Letter from a Shareholder

I love letters from our shareholders. Sometimes the answers involve information that, to be fair to all investors and prospective investors, should be published to everybody at the same time. Sometimes there are great suggestions that everybody should think about. Thus this post.

Ryan P writes (and I’ve slightly edited):

In a previous email Rob informed us that we were trying to impress
potential investors in a short time span. This span ends June 15th: Have we impressed them? Also I’m curious if iConsumer makes money yet, if it’s in the green? If not when is it expected to?

We’re certainly trying to impress, and better numbers help. It takes a lot of time to get potential investors to say “yes” (or “no”). Which means I can’t answer definitely if it worked. Nobody has written a really big check yet, so we’re still doing next to no marketing. We had two conferences in that span of time. We’ve planted the seeds.

Financial types love iConsumer, but generally can’t get over the fact that we’re neither fish nor fowl. We’re too small for most of the folks who care about public companies. And venture investors don’t like the fact that we’re already public.

iConsumer needs about 20,000 more shoppers to be “in the green”, or as I would say, in the black. I figure it’ll take about $1,000,000 dollars invested to get us there. We’re telling prospective investors that we expect to be cash flow positive within a year of raising that money.

Ryan continues:

I’ve been checking iConsumer on review sites and there are very few reviews, and a lot are negative. Meaning only people with bad experiences are taking time to review us. iConsumer has the largest rebate with over 80% of the retailers it works with, and we are over 50,000 strong. We need to flood these review sites with positive 5 star ratings, and leave detailed upbeat reviews.

We certainly don’t control what and where people write reviews. If you could drop a note to support talking about where you saw negative reviews, we’ll see if there’s anything we can do.

For positive reviews, that depends on our users. Sounds like we should have an email or two asking our members and shareholders to write something good about us. Again, when you write us that note, could you suggest the review sites you find credible?

Ryan’s concluding thoughts:

I would like to put my cash back, back into iConsumer, it would be awesome if there was a stock option included instead of the Cash and bitcoin rebate. It would increase the volume of our stock that is traded, and if we could choose the price we buy at with a minimum price set at current trading value I wouldn’t be against buy-in $25 of our stock at a price that is a 3,4, or 5 cents higher than current value. With over 50,000 investors, seems like it could add up quickly.

Just some thoughts, wish everyone the best,

Ryan P

We’ve gotten several requests to allow folks to reinvest like this, but we’ve been concentrating on some other issues (like requalification). Now that we’re through that process, we’re going to work on all of the stuff that makes it easy for ordinary people to invest in iConsumer, including reinvesting.

As to the price, we’re limited in how we can set the price by SEC rules. Basically, we cannot price “at the market”, we can only sell our stock (that’s really what reinvesting is, we’re selling, you’re buying) at the price outlined in the offering. Which is $.15/share. Changing that price more than 20% up or down is a “big deal”.

Until we figure out how to take your cash back balance and allow you to buy stock, you can help iConsumer and other shareholders by buying shares in the open market, plus you’ll get some interesting experience. Open a TD Ameritrade account (or almost any brokerage firm) and buy 100 shares (or more!). Yesterday’s close was at $.12/share. 100 Shares = $12 bucks plus about a $6 commission. We like TD Ameritrade because they’re reliably making it easy for stock members have earned to be deposited into their brokerage account.

Which gets us back to the first point. The more activity there is in our stock (buying and selling) the easier it will be for us to raise money.

Thanks, Ryan, for your great questions, suggestions, and observations.