Opporty - a new marketplace for small businesses on the blockchain

According to statistics, less than 10% of startups can hold out on the market for more than one year. The main reason for their failure is the inability to find loyal customers. This may be due to the fact that the company chose a product that is not in demand in the market. Nobody buys such a product, and therefore the company fails.

However, most often another reason is fatal to businesses. The more developed the market, the stronger the competition, the more difficult it is to attract the attention of the target audience and bring your product to the target customers. This is relevant, even if the product is ahead of the competitors in a number of characteristics, whether it is a product or a service. Production of a higher quality product implies high costs, especially in cases where production is not yet mass. In these conditions, we often observe that a small business is running out of steam and does not always survive.

In these conditions, there is a significant difference in the behavior of the business.
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Unlike small businesses, large companies can use brand awareness as well as substantial promotion resources to bring an innovative product to the market. They already have some pool of loyal customers.

At the same time, customers are much more cautious in responding to a new product, which is produced by a small, unknown company. There are several reasons for this:

• A small business is known for a limited circle of clients;
• Small businesses do not have the resources to promote a product;
• Small business loses due to the low efficiency and randomness of the processes (more on this later.)

This example is well seen in the US market in the competition of law firms of 1 to 5 people with giants such as LegalZoom or RocketLawyer. The same thing happens in the shipping market. The most obvious example is supermarket chains and small retail outlets and Uber-like companies.

So how can a small law firm compete with entire corporations? To survive, such a company must:

• Work actively on reputation: make sure that potential customers trust it;
• Find a way to effectively lead generation: not to buy leads, but to attract them organically (for example, through content and expertise);
• Strengthen business standards, which will increase the overall efficiency of processes, reduce costs and increase profits.

It is these three business objectives that Opporty helps to solve.

What is opporty?

Opporty is a service marketplace on the blockchain, which helps small companies solve all the problems listed above. This is achieved through several elements:

• Ecosystem of suggestions, requests and responses;
• Knowledge sharing platform;
• Smart contracts implemented for small business operations

Opporty not only creates the conditions for small companies to significantly reduce the cost of finding and converting new customers, but also makes litigation impractical. And now in order.

Ecosystem of proposals, requests and responses

Offers (offers), requests (requests) and responses (responses) are used by registered companies, service providers (for example, these can be freelancers or contractors) and customers.

If the service provider wants to reach potential customers, he leaves the offer with the terms of cooperation, collects feedback, and then selects the best offer.

In case a company needs to find a service provider, it leaves a request, also collects feedback and selects the best offer.

The system is simple but effective. Its main advantage is that the offers and requests are as targeted as possible and are shown only to those to whom they can be really interesting. In addition, during registration, each user receives a free package of offers, and requests are free for the duration of the entire use of the platform. This reduces costs, as now companies do not need to buy leads and compete with those who “scan” the market, filling the price with a lead.

Question : If creating ads is allowed by everything, what is the difference between Opporty?

Knowledge sharing platform

Suggestions, requests and responses are only the first stage of a real conversion to Opporty (although you can find customers in non-competitive niches).

To increase your chance of getting a lead, the user can work on their reputation and rating on the platform. This is where the “Knowledge Sharing Platform” comes in handy. The essence of her work is simple:

• Every registered business has a certain expertise;
• To get leads, you can share this expertise through content (for example, publishing articles, answering questions, etc.);
• The more expertise is shown to users, the greater the likelihood that when choosing a company or service provider, users will choose you.

(If you paid attention, then Habrahabr is just such a platform for generating and sharing knowledge in the IT industry.)

By sharing their experience and knowledge, users not only gain a reputation, but receive OPP tokens, using which you can purchase additional offers (announcements for the provision or the search for a contractor for the execution of the service). Also, you can rent an additional advertising space, place your company in the top, etc.

There are already 10 active contributors on the knowledge sharing platform who regularly post their research, useful articles and case studies. Although we did not have time to seriously engage in the promotion of this decision (now all the forces go to the upcoming ICO), the platform works and attracts new users who are looking for useful, niche content. This ensures high attendance of the resource and its popularity in the Internet. Traffic at Opporty.com is increasing smoothly. New businesses are added daily. This happens in the passive mode, since we are busy with others now, but we are counting on explosive growth in the near future, when we switch to the promotion of the project.

Escrow and smart contracts

Opporty offers support for escrow judges and business oriented smart contracts for small businesses. It means that:

• Companies get an effective tool for standardization of business processes, which by default is implemented in the platform. Although companies can operate without smart contracts, offers and requests from users who support smart contracts will be ranked higher in the Opporty internal search.
• Companies quickly solve problems. If there is a disagreement about the interpretation of the terms of the contract or its execution, the disgruntled party initiates an escrow procedure, using Oracle and the possibility of completely or partially canceling the transaction. Independent escrow judges decide the case. Such a system allows to achieve resolution of previously intractable conflict situations.
• Companies reduce costs by gaining access to bulk standardized orders. Smart contracts are programmed using the usual if-else conditions, breaking the process into understandable stages of work, thereby reducing the likelihood of non-compliance with the conditions of any of the parties.

Opporty features

Although Opporty is now actively working on the launch of ICO, we are a living, working platform, and are not raising money for a non-existent project. Currently, Opporty has more than 1000 verified service providers in more than 286 cities. Also on the site are already present users who post content. Their number is still small, but it is increasing, in fact, without any effort on our part.

We are constantly refining the platform and adding new functionality. Since January 2017, developers have been releasing monthly platform updates.

Team

The development and promotion of Opporty employs 25 professionals in various fields. Most of the team are developers whose goal is to create the basis for smart contracts, prepare the necessary functionality and support Opporty blockchain solutions. We are working hard towards our goal of creating a service marketplace with deep integration of blockchain technologies that will help solve the real problems of small and medium businesses.

Consultants

In addition to the core staff, we are assisted by 16 IT professionals, cryptocurrency, blockchain, artificial intelligence, marketing, and management. Some of our consultants are: Wulf Kaal, Elie Galam, Sead Muftic, Esteban Van Goor, Marc Kenigsberg. You can read more about them here .

To summarize, we can say the following about us:

1. The project has a strong MVP version , which is already successfully validated by users.
2. Own team with relevant experience in developing and promoting large projects.
3. Strong and large team of advisors in relevant areas.
4. Previous experience in management and entrepreneurship, which allowed us to grow to 50 people and successfully operate in several countries.
5. Own funds on which we build and develop this project. If we imagine that ICO will not happen, then the project will still live and develop.

Today, October 19, 2017, our tokens start Whitelisted Presale . To sign up for participation, you need to fill out a form on our website .

Thanks for attention!

PS: I am ready to answer all the questions in the comments. Fidbek is welcome.