ICO Review of SNOVIO (SNOV tokens) Decentralized lead generation platform

At first, this project looked like dozens of other ICOs, but the idea behind the project actually looks quite promising. I couldn’t understand much of the project at first, even had to google what “lead generation” even means, but as I made it to the bottom of the page it all became really clear and logical. But 2what is lead generation? Lead generation is a process of collecting names and contact information about qualified prospects which will be contacted by the salespeople for generating orders.
So, basically, making a database of potential customers of a certain product. There are already a few lead databases existing, of course, but the problem is that most of the leads are incomplete or of poor quality - approximately 20% of all leads contain either a fake phone number or a non-existent email address. Besides, the leads are hardly ever updated, which is crucial, because businesses nowadays need to be able to reach potential clients at the exact moment that clients develop a demand for their product.

So, there are a few problems in this field, but what does SNOV.IO, the company we’re reviewing today have to offer? Let’s find out!

First of all, what about the team of SNOV.IO?

SNOV.IO is a Ukraine-based startup team, about 13 people altogether, excluding advisors from all over the world. Here are the main managing staff. CEO is Alexis Kratko, who has brought the platform from the idea development stage to 100 paying customers and financial sustainability in just 5 months. Next is CTO, Rodion Yaremenko, who created the high-level architecture of the Snovio app and managed to build a fail-safe system. Daria coordinated marketing specialists and Julia addresses the issues of users working with Snovio daily. The advisors include Alexander Borodich, who is a pioneer in the fields of innovation and blockchain world and founder of Universa Blockchain; Renato Almeida, former legal advisor of the Minex.io and Trueflip.io projects; Alexey Girin, founder of Starta Capital fund; Kairat Kaliyev, founder of Cross Coin, which successfully conducted Starta’s ICO and attracted $5 million and others. Also, Starta Accelerator listed as an ESCROW and Token Rockets is listed as a technological partner.

So, now that we’ve made ourselves familiar with people behind the project, let’s start with the main problems of the industry.

1. Sources of Information Lack Transparency. Currently, clients who purchase leads have no way of telling what the source(s) of that information is/are. They could be buying extremely outdated contact information that was collected automatically and which wasn’t updated for several years.

2. Data Exclusivity. When buying data from traditional lead generations services, clients never know how many times that same data was sold to others and whether it’s even worth buying that data now.

3. Poor Quality Leads. Since traditional lead generation services collect their leads in a centralized manner, those leads are often of a lower quality due to the fact that the information in them quickly becomes outdated. SNOVIO experience indicates that, on average, 20% of purchased leads contain either a non-existent email address or fake telephone number.

4. Inability to receive real-time updates. In the current, highly-competitive business world, businesses need to be able to reach potential clients at the exact moment the demand arises. Examples for such demand-triggers might be purchasing a new car, a new promotion, or moving into a new home.

5. 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.

And what is the solution that SNOV.IO team provides?

1. Through Snovio, clients can always see the full history of the data they are purchasing: beginning from the moment data was added into the system, including any time that the data was updated, and whether the data was bought by other clients.

2. Using Snovio, clients can always see the full history of the data they’re interested in, including its source, updates, and sales. This gives clients a better opportunity to make informed decisions about purchasing any and all Snovio leads.

3. 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. All of this substantially increases the trustworthiness and the quality of the services offered to our clients.

4. At Snovio, tracking updated data triggers form a fundamental part of the system’s functionality and competitive edge.

5. Snovio solves this problem using an open transaction registry complete with all the relevant information and smart-contracts.

Snov.io began development in January 2017. The first Beta version was released in April, and first paying client subscribed on 17 May 2017. Within a month snovio had 10 paying clients out of over 500 free users.

There are around 200 new users each day and there is over 9000 SNOVIO Chrome extension installs.

Currently, database of contacts for lead generation consists of over 400,000 unique contacts. With the help of decentralized data collection, database is planned to grow several hundred-times and to make the service more appealing and accessible to various types of businesses.

Among the users of the service are such companies as: Lenovo, Oracle, Uber, Soundcloud, Lego, Ubisoft and so on…

So, it all sounds nice, but how does it work?

Simply put, first, customers interested in certain type of leads place an order for search within the database. Then, once the order is placed, the criteria are described in the smart contract. After that, agents, who are interested in receiving tokens will carry out the search. They can use their own tools or Snovio’s to search in social networks, catalogs etc. Customer can then validate how adequate the search was by looking through partially revealed but incomplete data. After the data provided by one or several agents are selected, the reward stipulated in smart contract is distributed. Data remain in the system for further use.

The distribution of tokens goes as 70/30. 70% of sales revenue is distributed among contributors (data miners), whereas 30% goes to the platform for continual network maintenance purposes.

The project aims at email marketing and lead generation markets by using the advantages of crowdsourcing data collection and blockchain technology.

The volume of the market for email marketing (which SONVIO intersects with) is variously valued at around $10 billion with a constant annual growth rate of 20%. The lead generation market is valued at $30 billion with a constant annual growth rate of 20%.

Token value is expected to grow with more of the new customers coming to use the system.

● ICO starts 31 Oct 2017 – 30 Nov 2017. Hardcapped at $15mln.

● 60% of tokens go to investors, 28% to the team, 10% as contributors motivation, 1% for advisory board, 1% for bounties.

● ICO accepts only BTC and ETH.

● 2.5bln tokens are to be issued, initial price will be $0,01 per token.

Advantages

● A great idea behind the project

● There are already numerous big clients

● All the quality control comes from the customer side

Disadvantages

● All system depends on performance of freelance data miners

● The competitors are strong and already have big databases with leads