Sylo; shifting the industry paradigm to strengthen consumer trust…

Blockchain has created quite a niche space for itself in the market as a ‘disrupter’. Not only has it revolutionised the tech industry, but it’s challenged traditional values and norms in the business and finance sectors as well.

‘How?’ you may ask? Let me tell you.

Even a couple of years ago, investors used to largely invest in shares, FOREX, and take part in IPOs (Initial Public Offering).

Now, they largely buy digital tokens (security or utility) and take part in ICOs (Initial Coin Offering) or STOs (Security Token Offering).

No longer the realm of the experimental, even traditional venture capitals and angel investors are now actively investing in ICOs and STOs.

Long story short, the disruption of blockchain is real but the result is positive.

But this piece isn’t about investing in cryptocurrencies. I am not writing to try and convince you why one should invest in digital assets. That’s not the intention here — I’m trying to get to a different point.

In the past three years, thousands of ICOs have come into play from different industries. Over 2018, we’ve seen over 950 projects running their ICOs.

(You can check out the stats here.)

All this while, projects have followed a few common steps which have loosely become the ‘unwritten rules’ or norm in the ICO world. What are those steps exactly?

Well, it goes like this; the standard ICO trajectory more-or-less follows the below steps:

1. Develop a whitepaper (the concept)

2. Have a pre-sale to raise the initial funds (and get resources)

3. Start product development

4. Have a public sale to raise more funds (hit the soft-cap!)

5. Accelerate product development

6. Alpha launch

7. Beta launch (takes about 12–18 months post-main sale, if everything goes well, or else even longer.)

Now the problem with this approach is, product development and beta launch depend majorly upon the outcome of the project’s main sale — i.e. how much money has been raised at that point in time..

Why is this a problem?

If the project doesn’t reach the soft-cap within the stipulated time-frame, for whatever reasons, the rest of the plan goes out the window!

Hitting the soft-cap then becomes the primary objective over anything else.

As a result, what those projects tend to do is extend the duration for the main sale (sometimes multiple times) and offer rewards and the like to reach their investment goals.

Meanwhile, product development (and launch) takes a back seat and the project timelines stretch further into the distance…………

The below graph will help you understand what I’m saying.

In order to keep the graph simple, I haven’t shown the initial few stages, but you should be able to understand what happens and why.

There are two companies — A and B. See below how B’s product launch gets delayed because it took them longer than expected to reach their soft-cap. (This graph is drawn considering A and B had the same parameters and project timelines.)

Standard ICO Project Graph

The longer it takes to hit the soft-cap (project B in this case), the faster stakeholders (investors, partners) start losing faith in the project — the people/ investors that were once interested in the project, start to back off. Eventually, they assume that the product is never going to see the light of day.

Even if the concept was great and maybe the product could be great too, it loses half of its market even before it’s launched! Now that’s a shame.

But even after these two to three years of learning as our market expands, almost all the current projects are still following the same old path. Unfortunately, this has the added side effect of weakening peoples’ faith in general, when it comes to blockchain-based projects.

We are yet to come across a project that has broken out of this pattern.

In light of this, here at Sylo we’re trying something new; we’re taking the path less travelled.

But what is it that we are doing different from the others in order to break the pattern?

Well, it’s pretty simple actually — we’re just sticking to our plan!

We’re making sure that we will deliver what we’ve promised, within the proposed timelines, without compromising on the quality.

But how?

Check out the image below.

And again, to drive better comprehension, I’ve tried to keep it simple.

The Disruption Axis

What do you think? Did the graph help?

If your answer is ‘no’, then here’s some context:

Time and again we have mentioned Sylo is — ‘User first’.

And when we say it, we mean it! We and our project are here for the people.

So what’s the use of our work if we can’t deliver the product on time?

Though fundraising for elementary resources via a main sale is helpful to keep the workflow flowing, raising funds isn’t the overall goal here — delivering the product timely, is. The launch date for our Beta release was set long before we decided on a main sale time frame.

So bearing all this in mind, it’s a brand new year and we are stoked to say that we are well on track! And you will soon get an official announcement from us confirming the Beta launch date!!!

Want to try the new Sylo App before anyone else? Pre-register here to be among the first to get your hands on it.

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