I write this in the hopes it will reach Lorenzo, the CEO who calls the shots.
I’m the person who wrote the infamous “why elongate is not a shit coin” on may 6 on medium and reddit, which was the all time most upvoted post in the r/elongate, and was on the top page of r/satoshistreetbets and r/cryptomoomshots for 2 days straight with over 50 awards to those posts.
That post was generally a persuasive text to new investors trying to shut out the general consensus online that elongate was a scam and shit coin. It was extremely long and detailed with research and proof laid out to show people what we were about.
This post now will be my thoughts and criticism on the direction the coin is taking, the marketing efforts and my personal suggestions. I would like this text to challenge the team to take on board and have a serious think about – not just to read and say “thanks for your feedback”
I have given my feedback on telegram, reddit and discord previously 1–2 months ago. However, they have not been implemented even though some were “approved” on the discord suggestions.
I am not a writer so please forgive me if my formatting is a little confusing but I’ll do the best to my ability. I am also writing this from my phone.
Why does my opinion matter?
All in all - I’m just another person, an investor ; and that’s the most important part. There are many more people who share the same thoughts as me. Those people include current investors who are still holding, current investors who are giving up hope and wanting to sell, ex investors who have already sold, and potential investors who want to BUY but are holding off.
Now let me be clear. Most of the people who invested are here to make money, not donate. They are here first to make life changing money – taking the risks WHILE also doing good for the community. If people wanted to be charitable they would simply donate money to their charity of choice with 100% of their funds.
Let’s not kid ourselves, we need to target the right audience here. There is a fine line between trying to be a charity on its own and being a charity CRYPTOCURRENCY TOKEN.
Why it’s important for the team to take this feedback
In the 2018 team, most coins crashed and never made it back. They are still dust. Even most coins with good fundamentals still haven’t even touched their ATH. This means anyone who bought at the ATH still have not even made their initial investment back yet.
What does this show us? What does this mean? * Crypto is highly speculative and built on hype and followings. * Fundamentals do not necessarily guarantee success. * Coins with teams who do not dedicate themselves, or adapt to changing markets will fall behind and be left behind – not able to recover. * Bad press and angry ex investors will influence new investors not to buy, at the first sight of a newbie mentioning the coin.
What can we learn from this? * We need to build a strong foundation first and foremost. * We need to find good use cases for our token. * We need the team to constantly adapt to the changing environment. * We need to push marketing. * We need to build a strong community.
I will give my summary of personal suggestions to these main points at the end of my post.
Why is the value of elongate dropping?
- We are currently in a bear market. All coins are dropping right now. However, some are dropping drastically while others not so much. Elongate has now dropped over 90% of value from the ATH. We’ve actually added a zero now. In comparison, many of the coins in my watch list and that I have previously bought have only dropped 50%-80% in value.
// Why do I think elongate has dropped more? * We are regarded as a scam and shit coin (not meme coin, but a shit coin) * There are too many similar coins that offer the same thing. We offer nothing unique. * We are also affected by BNB. * The community has lost hope. * This is in part to all the hype from marketing and the price drop. * It is a snowball effect. Once the investors lose hope they will sell and continue to bad mouth the project due to having a negative experience and losing money.
Again, these points will lead back to my personal suggestions at the end of the post.
What are the most important things to elongate?
//// VOLUME.
Plain and simple the most important factor. What does volume do for our token?
It provides us funds including; * Donations: the team has marketed us as a “first and foremost charity token.” Without any volume how will we have the funds to donate money to charities? When you have mindlessly drilled into peoples heads that you are a charity then what will people think when the amounts you donate become less over time? To any normal person that would equal a failing business. This is why we need other use cases and not to just market ourselves as a “charity token.” * Stability reserves, * Marketing fees, * Business development, * Liquidity: high volume allows people to buy and sell. If there is no liquidity and you wanted to sell as a whale, you may not even be able to sell your tokens. As buyers on an exchange you may place a huge buy order only for 25% of your order to be fulfilled.
For investors, volume means reflections and earning rewards.
Right now our volume can be classified as a laughing stock. What’s the point of holding if you hardly get any reflections? You’re better off holding another coin and staking.
//// TRUST/IMAGE.
As I previously touched on, the general consensus online in the cryptocurrency community is that we are a scam. I was banned from r/cryptocurrency for posting the “Why elongate is not a shitcoin” post even though it was fully detailed and had proof of donations and such.
Also, if you search up posts in r/cryptocurrency of elongate with newbies asking questions of our token, you will see seasoned investors warning them of such shit coins saying that we are a scam. On r/cryptomoonshots and r/satoshistreetbets even though we were on the front page with huge upvotes, there were people calling us a scam. Yeah I was able to persuade some people with my massive write up but many others still weren’t convinced.
Take a look at it this way, Bitcoin, the original, still has many haters and non believers. Go into non crypto specific subreddits and if you see a post about Bitcoin a lot of them will call it a ponzi scheme. For a coin like us, we have a long road ahead of us and it won’t be easy to gain trust with the brand.
I can commend the team for doing a logo change as the old logo was rubbish. The new logo looks a lot more professional with some thought put into it being a heart. It also flows a lot easier, which makes it easy to put on marketing material.
The new website looks much cleaner too, so I have to commend the team on that. A new investor will do a simply google search so the website does need to look top notch to gain their trust.
The white paper although updated still looks like a rookie made it. I suggest the team update it with nicer formatting and images.
As a brand, you should have your tool kit which has rules for what fonts, sizes, weights etc you should have for every part of a text including headings, subheadings, paragraphs etc. Uniformity and consistency inspires trust.
One thing I disagree with the team is that they don’t want to be seen as a meme coin. Hype and memes is what took us to our ATH in conjunction with the bull market. No the billboards did not do that, I guarantee you.
It’s fine to have a professional image but still have memes and hype associated with your coin.
//// AUDIENCE. WHO WE SHOULD TARGET.
It would be foolish to try to get rid of the memes and look like a corporate company or a full blown charity organisation. Cryptocurrency doesn’t work like that. Memes are a part of technology and internet culture. We should not be trying to build a charity – if we are, go and build one without the cryptocurrency aspect – it’s not needed.
Our image should cater towards investors. Most people in crypto are here to make a change to their lives. They want to build towards a better future for themselves. A lot of people didn’t come into crypto by researching and thinking Bitcoin will overtake fiat. They invested their hard earned cash to try and make more money. Only then they did more research and started to believe in the technology.
Even those who started out with believing in the technology didn’t need to actually invest. If you are in crypto solely for the technology why do you need to put money into it? You can keep researching and promoting it to your friends telling them how great the tech is and how it’s a once in a lifetime innovation like the internet was without investing…
Look at the share market. Do people invest in google because they use their services everyday? It’s called an investment for a reason. Coins and shares are similar that way which people use it as an investment tool. If you can make money WHILE doing good for the world with charitable work – who the hell wouldn’t want to?
That’s why I personally bought the token and I bet why over 95% of the buyers did. If you want to test this, make a poll with two options to the community: Why did you buy elongate? 1. To make money and be a part of a charitable cause. OR 2. To donate to charity.
That would prove my point.
//// WHO WE SHOULD NOT TARGET.
We should NOT be targeting people who want to donate to charity. Why? Because if they wanted to donate to charity they would just do it and NOT NEED TO BUY ELONGATE.
Let’s put this in dollar figures. $100,000. If I buy $100,000 of elongate, I will have $90,000 after fees. This $90,000 may go up or down. If I had bought last month this $90,000 will now be worth $9,000. I lost the $81,000 on paper to nothing if I was to sell. How much goes to charity? According to the white paper, of the 5% fee, 58% goes to charity; that is, 0.05*0.58=0.029 which is 2.9% So $2,900 of my $100,000 goes to charity.
I don’t even get to choose who it goes to and I don’t get any tax benefits. If I chose to donate the whole $100,000 I could’ve chose my charity of choice and claimed the whole $100,000 for tax purposes.
In what world would it have been better to purchase elongate if I wanted to donate to charity? NONE.
People buy this coin for the potential to make money first and foremost. Otherwise they’d simply donate to charity. It’s not rocket science.
The head team who says we are first and foremost a charity coin are delusional. You CAN NOT market the coin like this to people who simply want to donate when there is NO benefit at all in doing so. The benefit is that you can make money!
//// USP. UNIQUE SELLING POINT.
Our code is basically a fork/copy and paste, just like thousands of other new coins. All these new coins popping up with almost the same tokenomics have hype behind them. Why is there hype you may ask? Being new, people are hoping to 100x their investment. With that hype comes volume, and with that volume comes donations.
So anyone can fork these coins to build some momentum and make some big donations and play catch up. With more people aware now of charity coins, it just takes a big group to buy in and then they can claim our 1st month we donated $1,000,000. The newer coins will have volume and therefore will outperform our early donations.
This is not hypothetical, but real, there are new coins have donated more than we have in our first month. I will not name them but simple research will support this fact.
We need a unique selling point, something that sets us apart. All these new coins are also doing new wallets and NFTs. A wallet is convenient yes but why would NFTs bump up our price?
You need to lay the foundation before you bring up novelty ideas. Unless you work with major players in the space of the biggest celebrity names then NFTs won’t do much.
I don’t claim to know a solution or something that other coins can’t copy but I do have some ideas I will list at the end of my summary.
At the end of the day there will always be coins that copy but you need to think of things that are hard to imitate or things that first movers advantage REALLY, REALLY matters.
Marketing
We hit last ATH due to the bull market. A lot of coins increased in market cap. It was good timing if anything. In 2017/2018 most coins saw a huge pump. Billboards are good for creating trust. That’s about it. Do you really think billboards reached a wider audience and pumped us to ATH? Our billboards literally say Elongate4Charity with a moon and rocket. Do you think Joe from the barbershop walking to work will see this rocket and moon and ELONGATE and feel the burning desire to donate to charity after that?
Charities have been around for ages. Have you ever been at work and someone walks up to you and asks for donations? They rarely get any. Go to a shopping centre and you’ll see these guys standing at kiosks handing out flyers and asking if they can “stop you for a sec and talk about a good cause” – only for people to keep walking and roll their eyes. These people door knocking and disturbing people in the comfort of their own home to ask for donations only for people to get annoyed for them ringing the doorbell, informing them for a second time they ring the door bell just in case and annoying them even more. People don’t like giving to charity organisations already. Most people don’t even believe or know what cryptocurrency is all about. Yet we are promoting ELONGATE4CHARITY bringing crypto to charity and a picture of a rocket and moon and we think this will suddenly change their minds? No. It doesn’t.
I’d dare to say the first billboard has such a lazy design that it looked immature and had a negative effect on the branding. However the billboard factor itself on the opposite end had a positive effect on hype.
The only thing the first billboards did were: * Put some legitimacy on the brand by having exposure in the real world. * Generate hype to online communities in which turn they bought elongate.
Yes it’s great to have photos and videos of the billboards to generate hype online as it was a first for our coin. Not many other coins did it too. Also, it’s great to use as images on the websites and other marketing material if needed. The second batch of billboards looked much more professional. But did we need to go to 20x cities? If you knew the reasons why it has any effect the first time you’d know that going to 20x countries or 100x wouldn’t have made a difference. The effect wasn’t due to how many countries we went to, but because of the two points outlined above. So I congratulate the team for designing a better billboard, albeit it should’ve been done for the first and we didn’t need the whole 20x countries thing at all.
June 7 Why was June 7 hyped as it was? The team should not generate hype; the investors should. The team should not hype June 7 as a thing different to the billboards, influencers and youtubers like they did in the infographic. They need to be clear in what they give the audience. Everyone was waiting for the announcement. Everyone was confused and still is confused what June 7 should be about.
Was it going to 20x countries? If it was, it shouldn’t have been marketed as a separate campaign to billboards then. Was it the post where someone said we’re going to a top 10 exchange? If it was, this should’ve been made as a separate announcement and not just a telegram post. It should’ve been a Twitter and Instagram official post. Was it not even announced? If it wasn’t, there needs to be an announcement that it has been delayed. Was it meant to be a group of all those things above? If yes it should’ve been told directly as an announcement and the message given across directly and effectively. Say specifically that June 7 was a collection of those posts.
Seriously nobody even knows what June 7 was meant to be still. All it did was lose the trust of more people and that is why the price tanked further after June 7 (obviously along with market forces)
/////////// My personal thoughts and suggestions ///////////
//// 1. Marketing slogans should be about tokenomics not charity first
This the main issue. We need to attract potential investors and we do that by promoting the fact people can make money.
Looking at safe moon, besides their community, they are successful because they tell you that you can make money off reflections.
We need to tell people they can make residual income, and secondly help with charity. I can’t stress this enough. There is no point to marketing as charity first when you don’t have any advantage to solely donating to charity yourself. I mean if the team ever comes up with some benefits over traditional donations, then feel free to market charity first. Until then we NEED to swap it the other way around.
Use words like “earn income” “earn rewards” “passive income” “residual income” “invest” “invest and hold” “hold and profit” etc. These are words potential investors want to here. Followed along SECONDLY with “with a charitable cause” or “and help make the world a better place through donations” etc. They need to be straight forward and get the point across, that FIRST, PEOPLE CAN EARN MONEY, and SECOND, some of their funds will go to charities.
//// 2. Flow on on marketing
Think about how new investors hear about elongate. They read it on social media, hear it from a friend. They then google it, and read up reddit and articles. Then they verify it further with more articles and credible sources. They then purchase it.
Knowing this, what elongate needs to do in order is. * Build the foundation first. Website has been done great. * Work with media outlets and credible news sources to release articles. There are some yahoo and Bloomberg. Great. We need more. * Work with blogs, and other high level credible websites. These include influencers with a high following , over 1 mil followers. * Work with online ads, have campaigns with some smaller followings 250k to 1mil followings. * Promote the coin on social media and encourage current investors to promote the coin. Perhaps do giveaways for those that come up with the best graphics and those who have the most invited to discord for example.
So when a customer hears about the coin working backwards from my dot points they will follow along that process and it will reinforce a lot more trust and the coin will look more reputable.
// 2a. Messages for marketing need to be clear. As mentioned with the first billboard the rocket and moon is not related to the token. The graphics were cartoonish. They do not resemble what the coin is about. Who even made this new burger video? “Weird is good” is not a good marketing tactic. Nobody even knows what this is about. Are we a fast food company? We could’ve spent our money better here. Our volume is dying. Stop wasting money on ineffective marketing. We need to use effective and efficient marketing, not blow our money on useless messages. As you understand in business, once money dries up it’s even hard to get capital to inject more funds. Use your money wisely !!!! It cannot be understated. Even when things are going well, you should look at the COST EFFICIENCY of your campaigns and spending!
//// 3. Community slogan Along with having the correct marketing slogans, we need to have one in the community that encourages them to hold. Having shirts that just say elongate etc is not good enough. Promote things such as “HODL” for all merchandise. In telegram and discord when there is a negative vibe, the mods should be promoting HOLDING. On all AMAs and all interviews, HODL should always be mentioned.
If you want to see an example, check out CELSIUS. Alex Mashinsky is a self made billionaire who is the creator of Celsius. In all his interviews he is very knowledgeable of the crypto space and tells all the investors to HODL. They believe in him as a leader first and foremost and that flows into the Celsius coin. Celsius has dropped from $8 to averaging around $6.70-$7.10 during this bear market. Why? Because of their tokenomics and their HODL community vibe.
It can’t be understated how much the community plays a part in this. If everyone held, technically the price should not drop. Obviously there will always be sellers but you can understand how important it is to tell your coin holders to HODL.
When you do AMAs or even come to chat, it’s better to instil the HODL mentality instead of providing them with reasons to hype the coin. Hype will follow when announcements are naturally made over time.
//// 4. Hype
Following into that, hype should not be done by the head team. You guys should only post clear announcement and dates. Please do not give unreasonable dates. If you can’t meet the deadline then use later dates. Failing to do so will ruin the trust and investors will not believe anything the team says in the future. Give news and let the community hype. If it’s worthy of it, then it’ll come. Giving secrets and making June 7 a massive thing was one of the biggest let downs I’ve seen since 2017. Some coins have missed huge milestones and deadlines but the way the team hyped up June 7 and failed to deliver was honestly embarrassing.
Again, keep the message conveyed clearly. If June 7 wasn’t a thing of its own then don’t use an infographic to show it as a separate announcement to billboards, influencers etc. I’m sure you know which tannic I’m talking about with the June 7 catalyst graph.
//// 5. Use cases to generate volume and a USP
VOLUME is the most important thing for this coin.
We need to find other use cases for the coin. Too many forks and copycat coins. Being the first does not guarantee success. Heard of Netscape and google? Google was nowhere near the first. New coins come in and take market share because they see what the old ones did wrong, they have new hype and blood and importantly for these types of coins it means more donations. Therefore they have the best of all worlds. They can compete all their new donations to ours and it will be more. Don’t rely on being the first and biggest charity coin. We need to start thinking of other ways to use our coin, besides people buying and holding. We need to generate VOLUME. It’s abysmal right now! There is no point holding elongate when you hardly get any reflections because of the horrible volume.
Some ideas for use cases:
// 5a. Flywheel. Introduce a flywheel similar to Celsius. (Google their flywheel.) * Using funds in the liquidity pool to buy back elongate. This will help push up the price. * The tokens will then be transferred in other processes such as community events.
// 5b. Community votes. The community should be able to vote in certain things such as marketing ideas, new innovative ideas (eg. release a new wallet), who yo villa collaborate with etc These votes should have weightings. For example the team can choose option A which will be weighted at 45% of the votes. There could be option A, B and C. The community would need to get over 45% of votes on another option to outweigh the dev team. This means that over 83.6% of the community need to vote for either option B or C which would be quite a high choice for many to over ride the teams option.
// 5c. Give aways and chance to join the OFFICIAL team. Tokens should not just be given out for watching stream etc, they should be given for valuable input from the community which may include but are not limited to: valuable input, amazing graphics, volunteered promotions, etc that all have high effect. Multiple instances or very effective inputs from community members would be recorded by the dev team back end and they can offer a role to these people in the community if wanted. This creates cohesion with the team and community.
//// 6. Team attitude and training
Companies grow by hiring people better than them. Some of the team are arrogant and think they know it all. We will never grow like this. Be humble and leave your ego out the door, there are always people smarter and better than you. What you should do is welcome them with open arms and get them to help you. This is how huge companies succeed.
If you see people with talent, make a team of them, not officially part of the team but keep them in a group and regularly interact with them to get their inputs.
The team needs to be trained on customer service. At the end of the day the moderation team are dealing with current, ex and potential investors. They need to know how to deal with people.
Too many times I’ve seen: * Aggressive moderators who wrongly ban and warn, * Straight out dismissing opinions of other people, * Cult like atmosphere in chats.
All these have negative impacts. Imagine being a potential investor coming to chat genuinely asking about how we compare to our competition only to be wrongly banned for life being told they’re shilling other coins. Well they might not even want to invest anymore if you can’t even participate in the community.
Acting like a cult dismissing other coins completely instead of welcoming genuine discussion is unhealthy. Does McDonalds kick you out of their store when you say the burgers are better somewhere else? What if you return a burger? Do they yell at you and kick you out. Customer service goes a long way. Investors are customers.
Just as customers grow the business and pays the workers, it keeps it going – the same way investors do for cryptocurrency coins or shares.
We need the team to be trained by one person who looks after all new recruits and teaches them customer service: * How to respond to negativity, * General responses to be professional, * How to take feedback and how to respond and forward it to higher ups, * How to answer questions, * When to warn and ban, * Certain use of words and language, * Cheat sheet for responses which can be modified to a personal level. * Regularly check the price of price bot. If it’s wrong, pause it. This will stop unwarranted fear that the price is lower than what it is.
//// 7. Honest and transparency.
All token burns and dates should be easily ready to be seen, listed in table format on the website. The website should have a no frills blog for announcements only. This blog should not be tainted with small headlines and news. It should be a place for only important information listed which can be found.
For example, burns, new projects, updates to these projects (wallet), AMA summaries, etc. Not stuff like AMA dates, Twitter competitions, etc You can ask the community for feedback but don’t take it just because, to make them happy.
For example I saw someone say “we did the marketing now on June 7 because the community kept rushing us”
You don’t make a decision due to customers telling you what to do. What you do however, is take it into account and then do what’s best in the business’ interest. To blindly do something because the community say would be immature and not looking after the business. The reason the community vote I said above would work, is because if you are happy to do ANY of option A, B or C. Then you do a vote for all three. But what you would not do is, list an option D for them if you don’t think it will ever work. Common sense.
//// 8. Media tool kit needs to be on the website.
Any community brand should have a media toolkit readily available on the website,
A png vector file of the logo should be made available for everyone at the minimum. Any other important marketing material should be organised and easily downloadable here too.
//// 9. Main listings on Binance and Coinbase.
I told everyone that the LBank listing wouldn’t do anything but nobody believed me. We are in a bear market and it’s not the first listing.
BitMart pumped as we were in a bull market but more importantly it was the first place people could buy the token who didn’t know how to use or were scared to use PCS.
Binance and Coinbase should be the main goal for listings as these two sites have PUMPED every single coin that’s been listed on it on the day. Not only that, they have sustained the price long term as they are the biggest and most trusted exchanges - listing on there shows that we are a serious and “safe” trusted coin.
Binance also has many competitions and their marketing to push campaigns for coins listed is unmatched. Being a BEP20 coin this would be the perfect listing which would really be advantageous for us exposure wise and for price growth.
We need to make sure when we list there, we have campaigns running (such as competitions for high volume) and they hype the listing up for us.
//// 10. Team should not bad mouth other projects.
Keep it professional. Don’t accuse, don’t say things you don’t have 100% proof of. Don’t make enemies. It can come back 100x fold.
Whatever you need to say, hold it in, as a company it’s not even worth it and will cause more issues than solutions.
This concludes my post, I have tried to write this up in the little time I have. If you have any questions then please feel free to message me.
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