Business

As you’d expect, this is a very busy time as HelloGold looks to build the business following the completion of the token sale.

On the critical path is expanding the team so that there is more capacity to deliver on the roadmap promised. Consequently HelloGold have been recruiting heavily for the tech, marketing, product and support teams. This Monday there were 6 new employees inducted in one go — the team is now 24 strong and we are continuing to recruit. The joiners are:

Deepan — UX/UI

Adrian — copywriter

Tawana — token team

Xing Zheng — social media (you’ll be hearing more from him!)

Izzy — HR manager

Dan — product development

The team then took the (relatively) short drive up to the Smokehouse in Cameron Highlands for a short offsite. Given the amount of work and number of new people, it is important to ensure that everybody in the team has a clear understanding of our priorities over the next 12 months. Robin shared his original pitch document for HelloGold from 2014. It is amazing how little has changed and how much has actually been implemented. The key difference was the use of a smartphone app rather than text messages as the customer touch point for accessing gold. The team went through the Roadmap (page 23 here) and agreed prioritisation and delivery responsibilities including for tech, marketing and business development. The key takeaway: there are lots of amazing opportunities and the team needs to ensure they stay focused to deliver for customers and supporters alike. There is a lot of work to do!

(most) of the current HelloGold team

On the marketing side HelloGold has made some changes to the advertising approach following input from 500 Startups, one of HelloGold’s VC investors. A/B testing of all advertising elements have been ramped up and the impact can already be seen, with the number of app downloads increasing by 78% and approved users (those who have cleared KYC) by 106%. Although it has only been one week since the start of this new approach, the model is now in place (along with the data tracking — see tech update below) for further expansion. It is very exciting to see this acceleration in customer numbers and there is a lot more to come from the new in-house creative team (design, copywriting and video).