Korporatio’s Monthly Recap: January 2020

Here we go with our January recap! 

 

Korporatio aims to create a new generation of cutting edge, truly global businesses, led by entrepreneurs who are citizens of the world. A new era in which everyone is empowered to incorporate, innovate and realise their dreams.

 

GENERAL

January has been a month where bureaucracy has been giving us some headaches. As you can imagine, our corporate structure is now becoming a bit more advanced as there are a lot of subsidiaries up and running as well as models with corporate treasuries. We are always looking for new tests to run in order to offer more and better services to our users. 

This month I had the not so pleasurable experience of discovering how different corporate governance really is in each jurisdiction. We are trying to set up a new subsidiary in a European country as well as a corporate bank account for our subsidiary in Singapore. Till here, not much of a problem. However, it seems like the world has never come across Company Treasuries before. This explains exactly how far behind we are in having a proper workflow at the legal level. So still a long way to go to ensure geography is not a limitation in running a business. 

 

JANUARY IN DEVELOPMENT

The development has been once again very intense for the month of January. A lot of bugs have been fixed as well as some small features on the back-end to ensure a better communication between all contracts. 

New companies will now be deployed with the gas station automatically inside. To activate the gas station, the business owner will be required to deposit 0.9 ETH in the Smart Company. This amount is required to ensure all contracts are communicating with the gas station. And therefore, new users don’t have to pay gas to execute actions in the company. 

Using the gas station, however, is not required. If the number of shareholders in the company is below 10, we feel there is no reason to spend 0.9 ETH to activate the gas station. Considering the average cost per action of few cents, it is probably cheaper and easier to just transfer a few dollars to every shareholder’s address. 

We do have projects with more than 10 shareholders where the users are blockchain savvy. But even for these people we don’t feel there is a real need to use a gas station. The gas station has been developed to ensure non-blockchain people could join a smart company without any additional steps in the process. Those are the types of Smart Companies we feel will get the real advantage of using it. But we like to put users in full control, so once again, the decision to use it or not, is solely up to you and your shareholders. 

 

JANUARY IN MARKETING

As mentioned in the end of the year recap, 2020 will be a year where our marketing focus  will be absolutely at the top. Brand and awareness are going to be developed as per usual and in fact this month, I had the pleasure to have a very nice chat with Sean Stella, who is the owner of HardForking. It was a different style of an interview as there was a lot of walking and eating. It’s more of a relaxed chat more than anything else, but I feel it describes well what Korporatio does. 

With Sean we are talking about setting up a very cool use case but I think this part would be a bit more appropriate for the Partnerships section. 

Another great feature this month comes from Legal Business World which picked up multiple articles from Korporatio about the future of corporate governance, why Smart Companies are more competitive manner than competitors and tokenization of assets (or entire companies). This site is a platform sharing the newest knowledge from industry experts within the field of law, business and legal tech.

And as we operate at the intersection of all those, it’s a pretty interesting space to watch! 

Ads

Continuing on the marketing side, we have closed all display ads as those have generated a solid 0% in conversion rate. I would like to point out that we have not spent a lot in that test. So probably that was one of the reasons why the experiment went bad. However, with a 0 as a result, there is not much to discuss. We felt it was going to be a better option to bring that budget back to a classic PPC campaign.

PPC

On the PPC side, things have been flying as our lead generation strategy has increased by 3x. We are now seeing a very stable flow of leads coming to our website every single day. The missing part is to launch orders via credit cards as that is a very important feature. The secret behind this increase was nothing special. Google has launched Dynamics Ads some time ago. And for some reason those ads have increased the impression of the other ads without touching the conversion rate. Therefore we have one new ad that is performing worse than all the others (Dynamic) but that overall have helped generating so many qualitative leads on the other campaigns. 

 

JANUARY IN PARTNERSHIPS

More than partnerships, this month’s section should be called ‘use cases’. As mentioned above, we are planning something new with HardForking. The idea is to tokenize their entire Youtube channel – and their brand. We have done this in the past with other influencers, but this time it will be a bit more challenging. The volumes alone put our dashboard resistance in a real test, and we’ve never done anything like this before. So not sure if this is the first ever tokenized channel or not, but will definitely an experiment worth checking out!

The second use case I would like to talk about is something we haven’t really considered in the past. We are now helping a food chain to set up multiple restaurants, i.e. Smart Companies, to ensure a proper corporate governance as well as tokenization of every single outlet. 

The use case

I’m a big fan of the F&B industry so this use case is actually very close to me. I do believe it is an interesting one as well, because it shows once again how much advantages blockchain can bring to the traditional industry. You have the brand, which is owned by the holding company. In a franchise model, a third party would come, pay the company to setup a new location and then pay a fee each month to the main company.

In this case, the holding company can automatically set up a new outlet via subsidiaries. And this way, also equity share with those interested to become franchisees. This way you get two major benefits: the holding keeps the shares and therefore gets the payments as dividends; this means higher cash flow for the subsidiary and therefore less risk of having to ask for a loan. The third party individuals don’t have to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars to setup a new franchise but can just become a shareholder with whatever they are willing to invest and start working right away. 

It is one of those solutions that I really didn’t think about when we were discussing how people could have used the Smart Company. But once again, creativity goes to levels that are simply incredible. 

 

TREASURY

As you may or may not know, a company treasury represents the total amount of shares available but still not issued by the company. This in simple means the company is holding those shares. 

Treasuries are actually very common in public companies when they are doing buy-back activities and something that is available almost everywhere in the world. However, it seems that people in the financial industry are not aware of such a thing. This month we received two different requests to explain what a treasury is and how it works.  In one case we even had to get a legal letter explain the same thing we were mentioning. 

Simple lack of information like this cost us time and money. I’m all about transparency but when it comes to something that can be considered common knowledge within the industry and there’s ignorance, I wonder how these people make their decisions on whether or not approving what you are asking.

We will solve this problem as it is nothing too serious. However, it does highlight the importance of education and knowledge in the industry. Overall, we had another good month of progress. Small issues like these are just helping us grow our knowledge to help users set up and run Smart Companies as hassle-free as possible. 

 

For this month, this is everything we have to share, as usual, we would love your feedback, and please join our Discord at discord.gg/g3m33DZ .