Pledgecamp

A very nice and promising idea, and it certainly can make use of blockchain technology. The team and advisers are strong and have experience and proven track records in the right areas. I look forward to trying the proper MVP when it is available.

I think that this project opens up one of the usefulness of an inviting block chain. If their attempts succeed, it will create a new future.
There is no real MVP on their page, I can not measure the ability of team members. I expect these to be complete.

→ Blockchain Advantage - ✅
→ White Paper - ✅❤️
→ Team Composition - ✅
→ Token Economics - ⛔️
→ Business Model - ✅
→ Social Media Presence - ✅
→ Collaborations & partnerships - ✅❤️
→ Fund Allocation - ✅
→ Legal Loopholes - ✅
→ MVP/ DApp/ Working Product  - ⛔️

Advantage - The WP is clear and when implemented it would change the game like SLAs is changing online business, for example. The team and partners can’t get any better than this! Absolutely amazing. Very reasonable hard cap!

Disadvantage - Tokenomics and other specifics related to business is lacking! The idea of having 1 X 10^12 tokens is a bit strange even accounting for future liquidity. No working product as if yet.

You can find my ratings methodology here- https://medium.com/@krishnenduchatterjee/ico-evaluation-investing-a-vc-perspective-for-investment-over-greedy-short-term-returns-433f6f9e13d8

The project is very good and the vision is one that can prove success in the future. It is one of those projects that give value to the Blockchain and vice-versa, while I'm not sure how much the Ethchaum Blockchain can be the best solution that fits with their platform, but we'll see how the situation will evolve.

The team is very large, with many well-known advisors, both in the blockchain world and the financial world, but at the moment it seems that a little more quality is lacking in Blockchain development area. The developers who are presented as team members, do not seem to have had previous experience of development in this technology, the fact is that their github contains only a small repository, which refers to 5 months ago, containing the details of the ICO and the token, but no other updates regarding the product are presented, or updates. Remember that github is the mirror of your project and of the product you are about to launch, so it must be taken care of accurately. The founders show that they are already working together in another project, which can be positive, because they already know each other and know how to work together, but some of them, apart from these two projects, do not seem to have other significant experiences.

The social media and communication channels are kept very well, there are constant updates and the community is not lacking. Marketing seems to be of good quality, while community support is good too. I contacted them on telegram, asking for information and I was given timely and partly good quality responses. They also claim to have already collected 17 millions in private sale, which at the moment does not seem verifiable in any way, but if it happened, I'm happy, because the project is very good and successful cases are always good for the Blockchain community. The President then contacted me in private, providing additional information, which could not be disclosed in the public group, appreciated.

I do not give 5 to the Product, because as already said on github there is no movement, while the MVP is not really an MVP, but a tutorial made by one of the team members, that although it is very well done, does not offer the same user experience.

Excellent website and Whitepaper, accurate details, clear business plan, market analysis, competitors, fair distribution and everything else you need. The only thing that has not been treated to perfection like the rest of the details is the "value proposition", the incentive for mass adoption.

All in all, a very good project, which needs to take care of some more detail and improve some aspects, but the basics are promising.

Pledgecamp is an interesting project with a potential upside but also areas of caution.

The good news is the Advisor Team is strong. Various people with backgrounds on
Buzzfeed, TechCrunch, Airbnb, Ripple, Saudi Royal Family and Zuckerberg Media
amongst others.

The Core Team has great experience in crowdfunding. There are 7 people
on the website with links to the profiles on LinkedIn (Sam Pulllman, CTO has
a "not available" on LinkedIn). According to Pledgecamp their "success on
Kickstarter ranks us among the top 1% of most-funded ever". They launched
Podo, the first stick and shoot camera and raised 761,130 from 8802 backers.

But there is not a downloadable or MVP for Pledgecamp. The best I could
find is a clickable demo on the website. And even that is not easy to find
or showcased. I found it here: https://awesome-fermat-1932a6.netlify.com/#/

Vision:
Pledgecamp seeks to disrupt the crowdfunding model by using "crowdfunding to fix crowdfunding".
Weird right? The Unique Sales Proposition is the notion of "backer insurance". Basically using
smart contracts to hold creators accountable and limit the potential losses of backers.
Payouts happen as key milestones are reached and the community can vote on fund
disbursements. But will backer want to secure a token (risk) to back a potenial product (risk)?
And as a creator would I list my project on Kickstarter or Pledgecamp?

Pledgecamp says it solves the longstanding issues of trust and
misaligned user incentives in crowdfunding. In their 47-page whitepaper,
they identify three core problems crowdfunding must address to reach full potential:
1. Lack of Accountability
2. Lack of Transparency
3. Centralization

However adding blockchain may introduce a layer of complexity that reduces
adoption and usage. Marketing would be a key requirement for Pledgecamp to
reach its own potential. One strategy they plan is to use "5% of the initial Token
Allocation, or 50 billion PLG to fund Initial Creator Bonus. They also want to
award bonus to eligible startup incubators and accelerators that list on Pledgecamp.

Beyond this the whitepaper and website do not mention a marketing strategy.
In terms of Community Building the biggest platform is Telegram with a little over
47,000 members at review time. Likely most of these members came from the
Bounty program (now ended). They also mention an Airdrop campaign on their website.

Product:
For me this is the area. of greatest concern. Pledgecamp is a decentralized crowdfunding platform
on Ethereum blockchain. It is a dApp not a platform, protocol or blockchain.
Which gave me pause to see only a only a clickable demo, not even a MVP when
they say $17 million has already been raised. The hard cap is $3 million for the public round.

When I look at their github repository I only see one branch, 3 commits (most recent 6 months ago)
and no people listed https://github.com/pledgecamp

The social community and sentiment is fair but not on fire.
Twitter 3400 followers
Facebook - 2565 likes and 4300 follows
Instagram - 144 posts and 3064 followers

I could not find an [ANN] thread on Bitcointalk.

Also no crypto or business press tab and mentions on the website.
I found this surprising for a project which boasts advisors from Buzzfeed,
TechCrunch, Airbnb, Ripple, Saudi Royal Family and Zuckerberg Media.

There is an active blog on the website with recent content.

I would like to see a working product or more about the use of
the previously raised funds. To disrupt existing industries requires
time, money and strategy. While there are not many competitors
the existing few have name recognition and years of organic and
paid media attention.

Pledgecamp does not try to add tokens to crowdfunding, they did rethink the whole crowdfunding thing to make it better with the use of blockchain :
- Backer insurance with smart contract and crowd voting.
- Autonomous platform: the team won’t manage it, users will (and get rewarded for it)
- Listing fees reimbursed via smart contract when the crowdfunder shares quality information about the project, team, etc.
- Access to international crowdfunding, including none $/€ countries
- Full marketplace integrated to improve crowdfunding success.

Great team with large experience in the crowdfunding sector, as users. They know well their competitors, on and off blockchain and bring value to the existing competitor’s offer.
They proved their capacity to gather big names and high level experts around them.
10% of the token for team and advisors which seems fair, with 12 months vesting.

The project is very well marketed (which was one of my concern first, when discovering the project, thought it was an obvious scam) but seems to rely on strong expertise.
This marketing expertise is important to support the launch of such a big project to the public.
Very active on social media, medium, youtube. A lot of videos showing the way their product will work.

They pretend to have raise 17M$ on private sale, letting 3M$ available for the public sale (the token sales represent 20% of the global tokens). If true, that's a very good sign of trust.

MVP is said to come soon, currently in the work with MetaLab.
I will increase my grade when the MVP is visible.

Current worries :
- They pretend to have 17M$ pledged (on the 20M$ they want to raise) in private sales but can’t find any proof of it. As it is a great indication of trust in the project, I would like to have more information on that. Knowing the value of the token sold in private sale would be important too.
- Some people pointed out that CEO Eddie may have stopped working on crowdfunded projects to focus on Pledgecamp, then not delivering what he promised. That may bring trust issues.
- Pledgecamp will be using the community reserve to mitigate the currency fluctuations while the backer insurance is active. It is unclear how this will not create high inflation in tokens if the token price drops.

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Updating my review rate to 4/5/3 after the team release their POC which is great + CEO answered about its previous projects.

Lot of social activity since a few days, good sign for the public sale.

Still no proof for the 17 millions raised but I guess the big names supporting the project would not do that if they did not get any proof of this fact.

Seems private sale had a bonus of 40% 12 months ago (ended in may) which is a concern for public buyers. Trying to figure out how much of the private received that. That is why Product Grade is 3 only and not 4.