Why no hype? Why no buzz?

With the token price slowly eroding the last couple of weeks, I have gotten countless (mostly well meant) suggestions that we should conduct more marketing and be more vocal about our achievements. After all, how many projects can claim they have a working product that will expose crypto fueled added value in the hands of 50.000 main stream consumers?

I'll tell you why.

While there are several strategic reasons for why we have been keeping it on the low on the marketing and announcement front there is also a more fundamental conviction we have about doing business responsible for this perceived shyness. We believe that a large percentage of the projects in crypto are in an update and announcement arms race for investor attention with each other. While being vocal to the crypto community supporting your cause isn't a bad thing per se, it is quite detrimental if a project’s focus diverges because of this aim to please token holders as soon as possible.

I believe that focusing on making announcements as soon as possible makes a project chase the wrong types of targets. We believe that a lot of projects are falling into this community pleasing trap.

Execution is king

Steve Jobs didn’t invent the concept of computing and wasn't the first to market the concept of the personal computer. Steve Jobs was the first that was able to convince the masses that having a personal computer was something people wanted. His ability to both innovate and convince consumers(their target end user) is what made him and his company successful. In the same light it is not the concept of event tickets on the blockchain that will ensure the GET will have a important role in the ticketing sector of the near future; it is the token’s ability to guarantee a ticket’s validity, re-sale price and the uniqueness of its owners. Convincing your community of this obvious value proposition is not the hard thing, convincing the people making the decision and picking up the tab for the services however, is. Luckily we have the capacity and the network in the event industry we have been working on from day 1 to step by step overcome this resistance.

Powerful ideas are not valuable ideas and vice versa

This is not to say that ideas are by themselves not powerful, after all this whole blockchain thing started with a whitepaper right? I have nothing against whitepapers. But let’s get real here, having a decent whitepaper isn’t putting anybody closer to having an honest and guaranteed scalp-free ticketing experience. That is why we have always put the fact first that we have an operational product that is actually being sold and used in front of our value proposition. What’s the point of innovative tech if nobody is willing to learn to use it or pay a higher price for it? The fact that a certain blockchain protocol is smarter, offers more functionality or is more transparent for all actors and thus evidently better for society doesn't mean it will be used in real life.

So what’s your point?

Projects that focus too much on making announcements might prioritize closing partnerships and creating buzz without having a product to sell. Partnerships establish that a company has a network and is able to make industry connections is very important, but in the end it will only matter when you have a product to sell that will make a token used in the protocol and make the cash register ring for all actors involved.

Projects that focus too much on showing their investors new development updates risk building a product that has no established clients base. Publishing a ticketing application to the App store can only be considered remotely valuable for your project if you know the product you have built is actually in demand by your target client. Building a product without immediate customer feedback creates a huge risk for a product/market misfit. Focusing on deploying software also kind of assumes the team exactly knows (with 100% certainty) what the problem is at the core of the industry.

The GET Protocol approach:

Fail quick, fail often. Improve. Repeat.

From the get-go GUTS has decided to present our achievements as they are. Building software that will be used by millions of people on a wide array of devices and with capabilities for both attendee as organizer will require a continuous stream of feedback, especially as we are exploring new areas as making tickets smart, adding crypto wallets for every ticket sold to an identity and merging the primary and secondary market. All our partnerships thus far have converted into actual ticket sales, with as prime example the Hekwerk deal that will put lead to Ethereum wallets in more than 50.000 Dutch consumers in 2018 alone.

Honestly, there is so much in the pipeline and we are in contact with so many interesting parties of various types in the industry that we build the future of ticketing with, but for now we have to focus on our core business. While we have international intentions our short-term (2018 Q1 & Q2) focus will be strictly on further product and concept development of the smart ticketing application and the mechanisms of the underlying GET Protocol.