fiat exchange for Dash for visitors in the UK. This means that UK visitors to Dashinformer will automatically be recommended this fiat exchange when they visit the site. Visitors from outside the UK will not see this recommendation.
This recommendation will only remain active as long as there are clear benefits to Dash on the exchange (homepage / dashboard exposure, exclusivity, etc).
I don't see that as the issue more so that it's a just one more friction-free route into Dash regardless of the fiat coupling
The fact is, there are many direct purchase and fiat exchanges which are managing just fine, we're just building this to make Dash as easy as possible for those in the UK to adopt by removing friction points that currently exist. We'll also be providing insight directly to the various Dash marketing teams to improve all marketing efforts.
Let's see what you can do. You get a yes from me.
8 months at 25 is too long, 50 for 4 months would be better..
Please clarify thank you
We'll procure dash through the more complex methods and through supply partners and then once ready we'll add sales functionality so those with Dash in our system can sell it directly through it (although this would not be quite p2p as the buyer would never see the seller in this transaction).
I would highly urge you to research this and resubmit proposal next month in advance of the deadline so there is plenty time to research and vote.
1) is there any operating bitcoin exchanges where you can buy bitcoin in UK?
2) if there is then why have you outlined a process which seems very exhaustive?
3) could the users not go to exchange X and then to bittrex or shapeshift or something to dash?
2) That's a recommended route to minimise fees, one very familiar with UK crypto adopters!
3) Yeah, that route is just an effective one, there are other avenues again each have their barriers in terms of fees, user experience, transaction times, etc.
Revolute just added cryptocurrencys but only eth ltc and btc would have been great to add Dash it is by far the most userfriendly and easy way for someone new to get involved.
What happens if in two months time you hit a dead end?
Please provide some information so we can make an informed decision.. and to ensure that dash network gets its value for the dash. And not some half done product that is not deliverable.
From the very start we've built this with Dash and DAO best interests in mind - our first email with the core team was to find out if it possible to offer equity to the DAO, which unfortunately it's not at this stage. We would be happy to give equity to the DAO whenever this function is added.
There is a big element of trust involved which we've done our best to earn; by only asking for a minimal amount in escrow through the core group with clear deadlines, being completely transparent from the offset and putting together a serious budget proposal.
Whilst I appreciate you wanting to work with established businesses, those conversations are most definitely on-going, but the two aren't mutually exclusive. With us we're building right from the start with Dash at our core, directly improving all dash marketing initiatives by providing valuable data and insight.
We've seen and experienced a massive friction point for UK dash adopters that has been corroborated by other UK dash advocates that we want to solve as well as a marketing opportunity that no other crypto has. It's an issue that needs to be solved to help Dash grow to where it belongs and along with the user education we'll be providing with our platform and the marketing integration there will be massive return on budget for Dash and MNOs like yourself.
I hope this clarifies things but like I said, we're a completely open team and happy to continue this discussion and figure out if there is more we can do to demonstrate our commitment to building something great for Dash
Come up with an alternative that banks can't shutdown
But then they would still need dash or btc or eth
Whilst I agree navigating the banks can be difficult, our goal is to minimise friction for acquisition of Dash from fiat - an important part of which is accepting card and/or bank payments.
There are benefits to this beyond the exchange aspect (also worth noting our positioning is more direct purchase than exchange).
'clear.bank and clearinghouse intermederies/creditcard'
We've asked how you would handle shutdowns.
Once banks/processors notice large volumes of money and they dig which they will as they have risk management(underwriters)
You will get shutdown, how does the network realize its value.
1) how much of your money is on the line?
2) why will you not spend the few hundred gbp and incorporate if you strongly belrive in the project
3) what happens after 8 months and you have little to no volume?
4) will you just shutdown and move on?
5) what is your marketing budget beyond 8 months
6) if you have no budget beyond 8 months then you will be right back here asking for more funds or shutdown.
At the end of the day the value for dash network is very little.
i have personally on my own funds offered to visit you in the UK, so that i can best asses your pitch on behalf of the network and maybe even perhaps provide some funding for you when dao funding is depleted.
Otherwise sadly only a NO from me.
This proposal focuses on a top level, we'll be building redundancy into the system and pursuing multiple avenues for payment processing - there are many exchanges that accept card payment and we will do the same. The system will be as fault tolerant as possible to accommodate for any shut downs or freezes.
1) We're taking significant cuts to our wages and building a project for Dash that offers a lot of value for Dash.
2) Forming a company and getting a bank account isn't a problem, the FCA process is more long winded and complex and it doesn't make sense to go down that avenue until we're ready.
3) We've considered that outcome and there are a lot of avenues - we've even already discussed this with you regarding angel investment.
4) No
5) We've already discussed partnerships with Dash marketing teams and if ewallet is profitable which I see no reason why it wouldn't be, we can raise funds to grow it.
6) We above
The value to the Dash network is huge in terms of increasing adoption in the UK and providing marketing insight.
Thank you for your input.