Here’s the Question & Answers interview with the team of Crowdholding platform
Crowdholding is an online platform that connects companies with consumers and investors so that the supplier (the company) can co-create their business with the market demander (consumers and investors) to ensure a higher rate of success in their market. While researching the Crowdholding company, there were a few pieces of material that I read that spurred a few questions about the Crowdholding company. After inquiring with the Crowdholding company for clarity. The Crowdholding company provided me with these answers.
Patrick Thompson: What products and services can be purchased with YUPIE coin?
Crowdholding: The YUPIE token can be used to purchase the community’s time for enhancing products and validating ideas (aka providing insights). The token can also be used to invest in companies that validate their projects on Crowdholding. Lastly, YUPIE tokens can be spent on services and goods launched by the projects on Crowdholding.
PT: Who is your target audience?
CH: Our target customer base are the small fintech/Blockchain businesses with two to 25 employees and up to $500,000 investment. The ideal user is 18-34 year old English-speakers looking to practice their talents or acquire new skills.
PT: Can you provide me with an example of a task a business would post and a possible response that a user might provide to the task?
CH: A business that just launched a new website can post a task like: What did you want to accomplish on this website and did you find the information valuable?
User: Overall it was a visually appealing website. However, I did not see a clear call to action on the main page. As a first-time visitor, it took me more than 10 seconds to figure out how to launch a project; it took so long because I didn’t see the project button hidden deep within the menu. The information was not easy to find compared to my expectations.
Another example can be a task related to sales which doesn’t require voting:
Business: Help us build a network of banks, Telcom operators, money transfer platforms, Insurance companies, e-wallets, cryptocurrency businesses/exchanges, e-commerce platforms, travel companies like Airbnb, etc, please refer any Senior Executive of top management in any of the above industries to earn bounties.
- Share five prospective company URLs: 100 Yupies
- Share the e-mail address of any Senior Executive (Top Management like AVP, VP, GM, CEO): 100 Yupies
- Introduce the Senior Executive of any one of the industries above via e-mail: 300 Yupies.
It is also possible for a Crowdholding user to receive freelance work through a company on the Crowdholding platform.
For instance, if a business posted a task saying, “help our company choose a design for our logo.” and a consumer happened to be a graphic designer, that consumer could get in contact with the business and potentially do freelance design work for the company.
PT: How is your solution different from other solutions currently out in the market?
CH: With us, the community aspect is key. Businesses are nurtured and launched into success by the crowd.
There are Blockchain-based competitors like Cofound.it and Starbase.co which rely on experts to foster startups just like an accelerator. Also, there are non-Blockchain competitors like Quirky.com and Firstbuild.com which have the community to produce ideas, but these companies take the ideas and act as the Marketing, Sales, Development, Legal, Distribution for those selling the products at expo festivals and via their online stores. We facilitate the collaboration between businesses and society, ensuring mutual prosperity for both.
PT: Can you explain why consumer insights are more valuable than expert opinions?
CH: We are building a decentralized, open innovation platform where the power does not fully reside in one expert. It is better if important decisions are made based on local and specific knowledge rather than by an omniscient or farseeing expert.
Users come from different fields, each bringing their own expertise. Crowdholding is a platform that fosters and is fed by specialization, the closer a person is to a problem, the more likely he or she is to have a good solution to it.
The greatest weakness of such a decentralized system is that there’s no guarantee that valuable information which is uncovered in one part of the system will find its way through the rest of the system. Sometimes valuable information never gets disseminated. However, our decentralized system can produce genuinely intelligent results as there is a means of aggregating the information of everyone in the system–comments are sorted by the users through a voting system.
The scholar Scott Page (the professor, not the saxophonist) wrote the following equation in his book related to the diversity prediction theorem:
Collective error = average individual error – prediction diversity
The average individual error is a reflection of ability, and the prediction diversity reflects how different the individual answers are. The equation basically states that if you have a group of incentivized or otherwise motivated individuals with diverse backgrounds, the crowd will always predict more accurately than the average person. Yes, that is always, not sometimes. Of interest, the collective is often better than many of the experts in a particular field.
PT: When can a user on the platform begin contributing insights?
CH: Users will be able to contribute to projects the very moment they join the Crowdholding platform, however, there will also be closed projects that will only be accessible to people with a particular rank on Crowdholding. All users on our platform are ranked, the ones with higher activity (which is based on comments, votes and upvotes on posts) can gain access to certain projects before others. The more time a user invests on the platform the more features will be available to them on Crowdholding.
PT: What can you tell us about the Crowdholding ICO in the near future?
CH: We will be hosting our ICO on Nov. 1, 2017. In our pre-sale, which ended on Sunday Sept. 17, after running for 31 days, we raised 514 Ethereum tokens–314 ether more than our target of 200 Ether.
For more information about Crowdholdings upcoming ICO, check out the Crowdholding website.
Patrick Thompson is a freelance writer who has written for several publications in the past about topics ranging from culture to cryptocurrency. Thompson is an Economics & Philosophy major at Rutgers University, where he is currently completing his senior year. Upon graduating, Thompson plans to go to law school. Thompson is currently the manager of Louis Kang Photography.
