Why Paytomat Won’t Launch a Bounty Program and What We Are Launching Instead

Many community members, partners and friends have asked us, “when is Paytomat going to launch a bounty program?” The short answer is “never(ever)”.

This post explains our reasoning and lays out the alternative project our content advisor and marketing team envisaged and built. We are hoping to create a new standard among blockchain startups.

The Usual Way and Why It Does Not Work

Token bounty programs were invented in 2016, in the chaotic times of the early token sales. Status, Bancor and Iconomy were among the first major token sales to utilize the concept of the bounty program. The story of the token sale bounties roots itself in the software bug bounty programs — an open compensation mechanism for researchers reporting code vulnerabilities.

Bug bounties save companies money on hiring institutional security analysts. In theory, they also foster competition among bounty seekers, leading to better quality of the content resulting from them.

It all worked well back in 2017. A whole new industry of token sale bounty seekers have appeared, with a number of bounty aggregators like icobountyhunt.com, icodrops.com and numerous threads on bitcointalk. With it also appeared a cluster of community management agencies specializing in token bounty programs. Some of them are doing a great job and the resulting content really adds value for the core team.

However, a visible trend is that bounty programs turn the magic of having a genuine community-based token sale into a mere set of mechanical community management jobs. The outcome of this approach is a broken bond between the community and the core product team, its replacement with numerous intermediaries having business development, not community-driven KPIs.

Another issue with a bounty program is its cost efficiency. The average cost of a bounty program is within 0.5–1% of the tokens sold. With the median amount raised being $7M — 15M in the first half of 2018, that brings the cost of having a bounty program within $30K — 150K. What the core team gets instead, is usually a combination of Twitter, Telegram, YouTube and Medium campaigns and a signature campaign for Bitcointalk and other industry forums which in essence is placing a link to the token sale website in the person’s signature for these forums.

Bounty people who generate content for Twitter, Telegram, YouTube and Medium are usually not related to the field of blockchain and are merely creating content using the pre-agreed algorithms for content generation. The outcome is a huge number of irrelevant tweets, messages, videos and posts which distract the audience instead of engaging it. The only viable outcome is a huge amount of content that gets generated. However, it appears to be noise without any real signal.

TaskRabbit or Fiverr for Token Sales

Our parallel inspiration comes from online freelance marketplaces like TaskRabbit or Fiverr. The beauty of these services is that the customer sets a clear scope, deadline and remuneration amount she is comfortable with and if the task is interesting commercially and from the professional standpoint — there is competition for this task between various performers.

In a bounty program you control a pool of performers and their general task framework, but not the actual tasks. In the Paytomat Marketing and Promotion Program (“Promo Program” for short) you structure the work by separate tasks and individual performers.

You also control the remuneration of each task, which gives the performer additional motivation and empowers you to give higher rewards to those doing an outstanding job. In the case of the “stakes” system of the traditional bounty programs — the performers with most social capital (followers, friends, Telegram buddies), not necessarily the most effective ones, get remuneration.

We hope to engage relevant community members via our Promo Program. Instead of bounty seekers ready for performing mechanical tasks, we’d prefer to attract blockchain professionals and genuine content creators who understand why Paytomat is relevant and beneficial to the current blockchain ecosystem.

Did Anybody Else Do It Already?

How it Works?

Paytomat Promotion and Marketing Program consists of taskboards, each dedicated to a particular area of expertise: business development, community management, content creation, translations and bug fixing. The list of taskboards may be easily expanded in the future via our admin panel. For example originally Promo Program had no “Bug Fixing” board. However, after several community members reported bugs — we decided it is good idea to include this type of tasks.

Speaking of tasks: they are the basic measurement unit for our Promo Program. Each task has a scope, that is the text of defining what a performer has to do, and a set of parameters, such as: program type, amount of remuneration (in PTIs), due date, complexity level of the task (easy, medium, difficult) and the amount of performers who can participate in the task. The last parameter might limit the task to a single performer or enable it to have an unlimited amount of performers. Please read our separate blog post, explaining the workflow of Paytomat Promo Program to understand how it works.

The Future is?

We want to test out how does the Promo Program work. And what could possibly be better testing other than an actual token sale? If the Promo Program proves to be successful, then there are two future directions.

First, as you might know from our white paper — our roadmap has Paytomat Decentralized Franchise planned for launch this year. This Promo Program is an MVP for the Decentralized Franchise. While our core dev team continues building and expanding Paytomat Core, our marketing team will use its miniature product building experience gathered while we were implementing Promo Program to test our product ideas for the Decentralized Franchise. In fact, all we need to do for Promo Program to become a basic Decentralized Franchise is by adding a blockchain layer and transaction data monitoring functionality for various stakeholders of the franchise.

Second, we are ready to provide the Promo Program engine for other core teams to use in their token sales or product traction development. Bancor Bounties Engine is a great source of inspiration for us. We are now considering two options together with our technology partners: building a white label engine and creating an affiliated projects portal. Imagining and building this project was a great fun for all of us at Paytomat. We hope you all enjoy it as well!

Promo Paytomat Website: https://promo.paytomat.com

Promo Community: https://t.me/PaytomatPromotion

Paytomat Official Chat: https://t.me/paytomat