Welcome, and thanks for your questions.


Management and Funding

The project was created and designed by me, but I lent money to Goodomy to pay for competent app developers. (This was lent in cash, to be repaid in cash plus nominal interest.)

Once phase 2 is launched and we have additional capital, then we'll look at getting some full-time help on board.

The Coin Before the Storm

The idea is to show you a working product first, then shift to high gear from there. Consider this like an ICO period, where you can pick up cheap tokens before we go live.


Branding

No worries. It's good we both have marketing backgrounds. I worked for a very large advertising firm that had Wendy's, Marlboro, Proctor and Gamble, and Kellogg's as clients in our group, and also Unilever, so have been thinking about consumer-facing products and branding for a while, especially for cryptocurrency. I also worked in financial public relations for EMC and Starwood (reporting directly to the boards of those corporations, and a few other big ones), so also have an idea of what the institutional investors might want in future. (However, the Shopomy ecosystem would be a hedge against corporate control, like what is happening now with Bitcoin.)

"Good" isn't brandable, I think. It's only useful as a ticker symbol. Imagine someone going to Google and searching for that. There are millions of websites with "Good" in their names and pages and the reason why generic names are usually avoided.

There's only one "Goodomy" however, and we show up in all 10 of the first 10 results on Google. It's also a play on words: "Good-of-me". But my original thinking was that every human being wants 'good' in their lives, and it's a neutral concept that most people can agree with, I think. It also stands for "the GOOD econOMY".

The core concept is essentially this: "You can be a good person by using Goodomy" with utility for nearly every archetype (explorer, caregiver, creator, outlaw, etc) all focused on their own interpretation of what it means to be "good". So the name represent different things to different people. For some, it will be an opportunity. For others, a way to find out what happening locally. Some may even wonder how they ever went shopping without it. And some may think it's stupid.

There will always be people who dislike the name, just as there will always people who dislike the most popular and profitable YouTube videos. But as far as branding goes, more people care about the product's utility and relationship with their everyday lives. People laughed at the name "ipod" when it was first announced, for nearly a year in the media. Now Apple has an entire line of i-products and people think far more about how to use them.

Our users will decide whether or not the name is good, I think. Just as people did with 'Google' or 'Yahoo' or even 'Unilever' and 'Marlboro', and hundreds of other successful companies. The more useful and popular a product becomes the less people will care about the product or company's name.

Marketing

For marketing efforts I see Goodomy more like the 'Tide' brand, focused on the markets where it will be used most and allowing people to just use it and see how it works for them, rather than trying to impress the chemical industry. Yes, the chemical industry was important for Tide but they weren't the customers. Now you can find Tide and its sister products on every consumer shelf in the world. So our primary focus won't be on the cryptocurrency industry like other coins and tokens, none of which have a foothold in the $30 trillion consumer product market or even seem to know how to enter it.

Opportunity

How much of the $400 billion cryptocurrency market do everyday purchases account for? Very little. And of the $14 billion transacted on Bitcoin over the past 24 hours, who would be confident to say that even 0.0001% was used to buy consumer products when transaction fees are averaging $27? This is much worse for consumers than any 'evil' credit card company could think up.

Can you imagine the price of GOOD when 2 million people who know nothing about cryptocurrency are using our app at least once a week to buy and sell everyday products using Goodomy? These people care nothing about crypto. They just want it to help them do what they already do, but better. That's our market, and that's our focus. The more of the masses that use Shopomy the more valuable GOOD becomes.

Too many other coins and tokens are good at explaining the wrong solutions well and overlooking the needs of the largest market on the planet in favor of shiny new methodology that only an infinitesimally tiny fraction of the population cares about.

We may very well re-write the rules of the crypto industry and dominate it simply by fulfilling the unmet needs of the society that allows cryptocurrency to exist in the first place.


Blockchain Platform

It's something to seriously consider. A platform with free and fast transactions is a must, I think. Only a few concerns are working on that: EOS, Raiblocks, IOTA, and perhaps one or two others (though POW isn't free). But EOS will have smart contracts and it's also an evolution of the lead developer's proven technology (Steem.it and Bitshares).

Please note that if you're still using a phrase in Parity to secure your tokens or Ethereum you should probably use a more secure method.

here is an explanation from MyEtherWallet from their Github: https://myetherwallet.github.io/knowledge-base/private-keys-passwords/parity-phrases-are-no-longer-supported.html

• They are insecure: People are using them as brain wallets. Brain wallets are insecure.
• Humans are not capable of generating enough entropy and therefore the wallets derived from phrases humans make up can be easily brute forced.
• They are being brute forced as we speak. At the time of this writing, no less than 9 ETH from 15 accounts has been confirmed stolen. There is certainly much more that we are unaware of.
• Parity phrases have no checksum or ability to enforce certain standards, such as strength or length. Any characters work.
• They create confusion for new users: New users have typed their private keys in that field and then ask us why their address is different from the one they originally derived.

The myetherwallet.com website is a popular choice, but you can also download the website and run it off of your local machine. You can find the download link on their website, which will lead you to https://github.com/kvhnuke/etherwallet/releases/tag/v3.10.9.7

(however, always check to make sure you are on the correct MyEtherWallet website)

You can also download the Eidoo app and send tokens to your Ethereum address that way.

If you have any questions about it please feel free to ask.

Poll added: "Should we hold a 10,000 GOOD bounty for creating a Reddit post with the most upvotes over the next 4 days?"

It's an idea to bring more exposure to Shopomy project during the holiday and shopping season, though I'm somewhat against bounties outside of the Shopomy platform (as it will have its own bounty system)

We could also do 10,000 for the winner and 5,000 for runner-up

Thoughts and suggestions are appreciated!

We'll try out a bounty (for top Reddit post) in a couple of days.

I've also created a poll to think about which city Shopomy should launch in first. Once that is decided we will either see if anyone from the community lives there and would like to help out or hire 5-10 people to go out and create the first listings.

It's good to see a promising project with an active dev who cares about the community.
Good luck with the beta relase kosmost

An important question from a recent telegram, and my (rather lengthy) response. The tl;dr is, "Shopomy is fundamentally different from others.":

What is Goodomy/Shopomy's value proposition?



How is this different than what Storiqa is doing?[/b]

It's also almost exactly the same value proposition as Amazon and Walmart, but Shopomy and Storiqa have different interpretations of this successful model. They are not doing what we are doing anymore than Amazon is doing what Walmart is doing.

Storiqa is actually trying to do what Amazon does without much difference, complete with tremendous overheads and distribution centers. They're also focusing on the $2 trillion ecommerce market that Amazon leads, whereas we are focused on the $30 trillion local retail market that no one leads (because it is likely that only distributed ledger technology makes it possible).

They seem to have fulfillment centers as part of their logistics, so stores will ship to them first, they will check for quality, then ship to the buyer. From their front page, "...the item shipped to you is tested at the Storiqa verification center." It's not really clear how it will work, but it sounds like a logistical nightmare that won't actually add much value.

Can you imagine if Amazon did this for each one of their products? Or even 5% of their products? This is a highly inefficent way of doing things. How is this cost-effective? Amazon leverages its ratings and review system to bring the better retailers to the forefront of listings and it costs them nothing.

They seem to be focused on tokens and their ICO rather than the utility of their product and why users should care. For example, in their FAQ they state that users will have to pay their own gas on the Ethereum network. This tells me that they're not thinking about the mass market, and therefore it would be very difficult to get the momentum they need to have buyers and sellers on the platform at the same time.

Another way that Shopomy isn't like Storiqa is that we are mobile and local. They are not.

On the somewhat-amusing side of things, they are using a strategy that I invented to raise funds.

I prefer to lead, not follow. That being said, it is best to go with what is proven to work already but doing it in a new way. I can't think of any successful product or service that isn't a new interpretation of an already-successful model or thing. I don't see their unique value proposition and how it solves the problem that Shopomy is designed to solve.

It also doesn't seem to save the buyer any more money. So why should buyers care? Because they can buy something with their NXT or DOGE coins? The market is far too small for this.

They have so far raised over $5M and they will need far more than that with all of their overhead. That won't even cover the cost of one of their distribution centers. (And right now they have a staff of 24.. and that's just for management and developers. They'll need to hire lots more people for shipping, logistics, inventory, quality assurance, etc.. at each distribution center.)

Shopomy: "What if you took the outrageously successful Amazon business model, removed the need for warehousing and logistics, opened it up to a consumer market nearly 15x bigger, made it mobile and local, and attached it to a blockchain?""

Storiqa does not remove the need for warehousing and logistics, nor are they going after the same market, or focused on local businesses (again, the largest goods and services market in the world).

Very different. But they also don't have the secret sauce that I invented (which see)

But I am sure they will be following that, too, in a year or so. By which time they may be just a footnote in crypto-history.

Further, I don't think they understand what decentralization means. From their FAQ, "Decentralization and the opportunities presented by the use of cryptocurrency in the project can cover the needs in speed, global market access and transaction security." Yet, they will have warehouses and shipping centers. How much "speed" is there when there are so many factors involved such as currency conversions, shipping, customs, quality control, warehousing, etc?

They will also charge a fee to list products. 1 token per item per DAY to list your product.

They will also allow buyers to pay in a variety of fiat and cryptocurrencies, which will be a tremendous accounting headache for sellers (and confusing for buyers, perhaps)

Warehouses are expensive to run and ship from. They need at least $100M for this if they want to expand to more than a couple of cities. Are sellers in Singapore supposed to ship their products to Russia for the first year? The mark-ups will be huge if tremendous economies of scale are not employed (which is something only the very big companies can handle).

I'm not sure they thought it through.

Storiqa will have:

Payments in cryptocurrencies and fiat money. [probably a bad idea; see above]

Low fees and transaction costs. [Shopomy is free to use, with premium features. Sellers must first purchase 1 of their tokens in order to simply list a product on their system in the hopes that someone will buy it. And that's AFTER paying their 18,000 STQ yearly fee. Already too much friction even with one token, and far more with an additional 18,000 needed]

24/7 customer support for customers. [I can't imagine the headache in handling customer support for "1,000,000 shops", or even 100 shops]

They're solving a problem that doesn't really exist, I think...and charging sellers for it.

The way Shopomy is designed, sellers won't need to think about cryptocurrency. (The average person doesn't care about buying something with cryptocurrency, either.)

Their platform doesn't seem to have any benefits for buyers. But the benefits for sellers and shops seems okay. Without buyers, though, there is no transaction.

Shopomy is fundamentally different.

Again, Amazon focuses on the 7% retail market (ecommerce) and leads it. Amazon = platform for retailers, supported by distribution centers and requisite logistics

Shopomy will focus on the 93% retail market (physical stores). Shopomy = platform for local retailers, supported by mobile and blockchain with a little 'secret sauce'

"Local" being wherever the retailer happens to be.

DLT technology (distributed ledger) makes things possible that could not be conceived before. This means that there will be a tremendous amount of innovation in the coming years. What Shopomy will do is one of those DLT innovations, I believe.

Others have tried to do what Shopomy will do and have failed because they could not conceive of how to leverage DLT to make it work. This isn't just about putting stores online or allowing people in the neighborhood to find stuff locally.

Amazon has warehouses. We will have the distributed ledger. The blockchain is our "warehouse".

It's really just the same thing that works for Amazon, with updated execution, rather than trying to copy Amazon directly like Storiqa is trying to do. There's no need to add more friction and make the selling process far more complicated than it needs to be. Nor is there a need to make the operations more complicated that it needs to be (unless they made it that way in order to justify their ICO?)

Blockchain is supposed to make things more efficient and decentralized, not more complicated and centralized. I guess not everyone got the memo, however.

I think that's exactly the right approach. If i see all the project pages with a big team of suit wearing people I have the feeling it's more about marketing than real content. I have more faith in one real developer.
Currently I'm working on a project as a dev (not crypto related) just together with a graphics artist. We share the same big idea and I don't even wanna loose energy explaining it to someone else