Business
News from the Marketing desk
It has been 12 months since HelloGold was publicly announced in a press conference with Aeon Credit Services. Back then HelloGold set out to give everyone the opportunity to buy and save in gold, starting with as little as RM1. A year later HelloGold is servicing thousands of customers in Malaysia, and hasn’t stopped pushing forward its agenda of financial inclusion towards the underserved and the unbanked.
What’s driving HelloGold? The promise of a better future.
HelloGold is re-positioning its brand and its campaigns around this idea. “A better future” is about what people want in life and how gold can help them get there. Whether it’s about saving for a house deposit, saving for a once-in-a-lifetime trip or simply saving for retirement, gold is a savings alternative that is safe from inflation, currency depreciation and even economic crisis.
The marketing team is rethinking everything around this idea, including doubling down on marketing commitment. You will see more in the coming months.
The marketing team has initiated a “lunch crowd campaign” which brings HelloGold to busy office spaces during lunch time to promote the app, securing at every event many new users, registered and KYC’ed by the time they leave the booth. Reception has been good and showing a physical presence strongly helps making HelloGold a trustworthy and legitimate company in Kuala Lumpur.
On the numbers side April was a sluggish month for HelloGold. A survey was sent to customers, and they said that they either “don’t have the money to buy gold” or are “waiting for a better price”. One of the focuses of the marketing strategy is to shift from this “trading” mindset to one that is focused on saving in gold for the long term - hence the new campaign and brand idea.
On the upside the same survey showed that roughly 2/3 of HelloGold customers are new to gold. It means that the company is breaking new ground and that there’s a real opportunity to shape the market.
500 Startups
HelloGold continues to attract the trust and support of major players in Fintech and Blockchain world. 500 Startups, a Silicon Valley based VC, have selected HelloGold as one of the companies to receive its support, and also showed its confidence in HelloGold by providing it with funding which will be used to boost the integration and testing of blockchain elements on the HelloGold mobile app.
PTT/Rise D-next accelerator
The 500 Startups story wasn’t the only good news this month, as it was also made public that HelloGold is one of the 15 companies to have made it into the PTT/RISE D-next accelerator. PTT, Thailand’s largest energy multinational, has partnered with Rise, a corporate accelerator based in Southeast Asia, to drive 1% of Thailand’s GDP growth through corporate innovation and startups through their joint program. HelloGold is attending a 12-week bootcamp program (starting on 2nd of May) in Thailand, fitting perfectly with HelloGold’s move into the country this year.
Technical
KYC
KYCv2.2, which allows expats in the local market to sign up has been launched for a fortnight now. The numbers are still being compiled by marketing who will use it to further market the feature to this untapped market. This is a major move as expats traditionally tend to buy more than the average local customer. Going forward, Tech will still be making some minor updates to optimise the onboarding process so that HelloGold’s customers can sign up and start preserving their wealth better by putting them into gold.
Wallet Integration
Tech is hard at work on the required customisations with Axiata due to the HelloGold’s unique fintech KYC requirements. There are changes on HelloGold’s side while Axiata has agreed in principle to implement some customizations that have been mutually agreed. Tech hopes to be able to launch this new wallet service so that customers have another option to top up cash into the HelloGold platform.
Product Blockchain
The key focus is to integrate the permissioned blockchain nodes to the current CWS core engine. While in development, Tech discovered some missing events that need to be implemented - these were duly fixed. This is a big and complex piece of work which the team is working carefully to resolve.
Preparing the core systems for regional expansion
The team’s key developer is completing the final features of the transaction component by adding several key features. It is projected to be ready for tests within the next two weeks. Tech will start testing it in the staging environment while they work on reviewing and completing the report generation features. Again, this work is crucial for HelloGold’s launch to new markets because it decouples the handling of regional profile-specific functions from the transactions component resulting in an architecture that is cleaner, more flexible, and most importantly scalable to support market expansion.
Token
Big Up Promo airdrop
The Telegram Big Up Promo closed on the 16th of April. Congratulations to all who joined us and received their free HGT airdrop! The official HGT Telegram group has now reached more than a thousand members, and we’re confident that this number will rise much higher as we proceed to revealing the other new features for HGT.
New HGT feature
Talking of new features, we announced the milestone burn last month. 10 milestones - 5 related to customer numbers and 5 related to quantity of AUM - to ignite 10 token burns, each to the tune of 10 million HGT. Yes, that’s a total of 100 million HGT token that we’ll be burning as Hellogold increases its reach to the mass market. This is just the tip of the iceberg. More good news will be coming for HGT holders very soon, so stay tuned and join our Telegram and YouTube to hear about it first!
Youtube
On the 11th of April, Harith and Bel presented the last episode for season one of Crypto Market Watch. It’s been a lot of fun and a lot of work, and they’ll definitely be back for a second season! In the meantime, suggestions as to what you think we could do to improve the content or the format are welcomed. We’re always very receptive to our supporters’ views.
For those of you who missed the live AMA session with Robin, which took place on the 12th of April, go check it out to hear of Robin’s views on the gold industry. If you like it don’t hesitate to share it around! Robin’s by far one the the most informed commentators on the gold industry out there, and it really is awesome to have him answer supporters’ questions.
Events
Robin and the team were in London for the London Blockchain Expo. Aside from the great feedback we had for the design of our booth, we had a constant flow of people approaching us to know more about HelloGold, GOLDX and HGT.
The rising interest from corporate investors and mainstream financial institutions could be felt as many came to us and enquired about GOLDX, a very encouraging sign for our golden token. 2018 is bringing a lot of new players to the crypto sphere including a lot of institutional money, which we believe will be good for the market as a whole. These new players will actually raise the demand for tokens offering a safe store of value, accessible for the crypto investor and at the same time independent from it… Did I hear tokenised gold...?
At the same time, HelloGold was represented at the SUSS Global Inclusive Blockchain Conference in Singapore. Our very own Xing Zheng participated on a panel discussing open blockchains and stablecoins, while our lead blockchain developer Dave presented his views on what’s ahead for the smart contracts environment and the role Singapore might play in the rapidly expanding Blockchain galaxy.
GOLDX distribution
The rewards for April 2018 will be distributed on 14th May 2018. The total allocation will be 1.487 GOLDX.
Please remember to keep HGT in your own wallet and not on any exchanges to receive the GOLDX!
We will continue to provide updates on a monthly basis. Please do get in touch with us in between updates if you have any thoughts, suggestions or recommendations.
The HelloGold Foundation Team