The other day I noticed an interesting news title that said: “Our parents had public pension funds, we have cryptocurrencies.” I couldn’t agree more. Cryptocurrencies are our chance, this is our moment.
I’m happy to see that the interest in Vibe tokens exceeded our wildest expectations. The 5th of September is less than a month away and I’m sure that we’ll see thousands of contributors putting their ETH in to buy Vibe tokens.
As every responsible CEO, I will of course exchange a significant part of my crypto portfolio into Vibes, but I’m biased, because I believe in myself more than I believe in anything else.
So it’s important that I put myself into the shoes of unknown contributors, who will trust us with their funds. Here are five important factors I would look for when considering about taking part in Viberate’s crowdsale:
1. TEAM
When we were raising our seed round everyone told us to emphasize our team in our presentation. So in the end our deck was around 30% about the people, working on the project. One of the investors then told us in the simplest way possible, why they invest into teams and not projects. He said: “I’d rather invest into a great team with an OK idea than into a crappy team with a great idea. You can have the best idea in the world, but can’t execute it with a bad team.”
We have the best team, everybody agrees 😉
No, really. The founders have worked together for 15 years, we’re not just business partners, we’re friends. Music has been our center focus for the whole period and we know everything there is about the music business. We are experienced managers and skilled team leaders, joined by loyal employees, who follow our vision and share our passion. We worked with big international clients such as Philip Morris, Vodafone, Hewlett-Packard and many others, who trusted us with their event management budgets.
Plus, we’re cool to hang out with.
2. SOLVING OUR OWN PAINS
We started the project because we were lost in the flood of trends in music. New artists emerge daily and it’s hard to be on top of things, no matter how experienced you are. When you’re solving your own problems, you’ll go extra mile to nail it. We’ve always followed the rule that said: “If we want it to be good enough for clients, it first needs to be good enough for us.” The same goes for Viberate.
3. KEEPING IT REAL
The ICO boom has seen some insane valuations for projects that were barely existing as an idea, scribbled on a napkin. Vasja already shared our thoughts about uncapped ICOs, but it’s not only about not having a cap, it’s also about where you set it. In order to develop all planned features we need around $6M and then we need all the money we can get to advertise it globally. We could spend hundreds of millions on advertising, but we set our ad cap at another $6M. It’s a lot of money, but global campaigns cost much more than that. Still, it’s enough to kickstart the service and go from there.
4. WE ACTUALLY EXIST
This isn’t really an argument when you’re raising money from VC funds. But apparently it is when you’re selling tokens. Viberate already exist as an awesome service, where you can explore the world of live music, find new acts or if you’re a musician — open up a profile and use it to monitor the popularity of your career.
By buying Vibe tokens, you are contributing to a project that already has value and a vibrant community covering our backs. The database you see today was built with the help of over 50 thousand contributors.
We achieved a lot, but that’s only the tip of an iceberg. Here’s what’s still in front of us.
5. MUSIC ISN’T GOING ANYWHERE
The guys at Hacked.com said it best: “Live music isn’t going away, and becomes more valuable as recorded music sales continue to decline. The potential to provide disruptive services which actually benefit the industry they target is great, and even a 10% take of the industry leader in ticket sales would equate to almost a billion dollars in annual revenues.”
Recorded music is nowadays mostly a promotional tool to help drive ticket sales. For most of musicians, their primary revenue source are live shows and there’s no sign of changes here. A lot of artists are giving away their music to fans for free and hope that they will show support by attending a live show. That’s why we decided to put our focus entirely to the live music segment, because we’re sure it will only get bigger.
I could easily write ten more reasons about why I think you should sit behind your computer on September 5.
But we have other communication channels for you to ask questions:
