Topic: [HAVELOCK] Mintspare (MS) Bitcoin Electronic Trade-in Service - Official Thread - page 12. (Read 35877 times)

Didn't bother to read entire thread, because OP is investing 0% of funds, but taking 80% of assets.   

If you invest, just remember your $1 will instantly become $0.20

LMAO, 1 desk and a scrony long haired dude, yet you think your worth 2.5mill..


HAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA

Here are pictures of our office/warehouse space located in Miami, FL.

SCAM



IF YOU INVEST IN THIS YOU WILL SURELY LOSE YOUR MONEY!

I find the idea good and I'm happy to see that more and more business are coming to spread the bitcoin all over the world.
However, from the investor's perspective, I would not invest in this venture for the simple reason that the web portal isn't available.
You claim that it will be ready on Feb 1st. I would have recommend you to make your beta public available before announcing any IPO.

Good luck with your business, and pay attention to the logistic point, it might be hard to manage if you're successful.

Regards.

I appreciate the answer, and the first two concerns have been as adequately addressed as possible. I'm now even more confused about the revenue projections, however.

The service is going to go live in March now, instead of January? And, even if you take out the 35 BTC January Marketing spend, you'll still be spending 25-30BTC in February for overhead, which will be putting you on the brink again.

And, again, you guys really need to cut out the marketing speak. I get it - I can read it and understand it. Others may not be able to, however.

This:


might be more simply said as 'The marketing budget will be separate from revenues, so we can adjust it up or down as necessary'. However, I do still see some issues here, as I expect you to have to spend more than 50BTC on marketing to pull in sales of 300-400BTC in your first month or two.

Plus, is this just the first time that you're notifying shareholders that March 1 is now your launch date? I don't see that anywhere in the prospectus.

Hey guys!

I'm the lead developer on the MintSpare project.  I've worked on various projects in the Bitcoin space before in the past, some of you might remember my exchange live trading tracker Kryptotrader.

To give you all a status of the site so far, I've been working with the team over the last couple months and I'm very happy with the progress we've made.

- Products and their offer prices have been uploaded to our database
- Device selection is complete (Being able to narrow down your device similar to how Gazelle does it)
- 2FA and SSL encryption has been incorporated
- All sensitive user data is encrypted in our database
- User accounts and user dashboard is complete
- Employee backend is nearly complete (we recently completed the ability to scan in received items, among other things)
- Shipping label generation is complete
- Most of the UI is complete, but this will be one of the last things to finish (functionality first!)
- Referral program is receiving finishing touches
- Email system is complete

Overall, the current development of the site is looking good, and as I've said, we've been working and planning this for a few months now.  Our hard deadline of February 1st for our Beta launch is looking very obtainable.

Feel free to ask me about any questions relating to the development.  

Sean Geng is our main developer, who has been working on the MintSpare's site for over two months now. He will be directly contributing to this thread, providing insight on where we currently stand in development, future progress, and providing feedback to any questions or concerns the community may have. Since he's the main developer, he'll be able to better inform the public on the technical standing of the site. His bitcointalk handle is 'blackswan'.

A shipping logistics expert capable of coordinating a team effectively and efficiently to handle hundreds of incoming and outgoing packages everyday, through processes such as repairs, sorting, labeling, and packaging with attention to care on every forefront is not paid minimum wage.

A marketing leader capable of using effective marketing tactics such as brand awareness, high ROI advertisement conversions, analytical tracking for optimal funnelization, and other necessary parts to creating a successful company of the scale we’ve set ourselves up to reach is not paid minimum wage.

A manager capable of not only handling, but effectively managing large teams with a strong sense of direction, efficient implementation of concepts and ideas, and innovative vision adapted to not only keeping up, but outpacing the already fast paced technology world is not paid minimum wage.

We could easily hire very affordable employees at near minimum wage to do a mediocre job, but we’re not trying to make a company that just ‘scrapes by’. As we’ve previously stated, one of our strongest focus points consisting of becoming the de facto standard is not reached by hiring a mediocre team, but one that excels at what they do.



Yes, there will be dividend payouts where we have only kept around 10% of funds for reinvesting on our current expansion project(s). Since we’re providing a service, we have a huge benefit in that we’re able to expand with relatively low capital in most cases.

We don’t expect to ever lower dividend payouts to below 70% of profits. But since we don’t want to limit ourselves based on legal wording in case of an unforeseen major event that requires us to quickly respond, we’ve made a clause stating that we’re able to lower them as long as we provide an announcement to the public. We strongly believe that this is in the interest of the investor.


The January projections for marketing are an error on our part. We thank you for pointing this out but believe we’re unable to correct this misstep. Only around March 1st, our expected official launch, would we start investing in marketing. Since the marketing funds will be spent alongside incoming revenue and profit, we’ll be able to constantly adjust angles for optimum ROI. With that said, we have no reason to believe that we will need to dip into our 350 BTC reserve.

We hope this was helpful in alleviating your concerns.

Thanks for the endorsement, I appreciate it.


Sure, I'm always open to honest discussion. I'm glad to hear that the Board will be foregoing salaries for most of 2014, as they're receiving 80% of the company without putting up any funds of their own. I understand that you may have to hire some competent workers to do the repairs, but are there any other salaried positions than those kind of employees?

When talking about dividends, do you mean that only 10% will be reinvested (90% paid out to all shares)? I'm very wary of any company that allows themselves to lower dividends on a whim. Do you have a contingency plan or additional funds in case the 150BTC for setup costs has been exhausted in January and February revenues are deficient? Can you assure investors that you will not dip into the 350BTC reserved for equipment purchases?

I stand by my use words when calling MintShares' revenue projections 'sky-high'.

Can you elaborate at all on why these projections are 'extremely well thought out'? Because this:


...It doesn't actually mean anything.

I'm glad that you guys are so confident about your execution, but numbers sell shares here. All I can think that you've done to come up with a $5 Million Dollar first-year revenue is linearly extrapolated Gazelle's sixth/seventh year revenues to your operation.

Gazelle made $35 Million in year 6, so MintSpare could make $5 Million in year 1, right?

The 'Gazelle' of Bitcoin! I like the idea, and it's certainly a service which I will use as often as I can.

However, this isn't something I will be investing in, but possibly for different reasons that have been voiced here already (I've only perused the thread so far).
The two biggest problems I have are:
1) The initial founder (or founders if there are silent partners) isn't putting in any of their own capital to seed the startup, or at least none that has been noted or accounted for in the financials thus far. Without an initial seed, granting investors 20% of the company seems a bit far-fetched. This also makes the offer more like a 'Kickstarter' campaign than an investment in a company, and runs the risk of reducing pressure on the company to perform as expected.

2) The big issue:

This is obviously to be expected, and certainly something I can't criticize. But what this means is that investing in MintSpare (or any other company tying their products/services to fiat) is a way to hedge against Bitcoin. As Bitcoin increases in value, MintSpare customers would receive fewer BTC for their items, and in turn MS would earn fewer BTC after converting USD from the sold product...leading to smaller dividends overall. Of course, the opposite could happen as well; lower Bitcoin price means more BTC to distribute after converting USD. I'm ignoring fluctuating Operating Costs in this example (I presume they're tied to USD as well).

I can also appreciate the fact that MintSpare is touting "first to market"; holding that title certainly has its initial benefits (e.g. market share). The problem here comes when competition suddenly abounds. Should a second "electronics refurbishing" company come to market in 2014, it may not bode well for investors. Or, if the Bitcoin price stabilizes while media coverage and adoption increases, you run the risk of the actual Gazelle adding a Bitcoin payment option (it's quite unlikely at this point or in the near future, but still something to consider).

Anyway, just my 2 Satoshis.

On another note, you may want to double check the Financial Projections chart in the prospectus. Your "Initial Costs" are incorrect.
 

Hello twentyseventy,

Thank you for taking the time to write a detailed and well thought out write up. We would like to provide some feedback if you don’t mind?

The board of directors will be foregoing all salaries throughout 2014. However, hiring well qualified individuals that will be able to drive MintSpare into becoming the go-to de facto standard in the trade-in service industry for the bitcoin world as bitcoin grows requires a higher than minimum wage pay.

Dividends are expected to be at or above 90% for the large majority of the 2014 calendar year. In certain situations such as preparing to launch an expansion plan, we would lower them temporarily to accommodate additional costs.

“MintSpare’s Sky-High Revenue Projections” being conservative are based off of extremely well thought out executions on every front, which we’ve mentioned in a previous post: design, culture, process, technology, customer support, innovation, growth and proper staffing. We agree that this is much harder said than done, but hope that the IPO Prospectus gives enough insight both in writing and visually to be able to showcase to potential investors the direction we’ll be taking MintSpare throughout 2014 and beyond.

a solid review of what's going on here. really, if you're thinking of investing, read the review:

http://coinelius.com/mintspare-ipo-will-they-be-minting-btc/#sthash.EY6LDEgu.dpbs

Hahaha a novelty is you.

This thread has delivered, restored hope & so forth.

In case anyone's interested, I've taken some time to do a detailed write up of MintSpare's offering on my site, Coinelius.com. The link is in my signature below-

TL;DR Caveat Investor

**edit**

Found answers in prospectus

how morbid. pick the one sentence from the one post that seems remotely favourable and declare that to be "the well informed post". all this in the cloak of being transparent!

to be transparent, maybe you acknowledge that the IPO is mis-priced and the fine-print offers absurdly unfavourable terms to any potential investor.

i'm also stuck on the fact that Havelock is promoting these kinds of "opportunities".

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LMAO, why don't you address the real concerns,

1- you have no sales, no income.
2- how do you plan on hedging against the rise in BTC value while you're holding product that will certainly DEPRECIATE??
3- WHY THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU'RE WORTH 2+MILLION??