Giving no F(xxx) about Voice.com and so should you
Dumping most likely north of 250Million of funding into being late to the party.
Yes, I know starting with bold statement can shoot the opposite way. Most people who know me in person would say, I am not the person who does that. In general when something new launches in the Blockchain and Crypto space I am excited and positive, but what BlockOne is doing here with Voice.com is complete, not understandable. In simple terms, they are late to the party, and no one is telling them so decide to do that and be happy to be converted.
Being late to the party
For once people involved in Cryptocurrencies and the Blockchain space tend not to be late to the party either early to the game. But what BlackOne is doing here with there idea of building “another social network” is just ridiculous, and it seems like more a reaction of having a “shitload of money” available and something needs to be done with it.
The verdict Voice.com
For a start, they spent 30 Million USD on the domain voice.com. One lesson learned in the past, domain names doe not matter as much as people think especially in the age of mobile is king. The lesson learned functionality does matter more. When I heard for the first time BlockOne’s plans launching a social network, I rubbed my head. The reason for this is that space is so crowded and “just” starting a social network does not work out in nearly most of the cases. Having money is not always the advantage to win the game, its passion and uniqueness.
We have seen it in the past for 1 Instagram hundreds of social network platforms which started had to fail, its finding a needle in a haystack. Last cycles success snapchat has a hard now, having made it for some time and allowed early investors to cash in big time. A new star in the social network world is TIKTOK. TIKTOK is unique and has for my taste not much to do with any traditional social network which, according to the information voice.com will be. TIKTOK is the anti-Instagram where only the rich and famous get followers versus on TIKTOK it’s not so much about the looks (at the moment) more about what you do.
3 Points why Voice Will fail (personal opinion)
- Voice.com will need people to go through a KYC/AML process, which is bringing a lot of hurdles into the onboarding process
- Voice.com will try most likely to attract existing stars from of Social Media Platform and lure them in by rewarding them for “transferring” their userbase over to voice.com and incentive the Influencers to do so. This may bring the most for short term growth. Implementing growth mechanisms like this does make sticky users who ar are coming back again and again and again. Influencers will after having gotten there referral commission most likely utilize voice.com just as another outlet where content will simply be repopulated.
- Voice.com is simply too late to the party and imagine there was once G+ from Google which got initial nice traction but died out very quickly. Googles success in social networks is and simply was always youtube.
Things in mind why they do this
I personally do not understand what was in the minds of BlockOnes Management when they made the decision, but I assume someone like Brendan Blumer came up with the idea himself (i consider him as a smart person) and no one of the executive team wanted to argue with the guy who provides and feeds them with the millions (billions) he raised for BlockOne. As they have a ton of cash, a ton of things can be tried out. And who am I to judge I did not pull off a 4 Billion dollar raise.
SUMMARY
All overall, that amount of money will go in development and marketing, and it will generate jobs. For the greater good, it will provide a livelihood for families at least :).
My prediction is, the social network voice.com will 99% fail once hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into it. Big splashing, flashing and showbusiness as its know in crypto land where no one cared about the product and users (in most cases beside exchanges) isn’t the game one can play in 2020 and especially when wanting to get a foothold in the social network space.
I would like to see pitching them Voice.com to any VC, I assume most will say, guys, you are late to the party. We will see what will happen with voice.com over the next 24 to 30 month and if I been completely wrong or even myself got converted to voice.com as it is the most significant and most excellent experience unseen so far.