Snovio (Snov) Review 2/21/18

(Youtube.com via ICOdrops.com)

Snovio – The “World’s First Decentralized Lead Generation Platform”

The Facts:

Current price is about $0.054 -

Total supply for SNOV Tokens is 651,129,644 -

This is a not a bad number in that it is not so large that it makes price growth difficult when the coin has total supply in circulation. Although growth may take more time and volume than other coins/tokens that have smaller supply, once all tokens are in circulation.

Circulating supply is currently 405,001,426 -

This allows for a potential faster rise in price than coins with a higher circulating supply. For example, it would take a very large amount of investors/volume for a coin like Cardano (ADA) to achieve even a price of $10 or higher because it has a circulating supply of nearly 26 billion coins. It would be much easier for the price to SNOV to rise. I personally like coins that have somewhere below 1 or 2 billion supply. SNOV fits that range. Icon (ICX) has a circulating supply of 386,442,514, and has achieved prices above $10 USD. (Although its market cap has been amongst the top 50 for some time already).

Market cap is currently at $21,833,262 USD -

At roughly $0.054, if SNOV went to $0.54 (10x), it would have a market cap of roughly $218,000,000. This would put SNOV roughly just inside the top 90 list of cryptocurrencies on Coinmarketcap according to market cap. (Ranked highest to lowest marketcap). This is with the current total cryptocurrency market cap of about $457 billion. If we have another market-wide bull run, it would likely not be in the top 100 list at $218 million. All in all, this is not unreasonable growth to expect from this token in my opinion, especially considering its all time high was close to about $0.41. That is almost in that 10x range mentioned above for price.

24 Hour Volume is $610,286 USD -

This is not a whole lot of volume, but is not too bad, considering the overall current market conditions.

ATH was roughly $0.41 -

Great opportunity currently to get into a position. But then again, most crypto-assets are during this correction/consolidation phase. Although the asterisk to this may be that the hype may be gone for SNOV. Since SNOV had a good amount of price action pre Jan 2018 crash, it may struggle to recover. Cryptocurrency is largely hype driven and seems to have fads. I will talk more about this in my ending thoughts.

Exchanges -

Only trading on Bibox, Kucoin, Tidex, and Forkdelta at the moment. This is can be seen as a bonus. When tokens get added to larger exchanges, such as Binance, they usually go through large price increases very rapidly. However, users should be very careful with small exchanges as there have been many suspect exits/crashes/hacks/ etc., especially with smaller exchanges.

Image From: Coinmarketcap.com

(Above stats from Coinmarketcap.com)

ICO:

ICO token sale was from OCT 31 - NOV 30 2018

Whitelist was until OCT 30 2018

ICO price was $0.01 per 1 SNOV.

ICO fundraising goal of 10,000,000 USD was not met. (Raised 2,129,106)

14 team members.

Team from Ukraine.

(Above stats from icodrops.com)

Image From: ingramlaw.com

The product/technology:

The Snovio project looks to bring a blockchain solution to the area of lead generation –

In the area of marketing and sales, lead generation is a crucial aspect. When a business desires to sell/market its products, it is crucial to find the right market of interested parties. For example, say Business xyz has a new style of women’s leggings they are looking to sell. They would ideally be looking to sell their product to women, and likely in a certain age range, that are perhaps interested in fitness. Having these specifications makes the likelihood of a sale more probable. If business xyz did not specify their target and leads, then they would likely waste large amounts of time attempting to sell women’s leggings to men, or even women outside the age range of those that would be interested in said leggings.

Lead generation can be very complicated. “In practice, lead generation is more like conducting an orchestra than a simple, transactional exchange. If you want to succeed, you need to have both the sheet music (strategy) and the instruments (technology) — not one or the other” (Aleks Peterson, Technologyadvice.com)

The awesome part of today’s world is that businesses realize the importance and efficiency of technology, and therefore are willing to spend money on it. “According to Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey for 2015-2016, marketing technology accounts for 33 percent of the average department’s budget… [t]he bad news is that a lot of us still don’t know which of the now 3,800+ “martech” solutions to spend our money on” (Aleks Peterson, Technologyadvice.com)

Snovio is attempting to bring blockchain technology to this area.

The Snovio whitepaper states that current solutions for lead generation have many problems, such as the use of outdated and inaccurate lead information that is difficult to update, thus often making many generated leads ineffective.

“The idea of decentralization, which lies at the heart of Snovio, solves these problems by attracting tens of thousands of people from around the world to collect and update the system’s data” (Snovio Whitepaper p. 4).

Snovio lists 6 main problems with traditional lead generation methods -

1. Sources of information lack transparency – in the traditional current system, clients who buy leads are usually not able to get much information about the source of the leads. Through the Snovio system, clients are able to see the full history of the data they are buying, including updates to said data, and if said data was bought by any other clients.

2. Non-exclusive data – when a client buys lead data from traditional lead generation services, they are unsure if the data was already sold. (This seems like the same point as number 1..?)

3. Poor quality leads – The Snovio whitepaper claims that traditional lead generation services use a centralized way of finding their leads. This leads to outdated information that can be hard to update.

“Our personal experience indicates that, on average, 20% of purchased leads contain either a non-existent email address or fake telephone number… Snovio immediately shows clients the source of the data they are interested in as well as the time of its collection, including the number of times that data was sold, previous clients’ reviews, etc.” (Whitepaper p. 5)

1. Inability to receive real-time updates – Timing is of the essence. Leads that are old due to inability/willingness to change them, can lead to missed opportunities. Leads may be potential customers but sometimes only in a time sensitive manner. An example would be if a lead was looking to buy a car. If the lead was a year old by the time the client received the lead, the person would likely have already purchased said car from a competing business.

2. “Utter opacity - about the distribution of revenues (from selling data) for information suppliers and contributors. Currently, when information suppliers provide their data to traditional lead generation services, they lose total control over that data. Snovio solves this problem using an open transaction registry complete with all the relevant information and smart-contracts” (Whitepaper p. 6).

3. Searching for specific data – Snovio states that, to their knowledge, there are not any services that allow direct communication with specific target groups of people. Snovio proposes to implement “a marketplace (exchange) model to place and fulfill the orders for sourcing concrete information about specific groups of people in the platform” (Whitepaper p. 6).

Above 6 points from Snovio whitepaper p. 5-6, with paraphrasing, quotes, and some of my input.

Due to the decentralized setup for Snovio, agents will be rewarded for data collection, via SNOV tokens, thus giving an incentive.

With regards to tech, the Snovio team “uses popular development technologies and databases like PHP, Python, JavaScript, Angular, MySQL, MongoDB, Reddis, RabbitMQ, Laravel, Elastic Search” (Whitepaper p. 7).

To my understanding, Snovio also is has been testing “core modules of the system” in different capacities and areas. This is good to note, in that many projects do not even really have a product yet but simply a whitepaper and a team. It’s a good sign when a project is further along in their roadmap that simply the bare minimum early stages.

Another good thing about decentralizing lead generation and marketing, is that many different people can contribute to the information, thus making it more in depth and up to date. Large amounts of work is made much easier if the tasks are available to larger amounts of people.

Snovio also has the option that customers of data will be able to search the databases and receive notifications about when data is updated.

The Snovio whitepaper gives an example of how their system basically works. To my understanding it is as follows: Company xyz desires information on a certain group. They are unable to find accurate, up to date information. Xyz places an order for that information for an amount of SNOV tokens. (Use of smart contracts is involved as well) Then data contributors who are interested in the amount of SNOV tokens paid, will search for the desired data. Then, the “[c]ustomer can validate how adequate the search was by looking through partially revealed but incomplete data” (whitepaper p. 8). Once the data is selected, the SNOV token reward is distributed. Then that data remains in the system for further use.

So to be put simply, to my understanding, data will be kept on the Snovio system for use by companies or interested parties. If they want further data, then they can hire someone, through the Snovio system, to get further data, and then pay them SNOV tokens.

A few advantages about Snovio’s specific blockchain tech include crowdsourcing which provides limitless potential for data and additions. As well as lower costs, in that the system is utilizing many different people to find data.

“Wikipedia, according to their own data, uses over 116,000 contributors from around the world who regularly create and update content, adding new knowledge to their system. This allowed Wikipedia to White Paper Snov.io 11 become a large go-to resource in just a few years” (whitepaper p. 10-11).

The above quote is interesting. Wikipedia apparently has a great system in place and this has led to a much more effective way of finding information. However, it leads me to question whether blockchain is completely necessary in this niche… Also, it will be interesting to see if this can solve the issue of inaccurate information. I know that Wikipedia has had issues with credibility in their data. But to my knowledge, they seem to be improving. Snovio claims to provide more accurate and up to date data. Although it depends on how their system actually plays out once put into action fully. At this point, I am still skeptical.

Image From: yourprojectmanager.com

Progress:

As mentioned above, Snovio seems to have the ball rolling in at least some capacity, in contrast to projects with simply a team and a whitepaper. “Snovio began development in January 2017. Our first Beta version was released in April, and our first paying client subscribed on 17 May 2017. Within a month we had 10 paying clients out of over 500 free users”…“We currently have a plugin that automatically collects data (Chrome Extension). At the time of publication, it has already been installed more than 12,000 times” (whitepaper p. 18).

Snovio lists some big name companies with regards to its current users. Among the list is the Uber, Lego, Oracle, and Soundcloud, among others.

Image From: blueironip.com

Roadmap:

Their roadmap for 2018 includes:

“Complement the extension with an option to search services’ footprints…Reach a database size of 20,000,000 profiles… Send messages about changes in data within peoples’ profiles; for instance, adding new skills or changes in employment” and ”Development of expanded address book service and synchronization of data from different social media through it” (whitepaper p. 24).

Their roadmap also ends in July of 2018 according to the whitepaper. This seems to me like such an in depth project should have more goals and stops on the roadmap… Unless the project is already finished and dominating the space, which I don’t see being the case so far if I am not mistaken.

Although, Snovio does state in the section after the roadmap, its goals for growth, such as “Increasing our market coverage by creating plugins and extensions for multiple popular platforms like Firefox and Gmail…and “Increasing our market coverage by creating plugins and extensions for multiple popular platforms like Firefox and Gmail” among other goals listed. (Whitepaper p. 26).

Image From: one2crypto.com

Team:

Alexis Kratko CEO – has had experience in email marketing and customer care.

Rodion Yaremenko CTO – has previous experience in software testing and a degree in computer systems and networks.

Daria Shevchenko CMO – has experience in sales and support.

Their Advisors seem to have quite a bit more experience, and can be found on page 39 of the whitepaper.

*For more details/deeper understanding of the technology involved, you may wish to consult the Snovio white paper, in that there is a lot of information involved.

Whitepaper link: https://tokensale.snov.io/docs/WhitePaperEn.pdf

Image From: linkedin.com

Positives:

1. Many businesses are willing to spend money in the area of technology

2. Price is significantly down from all time high

3. Interesting way of incentivizing contribution of data

4. Improves data transparency, accuracy, and efficiency

5. Provides a lower cost solution

Negatives:

1. Questionable strength of team.

2. Whitepaper seemed to be redundant

3. Whitepaper was not polished/ grammatical errors and punctuation makes me slightly suspicious.

4. Questionable as to whether this area of marketing/business would really be changed dramatically with a block chain solution. (Wikipedia example seems to be doing fine without it)

5. Hype may be gone for project/may struggle to recover from most recent cryptocurrency market crash.

6. Questionable roadmap.

7. Questioning whether they are able to deliver what they are proposing, in a way that makes it simple and appealing to the masses.

Image From: railforthevalley.com

Thoughts:

In my opinion, it is of the utmost importance to be critical of cryptocurrency/blockchain projects. It is possible that 90% of projects will not last or succeed long term. This is due to the current lack of barrier to entry to create an ICO or project. There have been large amounts of failed projects, scams, and dishonesty already seen in the market. For that reason, I am choosing to be more critical of projects.

That being said, I am not overly impressed with Snovio. First of all, the whitepaper just seemed off to me. There were multiple grammatical errors, typos, and oddities. The whitepaper also seems to be redundant to me, using different phrasing to essentially say the same things. I would not normally be so critical in this area if I were reading a blog or normal article. But Snovio is a company that desires to be a multi-million dollar company. A company that also claims that it has been in development since January of 2017 as per their whitepaper on page 18. One would think that a business of this proposed size and timeframe, would ensure that their whitepaper was polished. Yes, they may have had to get the whitepaper translated to English. But one would think that a business aiming for this type of magnitude and market, would produce a very sound whitepaper. Especially when this is what people are to read if they are looking to be investors into the business.

I also question whether or not this area of business would truly be revolutionized with a blockchain solution. Some of the concepts do sound great. Lower cost, more transparency, and more depth and efficiency. But to overtake the traditional system, Snovio will really have to provide something exceptional. They mention Wikipedia above, which is doing pretty well without a blockchain solution, while still having a decentralized concept in a way. It is possible that Snovio may be very successful and prove to be the upcoming best thing in lead generation. But I am skeptical at this point in time. Especially when they claim to be as far along in their roadmap as they are.

All that being said, there are some positives. I do think their may be potential in this area. They make many great points about problems with the traditional system. I do think that improving a lack of transparency, lowering costs, and providing efficiency are great and possible necessary improvements.

But from a consumer’s perspective, I also think that current marketing knows more than enough about customers. We are already being advertised to CONSTANTLY by companies trying to sell us things. Even our google search is littered with ads on the side, pertaining to things we have previously searched for. I feel as though the current system is already invading our privacy at times and I don’t think it is necessary to such a great extent as it is already being done.

Another unfortunate part of cryptocurrency at times, is the aspect that the market is hype driven much of the time. And many coins/tokens that are “all the rage” for one month, may be forgotten about the next. And this has even happened with very solid projects as well. This space moves tremendously fast. And there are constant improvements being made that often quickly outdate older systems. Due to this fact, SNOV may have already had its time in the sun, with regards to hype. It already achieved a return of about 40x its’ ICO price, at the time of its all time high. Which may indicate that it may be difficult to reach highs again after this market downtrend is complete.

At the end of the day, readers need to decide what they think the future will be for SNOV. This review was written about my opinions and my interpretation of data, which can be subjective. Differing opinions may be presented and I am open to hearing them. In no way am I claiming that I know everything, and therefore, more research may be required by readers. But hopefully I have given a good amount of content to assist in educating the public. Snovio could go nowhere in price or even go down. But it could also prove me very wrong. Decide for yourself based on the data and your own personal research ;) I have not yet invested in Snovio, and may not in the future either, depending on where things go. I have also not been compensated by Snovio for this review.

(**Everything written, said, tweeted, etc. is based on my personal opinion, my interpretation of the data/material, and is not financial or investment advice whatsoever. I do not claim to be an expert. Articles may be subject to edit/update at the discretion of the writer)

Sources:
ICOdrops.com
Coinmarketcap.com
tokensale.snov.io
Snovio Whitepaper
Technologyadvice.com – The Lead Generation Technology Stack, written by Aleks Peterson, NOV. 3, 2016

Video:
Youtube.com via ICOdrops.com