Hi there, and thank you for your work on this.
First off, we are nothing like SSIO, Eros.Vision, and others. We have a real business model. Or VP of Product is an active sex worker. Those other projects have zero future, scam or not, because they don't even have a real idea that'd possibly work. The same thing for Eros.Vision. I personally know how bad it feels to get ripped off. But Eros.Vision wasn't ever going to be a viable product. It was a Craigslist 2.0, with more scam potential.
1. Anonymous team. The core team must be anonymous or we'll be shut down. Launch city is Toronto, but we are going to expand into the US next year. But even with Toronto,
the business of sex work is not legal in Canada. Selling sex is legal, but that's it. You cannot assist someone in selling sex. Even tangentially! For instance, we wanted to use Tarsnap as our backup provider. I emailed Mr. Percival, and his legal team said they could not provide us service, because they'd be living off the proceeds of prostitution. Not having an anonymous core team puts the entire project at risk.
Does this mean our project is high risk? In absolute terms, YES! Compared to other ICOs? Well, like I pointed out about Eros, SSIO, or even Frantic, they have such bad business ideas that even if they aren't scammers (I think SSIO is sincere) they aren't going to make money. Filecoin is literally a real-life version of HBO's Silicon Valley's Pied Piper, without the amazing compression. Scam? No, but if you lose money because it's a terrible idea, you still lose money. So when you consider the high-risk ICO market, Pink is one of the more solid investments. But please only put in your disposable "gambling" money, just like you should do with any other ICO.
2. We're working on a "whitepaper" or pitch deck. I will say that whitepapers make NO SENSE for businesses. Pink is not a tech company. The core app is damn straightforward. We are not inventing new tech, besides our advanced privacy and security setup:
https://medium.com/@PinkApp/pink-app-trading-latency-for-anonymity-and-other-techniques-815ee21c6da4 So these whitepapers are mostly just an invention of ICOs wanting to pretend they are inventing something new, and to distract from the lack of real business model. But we're capitulating and will have a real pitch deck and some calculators soon. We'll even call it a whitepaper.
3. Yes, investment is anonymous to protect both our operations and investors.
4. Most ICOs are heavily dominated by whales. We had investors lined up from before we even bought the domain name so it is not surprising to have early investment. We had a slump when BTC dropped, and the recent spike was due to our update (
https://pinkworldwide.com/update2). I am not sure how it is our benefit to show low-investment periods. We'd definitely have more investment if we hadn't had a slump in the middle of the fundraiser! Also note that in the update, the plan is not to reach the cap or minimum right now. We're closing Series A end of month, using the money to build a beta, then will sell remaining Series A shares in a B round, then use that to do a big launch. We issued extra shares to pre-Oct 18 investors and gave them $1 call options expiring in December to compensate, and that was responsible for about half of the jump we recently saw. The rest was some mid-sized investors finally getting in, after weeks of back-and-forth.
5. I'm not sure how this has anything to do with the company. If you want to see real people, go to our Vimeo page:
https://vimeo.com/pinkapp = We have real escorts talking about their thoughts on Pink. From the videos, you can see these are not paid actresses (they identify themselves and you can check them out on Twitter) or scripted. We did provide a small ($200) compensation for their time, we asked for their honest thoughts and opinions. We asked several people and published every video response we got.
6. Our initial site used the "Primes" template we got off Themeforest. The new design used an NY-based design agency, Vivid Motion (
http://vividmotion.co/). I HIGHLY recommend them. As proof, here is an early concept they delivered, hosted on their client-work site:
http://vividmotion.design/pinkapp-final/index.html - They were fast, iterated quickly, listened to us go back and forth and all around on what we wanted, visually. Email me and I'll give you our contact's email if you want to ask about how they worked for us.
We have more than just a few screenshots. Our homepage links to a couple of videos, and more are on the way. But no testnet/beta yet, you are right.
7. Eros.com takes their business seriously. They run a fine line legally. Eros.Vision was outright illegal. It's understandable that Eros.com wants to distance itself from Eros.Vision and shut them down. And remember that trademark law strongly encourages companies to defend their trademark. If Eros.com was aware of Eros.Vision and did nothing, that'd be bad for them. And in no way will the Eros.com re-use their name to launch an illegal business (or scam!). We mention Eros.com because they are competition in a sense. We also mention Backpage, Slixa, ECCIE, TER, and other such sites.
Anyways, in summary: We may be high IQ scammers spending a ton of time to pretend to be building an app, while refusing to play the traditional ICO game (tokens, whitepapers, all that nonsense). I cannot prove a negative. As Sarah mentioned, go into our Slack room and chat with us and get a feel. There are other investors there you can talk to.
