Within the last 6 months, our experience shaped the way we think about what sustainable BCH adoption requires. When we first presented our plan in our first Flipstarter campaign, our core strategy was in creating value-added services within the wallet as a way to attract more merchants and customers to use BCH. We now think that this approach is incomplete and needs some refinement.
We realized that onboarding more people by attracting them to value-added services (what we call as "Value-Focused Onboarding") can be achieved more assuredly by recognizing a prior stage critical for the success of succeeding stages. We call this the "Grassroot Support Stage". Furthermore, a stage after "Value-Focused Onboarding" is necessary before embarking on large-scale mass adoption efforts that involve deals and partnerships with big businesses and government units.
Recognizing this four-stage model is important for us so we do not unnecessarily spend resources on efforts that will most likely become more difficult for us to follow through. More details about what each stage entails is explained below:
STAGE 1: GRASSROOT SUPPORT
- Organize interest groups of crypto enthusiasts who could be encouraged to spend their crypto through BCH.
- Onboard merchants that can be catered to by regular crypto spenders in our interest groups.
- Incrementally build more services that add value to both merchants and customers. Users should be able to do more with their BCH wallet app like pay bills, buy goods/services, avail of promos/discounts, etc.
- Gradually recruit more merchants and more members in the interest groups in parallel. Make sure that there aren't that many merchants onboarded that the interest groups could not support. Onboarding merchants who will not have any BCH-paying customers is a waste of resources and leaves a bad image.
STAGE 2: VALUE-FOCUSED ONBOARDING
- Bring down the cost of value-added services and make it more efficient than alternatives in order to justify the cost and hassle of loading BCH into wallets just to avail of these services. If executed well, this could translate to cost savings and convenience in using BCH through our wallet app as compared to using fiat currency.
- Onboarding of more users and merchants based on appeal to value. No need to talk upfront about ideals of peer-to-peer electronic cash or blockchain technology, which is a major turn off for most people. Using BCH through Paytaca should have enough value already to get them onboard.
STAGE 3: GROWTH BY EMPOWERING THE GRASSROOTS
- Decentralize the onboarding efforts by equipping local group organizers anywhere in the world with everything that they need (technical training, marketing collaterals, strategies) to initiate local adoption efforts on their own.
- Incentivize local group organizers and onboarders through long term revenue-sharing. This will be in the form of commissions per a certain volume of transactions and/or token rewards.
- Support builders and other startups to encourage development of more widely used financial applications / services that leverage on BCH and Paytaca.
STAGE 4: INSTITUTIONAL MASS ADOPTION
- With a sizeable user and merchant base from earlier stages, we will have a critical mass to start brokering deals and partnerships with big businesses (e.g. supermarket chains, remittance companies, loan & insurance providers) to tap into their huge customer base. It may even be possible, at this stage, that banks may be interested to partner with non-custodial crypto wallets like Paytaca, to provide crypto-services to their customers.
- Massive marketing push in both traditional and digital media fronts as partnerships with big businesses are being rolled out.
- Partnerships with local or national government units/agencies to support digitalization and financial inclusion initiatives.
We expect to learn a lot more as we proceed and this model will be adapted accordingly as new learnings are realized.