Update is under review by Havelock.

@stan

Sorry about that, we had to switch servers and a small amount of orders were somehow temporarily lost. If anyone has any problems with orders feel free to contact me directly at galfry@mintspare.com with your order ID.

Mintspare's 3 month financial report should be out by the end of the week.

I've been neglecting communicating through this forum and apologize for that. Although inexcusable, I assure everyone that Mintspare's team has been hard at work.

Anyone trying to reach me may do so by email at Galfry@mintspare.com. This is the best way to reach me. Although I have a lot of emails to go through, I generally answer back within 24 hours.

Bitcoin's price has caused our funds' value to drop from $300k+ to $150k.  I've had to pack a heavier work load and in turn be very calculative about where my time is invested. I would agree with everyone here that communication with unitholders via this forum is something I should not skimp out on and that is something I'll work to improve upon.

Statistics (Beta Period/Month of February)

Sales: 14.1 BTC
Profits on Sales: 5.4 BTC
Expenses: 26.241 BTC
Total: -20.841 BTC

Mintspare Accounts Made: 587
Unique Visitors: 8,339
Pageviews: 35,233

Future Outlook

Our monthly expenses are expected to be around 22 BTC per month (BTC=$500)
Rent: ~4.5 BTC
Employees: ~14 BTC
Other: ~3.5 BTC

We will release financial reports on a quarterly basis (instead of a previously mentioned monthly basis). This allows us to dedicate more time to growing Mintspare. March, April, and May statistics will be released during the first week of June. (Next report will be July, August, September, etc.)

Mintspare Detailed Metrics
We’re contemplating holding back detailed quarterly metric reports on financials so as to not provide an ‘open book’ to potential competitors.

We will always provide general updates on metrics and find a balance between being transparent and divulging our entire inside operations and roadmap publicly.

We understand that this is a sensitive point but believe it’s in the best interest of Mintspare’s future to go this route. We will reach out to unitholders in the near future via their registered Havelock Investments email to weight out and vote on this option.

CoinDesk Article
http://www.coindesk.com/mintspare-will-pay-bitcoin-for-your-old-electronics/

International 'mini hubs'
We plan on expanding to Canada when bitcoin reaches $1000+ in value. This will allow us to test out demand in Canada affordably. We will be using a PO-box and partnering under-the-hood with a commercial location in Montreal that has expertise in on-site technology repairs.

We plan on expanding to Europe by the end of the year. It will be located in the UK, with the same idea behind Canada's hub.

Funds
124 BTC (100 BTC held by Havelock)

        
http://i.imgur.com/YDG4i5L.png

Mintspare Update - Friday, February 28th

Key Acquisitions
We recently hired two additional individuals, one full time developer and one part time content marketing expert, both with extensive knowledge in their domain.

Site Development
The site has undergone a large amount of work in page loading efficiency and bug hunting.

Official Launch
Mintspare will be officially launching to the public on March 3rd, with all beta restrictions removed, including the activation of the referral system.

Traffic Sources
We will have three main traffic sources for the month of March.

1. Nationwide PR release
2.  Advertising on Bitcoin related sites
3. Content Marketing (Mintspare Blog)

Blog
Mintspare will have a blog that will focus on constantly releasing interesting news about Mintspare as well as the Bitcoin world.

Inside Bitcoin
If you're interested in meeting or hearing Galfry (Founder & CEO of Mintspare) speak at the Inside Bitcoin convention center in NYC on April 8th, we strongly recommend buying your ticket/hotel now.

Here is the registration page: http://www.mediabistro.com/insidebitcoins/new-york/?c=ibcadflex

Here is more information on the topic of discussion:

http://i.imgur.com/86S6QE0.png

We're currently reselling them via online marketplaces.

      http://i.imgur.com/YDG4i5L.png
Mintspare provides a service that pays consumers for their used electronics in bitcoins.

How does it work?

1. Visit www.mintspare.com and narrow down your product model and condition.
2. Accept offer and create an account.
3. Print out prepaid shipping label and use any box to ship it out with.
4. Sit back and relax - once we receive your electronic we pay you in bitcoins within minutes to your Mintspare wallet. Feel free to withdraw it to your personal wallet from there!

Mintspare is an easy, simple, and secure way of acquiring bitcoins, whether it be for your first or tenth time.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach us at support@mintspare.com or simply visit www.mintspare.com and use our online chat service!

We look forward to helping you earn more bitcoins!

    http://i.imgur.com/qLC09WY.png

We'll be releasing financial figures shortly after our official launch in March and every month thereafter. They will be provided as an update on both HavelockInvestments.com and this thread.

Hey Korbman,

Thanks for the bug report! We sent that off to our developer. We should be completely bug free once the beta closes and we launch officially in March!

If you find any other bugs don't hesitate to email us at report@mintspare.com.

You'll be able to redeem your infinity bitcoins shortly! 

        http://i.imgur.com/YDG4i5L.png

Mintspare Update - Friday, February 14th

Open Beta
We’re excited to announce that we’ll be moving from a closed beta format to an open beta format starting today. Visitors will be able to browse and explore more of the website without actually making an account although they will not have access to many features without creating an account.

Website Link: www.mintspare.com

Lowering Costs
Our costs have been and will be significantly lower than projected, in part due to significantly budgeted furniture & computer equipment, opting out of a cargo truck and instead using an employee vehicle, and paying some employees fully with my personal equity instead of salaries.

Security
Over the past week, we’ve been working on setting up an affordable yet effective cold storage system. The majority of bitcoins in our positions are already placed in cold storage. We’ve set up strict security implementations/protocols at our location. We are now trying to take it to the next tier of cold storage security and implement multiple levels of redundancy.

Dividends
Dividends will be held back until our official launch in March. They will then be paid on a weekly basis.

Marketing
Small marketing initiatives have begun while the site is still in beta.  Last Friday Mintspare’s post on r/Bitcoin made it to the front page and garnered us many new users.  In addition to this
we are proud to announce that we also had a mention in Business Insider!

Here are the links:

http://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-bitcoin-apple-protest-2014-2

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1x6yhu/with_all_the_iphone_smashing_going_on/

Marketing is extremely important to our goal of building Mintspare’s brand. Once we launch at the beginning of March, we’ll be implementing many simultaneous advertising campaigns with different sites from within the bitcoin community among other initiatives which we will announce at a later time.

Inside Bitcoin - New York City
Galfry Puechavy, the founder and CEO of Mintspare will be attending one of the largest expected Bitcoin conferences in the world to date: Inside Bitcoin. He will be speaking on behalf of Mintspare at the April 8, 10:45 am - 11:30 am Panel: Creating and Funding the Next 100 Great Bitcoin Companies  

Work at Mintspare
We are growing rapidly and are constantly looking for talented people who are passionate about bitcoin! Part-time or full-time, feel free to send us your resume at: Jobs@Mintspare.com

Thank you for your support!

We're looking into accepting additional products in the second quarter of 2014, there are a few goals that are currently of higher priority.

Dear current & future Mintspare Fund holders,

It’s been a wild ride for me since I came up with the idea for Mintspare, “The World’s First bitcoin Trade-In Service”.  I have been personally involved in the Bitcoin world since May 2013 when I bought my first bitcoins on Coinbase and dabbled into the mining scene with GPU’s for a little while. I immediately became consumed and obsessed over the next several months with the implications of learning about the potentials of the protocol and the currency.  One day in September, I was trying to sell my old iPhone for bitcoins and became frustrated with finding a reputable, fast and simple service that would buy used electronics in exchange for bitcoins. That’s when the idea for Mintspare was born. Since then, I have made it my mission to provide this service.

Today I am proud to present to every holder of the Mintspare Fund a private beta test invitation to surf the site, test the features, sell up to 2 items and provide any feedback; compliments, criticisms, bug findings, security flaws, etc (details on our bug bounty program will soon be released). A beta invite will be sent to your Havelock associated e-mail account at 2PM EST. Further, all fund unit holders will receive a 10% bonus per account for this private beta test to be put toward the items you sell. This 10% bonus will be subsidized from my personal bitcoins holding and not from Mintspare’s funds.  If you have friends or family that want to surf the site or sell items or just try the beta, I’m going to reserve additional beta test invitations for the first 100 people who e-mail me at galfry@mintspare.com.

I understand that the site will not be 100% perfect which is why I am asking for your help to get Mintspare ready for the official launch in March. I appreciate all the support from friends, family, the Havelock team, the talented engineers and new team members as well as everyone else that showed their support and criticisms along the way. My hope is that Mintspare will eventually become one of the quickest and easiest ways for people around the world to get direct access to Bitcoin in exchange for their used electronics.

Thank you,
Galfry Puechavy
Founder & CEO of Mintspare

Let me level with everyone.

Almost any investment has risks involved including Mintspare. To top it off, Mintspare's business model will operate almost solely on bitcoin at all times - the risks involved are enormous! That being said, you can't have great reward without great risk. My vision is that Mintspare could be the gateway for thousands and/or millions of people around the world to have access to their very first bitcoins/crypto-currency. We hope to become the standard.

I've invested roughly 40 bitcoins of my own personal funds in Mintspare so far. That doesn't include the 12+ hour days and sometimes sleepless nights of time and effort I have contributed over the past couple of months to make sure I can deliver a successful service. I will not be paying myself back my personal funds spent until Mintspare has paid out 0.005 BTC per share to investors first. My yearly salary consists of only $1. I want everyone to know I'm in this for the long haul.

As for the company’s valuation, it was derived from a variety of factors: the current trade-in industry market value in the United States (this is just one country - we hope to grow to a worldwide service), bitcoin’s expected growth in 2014 and beyond, Mintspare's unique and refreshing ease of use - you can have your electronics shipped to us in just three easy steps and upon arrival you receive your funds in minutes, not days. Additional revenue streams that are already identified will be introduced and realized later on throughout the maturity of Mintspare. Innovative back-end hedging processes are in place to protect the business in times of significant upward or downward volatility. Furthermore, we will be the "first to market" to offer this service for bitcoin which we will use to our advantage to become a brand name that stands out from future competitors.

We’ve got great news with respect to our launch: the website is complete but it would be a disservice to stakeholders if we launched today. A first impression is everything in the bitcoin world and especially to skeptical consumers, so we’ll be hard at work doing some final verifications and bug hunting today and throughout the weekend so we can launch on Monday, February 3rd!

Whether the terms of the IPO prospectus are favorable or not is your rightful opinion. I will always place investors’ interests before mine - I want to reward those who believed and contributed to Mintspare. Let me be clear: these words mean nothing without actions to back them up. As a matter of fact, all these paragraphs are worthless without any actions to back them up. Actions speak louder than words. I could type on this thread around the clock but at the end of the day, that’s not what moves Mintspare forward.

I look forward to launching a successful website in the coming days along with a top notch customer service experience so Mintspare can deliver maximum shareholder value back to those who believed in Mintspare’s business model throughout this journey.

Sincerely,
Galfry
Founder & CEO, Mintspare

Zevtiefenbach,

Thank you for voicing your opinion, I sincerely appreciate that.

Your concern in regards to our valuation is your rightful opinion, and I will not touch base on that. However I will note that 40% of Mintspare's profits will be directed to 20% of public shares until all shares have been paid out 0.005 BTC each.

Our prospectus was created over a long drawn out process that took many months of thoughtful consideration. We've made a best effort to provide as accurate information as possible. We ultimately made a mistake that reduced our expenses in the first month of our IPO. Taking into account the scope of our operation, and the length of our IPO prospectus, we hope that the community can understand us making a single mistake that ultimately is used to take better care of investors' funds (there is no need to spend the amount stated in our first month when we haven't yet launched). We've previously stated that the expected launch date of our beta was in February.

You're correct, our projected expenses for the month of January are incorrect. They're actually much less than what is stated on our IPO paper.

Hope this helped clear up any misunderstandings.

There was an error in our projections as they assumed we would launch our beta at the beginning of January, whereas it was supposed to be at the beginning of February.

Our expenses are expected to be less than 40 BTC for January, the majority of this being filled by the creation of the website. We'll provide a revised revenue/expense projection plan once we launch the website. This is because we want to provide accurate revised projections, on top of not steering away from our current focus: launching.

A small amount of funds are being used to promote Mintspare at its launch. In bitcoindifficulty.com's case, we had to close a deal a few days in advance in order to lock a contract in during our launch. In order to not waste advertising space during the time we would rent the advertising spot without Mintspare being launched, we've decided to link it to our IPO. Our intentions are not to use funds to promote the IPO.

We're planning on launching by February 3rd at the latest. All functionalities are in place. The security audit is fully complete. At this point we're just ironing out bugs. Creating a website from the ground up does allow for greater flexibility on one hand, but is prone to more bugs on the other. We're hard at work fixing them.

We will make a launch announcement both on here and as an update via our asset page on Havelock Investments.

Hello twentyseventy,

It would come down to a combination of the following: private investors, scaled down operation, and some of my personal funds.

Hello Branny,

We've already locked in advertising partnerships for 3 websites, giving us a total of 55k unique visitors viewing our ad per day. We should ramp it up to around 100k a day right before launch. The pricing for these 3 partnerships is 1.35 BTC/month. We were able to achieve these rates (as well as surpassing our initial goal) through 'door to door' manual requests for webmasters to create long term advertising partnerships with Mintspare. Our marketing budget for our one month Beta launch (starting either January 27th or February 3rd) is 5-6 BTC.

As an additional note, I (Galfry) will  be present during the Bitcoin Conference in Miami this weekend. I would be more than happy to discuss with any potential investors as well as provide private tours of the Mintspare office/warehouse. If you're just looking to say hi, I love saying hi too!

Progress Update 1/17/2014

The website's fundamentals are all complete, the website itself is fully functional. There are bugs here and there which we'll be squashing on the daily. Our site developer as well as our head of security are hard at work implementing security features throughout the website for the next 10 days or so. In the meantime we're testing out dummy orders to further iron out bugs before our beta launches. Marketing is also a key focus that we're constantly working on. We're aiming to have ads published on many bitcoin related sites, which will give us an ad exposure of roughly 1,000,000 unique visitor views for the first month of launch.

Summarized:

-Bug squashing
-Security implementation
-Testing orders
-Marketing

We're aiming to launch on a Monday, either January 27th or February 3rd.

Payment sent!

I sent you some possible term changes via email that you can either accept or decline! If you decline just send me back the extra bitcoins I gave you.

Thank you!