Quote from: maurobiasolo on December 27, 2017, 04:39:39 PM

In your website you mention

"Accelerators and incubators in developed and emerging market"

Can you explain a little bit more?

Hi maurobiasolo,

We're speaking to several startup accelerators & incubators in both developed and developing countries. (Organisations that take startups under their wing and provide investment, resources and mentorship. Usually in return for some equity).

With developed and emerging markets, I mean, among others, Ghana, Kenya, Romaina, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Brazil, UK, Germany.

Through this, we hope to:
- gain access to the organisations' networks of ventures and entrepreneurs, to see whether any of their projects would like to crowdfund on our platform
- learn from actual founders and organisations the specific issues that startups face in their respective regions and cultures, both in terms of funding but also just in general. And hopefully helping them to solve some of these with our services
- gain insights on how to design our UI/UX, keeping in mind most users in these countries speak a language other than english and may only be using a mobile phone instead of a computer
- Providing localised Acorn support services (one of our features that gives project founders campaign assistance) and a local presence in the respective countries, both as customer support and also for marketing

Appreciate your questions maurobiasolo, please don't hesitate to add more!

Quote from: OneUnderBridge on December 27, 2017, 07:54:48 PM

I just checked out the site and read the one pager. I like the concept. I will be digging deeper but if we can make this happen, I think there will be a huge market for the token at least. Why has the initial coin offering been set so far into the future though? Will there be any token left for the public when that day comes?

Thanks for the positive comments OneUnderBridge!

We wish we could run the ICO sooner as well, however the industry has changed a lot from the days where all it required was a whitepaper and a website, so we still have lots of work to get everything ready before we can run the ICO

. The Pre-Sale will start on 29 Jan and the main ICO is tentatively scheduled for March 2018.

Just to clarify, we do have some private contributors for the Pre-Sale, however the Main ICO is also open to everyone. If you're interested participating in the pre-sale, please sign up to our whitelist here https://aco.ai or join our telegram group https://t.me/joinchat/HI_eCBG0fCRCl1ja-d5JDg

Quote from: maurobiasolo on December 28, 2017, 08:45:29 PM

Low fees can surely help to beat the fierce competition (there are a lot of crowdfunding platforms around), what will impact is the general acceptance of crypto currencies

That's a great point maurobiasolo. Yes, actually we do think it's still an issue, getting normal fiat currency into crypto and vice versa. However, 2017 has been an amazing year for crypto and the more mainstream it gets in the coming 2-3 years, the easier this process will become.

Quote from: maurobiasolo on December 29, 2017, 09:20:10 AM

Quote from: bigcash2011 on December 29, 2017, 07:46:14 AM

I like the quality of their website and if they come up with a great design and interface for the crowdfunding platform i think they will be at the top.

I would be interested to know the main difference with similar projects like Kickico. They have raised lots of money in the past but dumped a lot after ICO

I copied this from another question earlier:

There will be other competitors who are:
- the traditional crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo
- blockchain based crowdfunding platforms, like fundyourselfnow and kickico. KickICO is a bit different, as they also focus on running ICOs instead of just traditional non-ICO crowdfunding campaigns.

Here's why we're better (taken from our whitepaper)
- We want to make crowdfunding free - Other platforms charge between 4% to 10% in fees.
- The crowdfunding market is still in its infancy, with a potential to reach anything from USD 90B to 1 trillion per year by 2025 (World Bank, 2013; MyPrivateBanking, 2015). Well allow virtually all legal projects to list on our platform irrespective of where the project originates from and irrespective of each Founders project goal. Project types could include but are not limited to commercial, creative, research, charity and personal causes. -
- We wish to expand project exposure in new markets where previous access and competition are low, such as emerging markets <-- there are HUGE untapped markets for crowdfunding
- Goods from successful projects can automatically be listed and sold on the Acorn Marketplace with no fees for campaign founders.
- Subject to the success of our ICO, we have designed Token Growth & Stability Mechanisms intended to increase the value of ACO starting after token distribution. These mechanisms include:
a. The Project Incentive Fund will seek to provide generous starting bonuses to incentivize early adopters and reward recruitment of founders, backers and token users into our ecosystem. This can be a double accelerator, not only will the platform be free but it would also reward those generating early traction with incredibly generous incentives. Its a mechanism to employ a huge marketing budget in an area where it should conceivably allow rapid growth for the platform and token.
b. Our Liquidity Reserve is intended to mitigate ACO price fluctuations related to large campaign payouts.
c. Subject to obtaining the required license or establishing a relationship with an existing licensed insurer, we intend for backers to have the option of buying Project Backer Insurance. For an additional fee, they could insure themselves up to the full value of their commitment against the possibility of project failure. We hope this will lower some of the objections to pledging funds.
d. Affiliate Rewards system: If implemented, this would provide rewards for anyone who can successfully recruit new users to participate in our platforms and therefore use ACO and our ecosystem
e. Frictionless ACO Purchases: We intend to connect with the APIs of exchanges and popular wallets to integrate them into our platform, creating a frictionless transaction environment.
f. Partnerships: We intend to actively explore partnerships with campaigns created on Acorn Hub as well as 3rd party platforms to integrate ACO and increase its utility

All of the above features and systems are intended to generate demand for the ACO token in the face of a permanently fixed supply.

tl;dr version
- free-to-use platform
- open to any legal project and any country
- fixed supply token --> more users mean higher token value
- project incentive fund: proportion of the ICO will be spent on incentivising early adoption of our platforms, meaning early growth of token demand
- tokenomics: crowdfunding on Acorn Hub; post-campaign sales of good/services on Acorn Marketplace; purchase secondary services on Acorn Support; point-of-sale transactions in local communities using Acorn Local. All use ACO token for transactions, meaning a continuous and circular flow of our token and a lot of utility

Hope that answers your question? Let me know if there are more!

Quote from: Marahunter on December 29, 2017, 08:36:24 PM

Will there be an arrangement to receive tokens crowdfunded on top of the Acorn Platform due to owning Acorn tokens. It would be a great idea working like an incentive to hold acorn tokens

Thanks for the question Marahunter. Sorry we won't have that kind of feature. Our platform is designed for traditional crowdfunding projects (much like those on Indiegogo or Kickstarter) instead of a platform that runs other ICOs.

We love the idea of incentives and have plenty for new users to obtain tokens and enter our ecosystem (what we call "Token Growth and Stability Mechanisms in our whitepaper/one-pager), however there won't be direct profit-sharing with tokenholders or anything along those lines.

Hope that answers your question? Thanks!