Carry Protocol: Project Update Report (November)
Hello, members of the Carry Community!
The November update will cover Carry’s latest development since October. In this coverage we will focus on some of the decision making process Team Carry was going through, our thinking process behind each decision and the resulting outcome. We will also cover our operation plan after the launch of our app.
Carry News
1. Product Development
1) Development Progress
In our last newsletter, we shared our updated roadmap announcing major changes in our product development plan. The initial plan on the whitepaper was to build Carry’s application-level protocol that incentivizes consumers for sharing their data and receiving ads and to design Carry’s ecosystem by developing a DApp that applies Carry Protocol on top of a base protocol platform. However, due to the slower commercialization and technical limitations imposed by the current state of base protocols, we decided to first build our product to run on our servers and wait until these base protocol projects prove their commercial viability. Once the commercialization of base protocols are proven, we will migrate the service to the base protocol of our choosing.
To read more about this change and logic behind https://link.medium.com/xCwbkYe3W1
Let’s go back and remind ourselves one more time Carry’s end goal: it is to give control of data and its monetization rights back to the consumers. To achieve this, we will need to achieve the following:
<Critical Factors to Achieve Carry’s Mission>
- Collect as much data as possible from as many consumers as possible (with their active consent that they will monetize their data)
- Build Carry network where advertisers can access anonymized purchase data and send ads paired with rewards directly to the consumers
- Expand the ecosystem by allowing CRE tokens to be used as payment options in the real world.
After considering how we can best achieve these goals, we’ve made several decisions on product and business development. Here we’d like to share the decision making process and conclusion of the updated product plan.
1. Building Carry’s own scalable data acquisition channel Vs. Relying on Device Provider partners
Carry’s initial plan to expand into the offline world was via ECA partnerships. Spoqa, the largest loyalty system for SMB in South Korea, joined as the first ECA partner of Carry Protocol. Spoqa’s core service, Dodo Point, is currently installed in +10,000 offline retail stores in Korea, and we planned to leverage this merchant base to start collecting consumer’s offline transaction data.
Although Spoqa’s existing merchant and user base can accelerate the initial adoption of Carry-integrated services, our team decided to build Carry’s own data collection channel. The last thing we want is to restrict Carry’s adoption and coverage possibilities to the merchant base of Device Provider partners of ECA. Carry’s own data collection channel allows Carry users to share data in stores that are not Spoqa’s client merchants, increasing the initial offline coverage. Carry will integrate with Spoqa’s Dodo Point, and Carry will collect more detailed data from Spoqa’s client merchants.
Conclusion: Carry team decided to build our own data collection channel on top of working with ECA partners for data collection
We will crowd-source data collection from the offline world with our own app.
2. High granularity data from smaller store base Vs. General data from larger store base
The biggest advantage of integrating Device Providers’ devices with Carry is that we can kickstart data collection from a vast merchant base from day one. While integrating with Spoqa’s 10,000 merchants is probably the fastest way to scale from 0 to 10,000 stores, such method of relying on Device Providers to scale Carry’s data acquisition also acts as the rate-limiting step.
One way to scale fast even beyond the merchant base provided by Device Providers is enabling data collection from merchants not provided by Device Providers. This inevitably lowers granularity of data collected, but at the end of the day, we collect far more data from much larger merchant base. This is in line with #1 of <Critical Factors to Achieve Carry’s Mission>.
Conclusion: Carry team decided to collect more general data from a large number of offline stores to reach out to more users in the market.
3. Vector data from larger consumer base Vs. Scalar data from smaller consumer base
Advertisers want specific purchase data because it helps them target their ads better. It is nearly impossible to get access to such information, and this is precisely why Carry receives so much attention from major advertisers.
Internally within Carry, we categorize consumers’ objective purchase data, such as SKU data, as scalar data. The higher the resolution of the scalar data accessible over the Carry network, the more information advertisers have to define consumers’ purchase patterns to draw targeting options.
Consumer’s purchase data provided to Carry by integrating with Device Provider partners of ECA is scalar data of high granularity. This is because data is transmitted straight from devices that are linked with Point of Sales devices in stores. This means while Carry can collect highly granular scalar data from consumers who make purchases in Device Providers’ client store base, no information can be collected from consumers who do not visit such stores.
Internally within Carry, we categorize consumer’s subjective experiences associated with the purchase, such as satisfaction, preference or review of the purchased item, as vector data. While scalar data helps advertisers understand exactly what item was bought, it provides no insight as to what the consumer’s experience was. To put it simply, scalar data provides insight as to what the consumer bought (“double cheeseburger”) and vector data provide insight as to whether the consumer liked or disliked the experience (“best burger in town”). Advertisers are given powerful tools to define their targeting options when given both scalar and vector data.
If we prioritize building our own data collection channel, we will be able to collect more vector data from a larger consumer base. For now, Carry team will focus on collecting vector data shared by a wider range of consumers and stores while finding better access to scalar data with higher granularity.
Conclusion: Carry team decided to collect vector data from a larger consumer base first, then integrate with Device Providers for scalar data.
We plan to test our app by the end of this year meeting all three criteria above to prove product-market fit. We will share more details of the development status by the next project update.
2) Service operation plan
The product will take a form of the mobile app, designed to collect consumers’ offline data in a seamless way. We expect the offline data of consumers to be collected through this app and be integrated with Spoqa’s dataset. The app will eventually be put on the base protocol of our choosing at a later date.
After the initial launch, we plan on converting Dodo Point’s users Carry’s app users. Dodo Point has 150,000 transactions a day with 4 million monthly active users. We will incentivize Dodo Point users to install and try out our new app, and we expect good conversion as we have case studies proving that when there is contextual relevance, the conversion rate is high.
Spoqa’s Dodo Point conducted a co-marketing campaign with Syrup, Korea’s leading mileage wallet app with 6 million monthly active users. Syrup integrated with Dodo Point so Dodo users could access their Dodo loyalty rewards and points in the Syrup app while consumers who claimed their rewards with Dodo Point in stores were directed to Syrup app. This campaign saw record 11% conversion rate at launch from the point of purchase to the Syrup app. We believe that marketing campaign structured similarly could successfully convert a big portion of the 20 million user base of Dodo to Carry’s first app.
2. Global Community AMA
Carry Protocol participated in the second round of Binance Community Coin Vote. As most of you already know, we didn’t win this time. But this was an excellent opportunity to put Carry on the map as we leveraged Binance’s communities in 15 different regions to raise awareness and to promote Carry. We will have another shot at listing at Binance, so please stay tuned for more updates.
For those who missed, read more: https://link.medium.com/MQ82ME5aX1
Thanks for your continued support.
