Blockchain Feasibility Study For Cool Kids and Grey-beards Like Me. I might be a ‘grey-beard’ straight from the cast of Mad Men, but I’ve been to plenty of tech rodeos in my time and Iâve come up with an idea that is so brilliant, it has already been nominated for the LinkedIn 2018 Global Whatâs Next? Award for Best Fintech, Martech, Medtech, Insuretech or BlockTech Idea, Ever!â Very smart folks within the bitcoin and blockchain ecosystem who have heard about it have said, âWow! I wish I thought of that! You could make Billions from it!â And of course, my great technology idea not only solves a problem by making it easier to do a whole bunch of things, it has a blockchain back-drop that leverages distributed ledger technology and naturally, there is a utility token component that comports with the established crypto communityâs definition of âstore-of-valueâ and it can be expressed in the form of a new bitcoin, or an Ethereum energized alt currency and it can nest on Ripple. Do you know how many ICOs are raising tens of millions and in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars?! This is a no brainer and weâll be listed on all of the bitcoin exchanges in a few months.
My idea is going to change the way discrete networks connect, how groups of people and nodes interact within specific industry workplace settings, and it will change the way in which people live.
Youâre either going to hear the above pitch or youâre thinking of making it. But without a blockchain feasibility study in hand, the conversation will be short.
If you didnât get the memo titled âICO Traded Ahead,â the nascent stage, yet multi-billion-dollar ICO marketplace is being viewed as fast track path for pre-revenue startups to raise capital without having the burden of adhering to accredited investor guidelines for private placement offerings and aims to accomplish the same outcome as a traditional Initial Public Offering. Â It is has also become a virtual pump and dump arcade.
According to Oren Raphael, the 30-something former international banker turned-tech entrepreneur, âthe ICO marketplace has already become a virtual #shithole of penny-stock populated, half-baked ideas riding the wave of euphoria courtesy of the birth of blockchain.â Raphael (click image to right for his linkedin profile) is the founder and chief technology architect of RAADAAR, an IP rich, location proximity software firm that has developed a âreal worldâ mobile device app that provides the crucial last few feet of connectivity between consumers and a merchantâs cash register and is already being rolled out by independent gas station / convenience store operators in Southern California. The Series A round was completed one year ago and after meeting the original deliverable milestones well ahead of schedule, Raphael set out to do a Series B round with proceeds earmarked towards product launch. When reaching out to the investor offering document firm PPM to prepare a Reg D Offering Prospectus, Evan Fisher, a senior member of PPM who has framed crypto token value propositions for several startups in the past few months had a ‘aha moment’ in the initial consultation. He recommended that Raphael should want to have a blockchain feasibility study for his existing product, not just a typical business plan that would be mapped as an exhibit to the Offering Prospectus. According to Raphael, “It was as if Fisher hit me with a lightening bolt when we were discussing the business plan I thought I wanted his people to write for me.” Two weeks later, Raphael, working with PPM team, produced a plan that has already fallen into the hands of a discrete universe of investment groups focused on blockchain opportunities, two of which have put a 10x multiple on his initial enterprise value. A classic example of what happens if you perform an objective blockchain feasibility study so as to fully curate out opportunities that lever distributed ledger technologies.
Yes, the glaring, multi-exponential increase in the value of Bitcoin aka BTC , Ethereum (ETH), Ripple (XRP), and Litecoin (LTC), the most frequently quoted alternative currencies, is the âtellâ for many of yesterdayâs token pitches. Many of those pitches point prospective investors to stories profiling Billionaire Boys Clubs that are burning Jeff Bezos in effigy because it took him 20 years to accumulate his net worth, while itâs taken less than 2-3 years for a short list of Bitcoin Baristas to achieve near comparable wealth courtesy of their being Crypto Cool Kids.
News Flash: Oren Raphael is not alone when advocating to those with a brilliant idea and aspiring to raise seed or growth capital via the new-fangled IPO market that you need to be squared away. Credible entrepreneurs need to have a refined âtellâ before they can solicit the âask.â What does the application do? How does it create economic value? How does the enterprise make a profit? How do investors make a return on their investment? What are the impediments to success? Who are the competitors in the space? What distinguishes the product/service from others? What is the customer acquisition scheme? Is there an exit strategy? These are the typical questions addressed in the course of preparing any preliminary feasibility study aka business plan. For aspirational tech titans, the same process applies and the need to perform a blockchain feasibility study and frame the value proposition in a way that makes sense to investors is crucial.
Why does one need a blockchain feasibility study when everyone else is putting their pitch into a Russian-accented whitepaper and in a matter of a few months, they are raising $2mil, $5mil, $15mil, $30mil and in some cases over $100mil through the sale of tokens?!
The answer is simple: Bitcoin Boulevard has become an overcrowded, sharp-elbowed highway saturated with good, bad and ugly ideas, many of which are devoid of well-documented business plans that frame a cogent value proposition for investors.
 Sure, you can aim at the suckers who donât know the difference between a whitepaper and a whiteboard and only care that your investor presentation deck includes the words âbitcoinâ or âblockchainâ or âcryptocurrency.â But, as news stories will inevitably report over the coming months, many crypto companies that have recently raised money via Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) will disappear into the ethernet, and share the post mortem affixed to a majority of the âdot comâ concerns that raised hundreds of millions of dollars money via Initial Public Offerings in the late 1990âs, and when the bubble burst, left the financial markets with a $1.75 trillion mark down and nothing behind for investors.
To be a Winner within the realm of raising serious investment capital to execute a serious idea, you need to have a serious business plan that complies with feasibility study best practices and meets the needs of savvy tech investors who will want to provide capital, and ideally, pump other wind in the sail to help execute the business strategy. Welcome to the world of blockchain feasibility studies.