Why WONO starts with sharing and freelancing together instead of focusing on something specific? WONO Follow Jul 13, 2018 · 2 min read

That’s actually the most frequently asked question from potential investors, critics and journalists. Most of them assume that building a platform for sharing any kind of assets is not a good idea, because the audience is too broad.

Why can’t we choose, say, just home sharing and start conquering this market trying to challenge Airbnb? And then, reaching some success, expand to car sharing and freelancing? Well, if we were an offchain startup, that’s what we’d started to do. But on blockchain business is different.

There are actually two main reasons to start with all kinds of sharing, including human resource — time and talents — sharing.

The first one is the matter of currency. A blockchain-based startup must issue its own token and just can’t work on Ethereum, Bitcoin or other popular coins. I’ve wrote a big article explaining this (https://medium.com/@wonoworld/why-wono-doesnt-use-ethereum-6c1f194e5d78).

So imagine that 10 platforms with 10 kinds of sharing and freelancing will succeed. What’s next? Their users would have to constantly exchange tokens to use all of them, losing time and money. Come on, that would never work. Such inconvenient way of earning and consumption just can’t become popular. We need to build a single environment with a single currency for every kind of sharing just to keep it simple.

The second reason is the matter of user retention. We can’t stop a freelancer who has earned performing jobs on WONO from withdrawing his tokens if he wants to buy food or a plane ticket. But we can offer him or her to rent something: a flat, a car, a bike, a lawn-mower or a snowboard.

That’s how we want to increase user’s lifetime value and quantity of deals per one attracted user. The more deals is signed and completed at the platform — the higher is the demand for tokens — the higher is its price. That will let us get more fiat money from selling our commission-earned tokens, quickly improve our platform and attract more users.

And to top it all… If you still think that the only road to success is building a single-segment service, remember the stories of Jack Ma or Craig Newmark. Both

guys started building multi-purpose platforms from the very beginning, and as a result Alibaba and Craigslist became extremely popular and world famous.

Andrey Chepelev, COO at WONO