Good news, and more waiting for the SEC
Three years ago we set out to create a crowdfunded startup with a million shareholders. To give the 99% a chance to be involved, learn, and potentially profit from the process. That meant submitting ourselves to SEC oversight and ultimately having tradeable stock – RWRDP.
Overall, I’m pleased. We’re seeing rather amazing new member conversion statistics. That is, new members are shopping and earning us money faster and more substantially than we have a right to expect.
I think that’s in great part due to the fact that we’ve gone through all of the pain to be SEC regulated. I believe our customers and shareholders find the level of scrutiny we’ve undergone to be a good thing, and they honor us by shopping sooner and shopping more.
We’re waiting on the SEC for our next offering to be qualified to raise more money to fund our member growth. That’s frustrating It means we’re not spending money on member acquisition, so we’re not growing like we could. Once the SEC qualifies our offering, the challenge (and it’s a really good challenge) will be to scale our efforts while maintaining the profitability of new members.
For the first time in three years, all the pieces of the iConsumer puzzle are in place. Most importantly, our stock is trading (lightly, but trading). You can see what people are buying and selling it for at any time of the day or night.
Here’s the best news: Our members who earned stock prior to February 13, 2018 can now have that stock issued and transferred to a stock broker, so if they want, they can sell it. Or, as some people are doing, buying more. Click this link to find out the three easy steps to being able to trade your stock. We’re not saying you should be trading. We’re just about making trading possible.
The transition to Bitcoin has worked well. We’ve begun transferring Bitcoin to the folks who have earned it. We’ve introduced a new member referral program that leverages the fact that customers are earning Bitcoin and our equity every time they shop. Bitcoin has made us a truly international business. We continue to add stores outside of the U.S. to take advantage of this change.
Now we get to truly test our basic thesis: Is ownership truly the ultimate loyalty program?
These are exciting days. The economy continues to benefit us, we’ve built a loyal base of customer / shareholders, and we’re all set to raise some more money to actually take advantage of all that we’ve built together.
Making iConsumer truly big takes you
It’s our members and shareholders who can make us a success. Old fashioned word of mouth. It’ll be your telling friends about iConsumer, about how they’ll have the chance to learn about owning Bitcoin and shares in a publicly traded company, simply for shopping, that takes us to the next level.
iConsumer isn’t about theory. You earn real Bitcoin for referring friends. Your friends earn real Bitcoin and RWRDP, just for shopping. You can see RWRDP quoted on SEC regulated markets. You can see the price go up and down. Try to guess whether the price is going to go up or down (I check it several times a day). You can hold it in SEC and FINRA regulated brokerage accounts. If you want to try to make money trading it, go for it. If you think you’ll make money holding it, go for it.
Everyday I try to make iConsumer worth more. You can do that too. Just by shopping and telling friends. Whether or not the market recognizes that worth is part of the excitement.
What’s the SEC hold up?
The SEC’s mandate is to protect investors. As part of that, they want to make sure that iConsumer has appropriately and correctly filed the right paperwork. Right now, that’s an Offering Circular (an SEC Form 1/A). Until they’ve completed examining that filing, and determined that we’ve crossed the T’s and dotted the I’s to their satisfaction, they won’t “qualify” us. And without that qualification, we’re not allowed to do all sorts of things, including issuing you shares for purchases that happened after February 13, 2018.
Throughout this process of making 1,000,000 ordinary people shareholders, the SEC has been great. They seem to want the same things we do. But we’re doing things that have never been done before (especially the Bitcoin and blockchain stuff), and they’re being understandably careful.
Right now, they’ve provided comments, we’ve responded, they’ve provided more comments, we’ve responded, and now, even more comments, and we’re working on our responses. Part of what we need to include in our next revision of our filing are our audited 2017 financial statements, which will be ready later in April.
Patting self on back time: While iConsumer is still very much “early stage” and highly speculative, we’re doing our best to be transparent. And to make it so that ordinary Americans can invest in iConsumer. We file SEC mandated audited financial statements and interim unaudited statements. We’re trying to be a model of what a company built by the customer, owned by the customer, looks like.
