The journey begins for real.  What came before was only prelude.

Exactly three years ago this month we started out to create a company owned by 1,000,000 ordinary people.

That possibility is now real.  The final milestone for the first part of the journey has been passed.  We’re publicly traded. Our stock is being bought and sold on the market.  You can see real-time pricing.  Thanks to all of our customers, shareholders and shareholders in waiting, our teams, our professionals and our families for helping to make that happen.

We went on this journey because the well-educated, well-positioned young millennials in my extended family felt disenfranchised.  They felt the world was conspiring against them; that they could never find a good job; that they couldn’t have a life as good as their parents’.  They didn’t feel a part of the economic fabric of our society.  And I believed we could change that feeling, if only we could give them a chance to participate, for free.

We started because we wanted the challenge to make 1,000,000 ordinary people shareholders in one of the most widely-held companies ever.

We wanted to see if we could all make money doing it.

We wanted to make a dent in the universe.

The founding belief was simple.  If we could make every customer a shareholder, and every shareholder a customer, we could build a terrific business together.  If customers owned a stake in the outcome, they’d be more active, they’d recruit more customers, and they’d have more loyalty.  A formula for success.

And we had the perfect business model to make this possible.  Online shopping and rewards.  Earn ownership in iConsumer for referring friends and shopping.

The laws changing made it possible to economically and quickly reach for this goal….or so we thought.  The JOBS Act of 2012 meant we could legally and frugally build a business that could have 1,000,000 shareholders in a short period of time.  We were wrong.  It wasn’t fast or cheap.  But, we finally did it.

We can finally start.  Because we’re real.  Our stock is trading as RWRDP.  You can buy it, you can sell it.  Today, you can transfer the stock we’ve issued you to TD Ameritrade, and let them try to sell it for you.  You might not get the price you want, and it may take longer than you want to sell, but you have the ability to buy and sell our stock.

Before this month we were merely promises.  We’re grateful that 50,000 people joined to test us out, even before we were complete.  We tried lots of things – some worked, some didn’t.  But all of the things we tried were hobbled by the fact that the basic value proposition, earning traded equity as a reward, didn’t yet exist.  Before today was only prelude.  Today, we’re able to reward ordinary people for their shopping with publicly traded and quoted equity.

Now it gets fun.  We don’t lack challenges ahead.  Can we increase our stock price?  Can we actually build a really big business with lots of shareholders?  Can we make it easier for shareholders to buy and sell our stock?  Can we raise the money we need to grow to take advantage of three years of prelude?

You can help.  There are at least four ways:

• Go sell some of your stock.  Our biggest challenge is liquidity.  Nobody wants to sell, or it was too hard to sell (and it’s impractical for me to sell at this point).  Just to be clear, the price may go up or down after you sell it.  This is not investment advice (I want the price to go up).
• Go buy some of our stock.  In theory, the more people who want to buy our stock, the more likely the price is to go up.  The higher the stock price, the more likely people are to want to sell their stock.  And that helps to solve our liquidity challenge.  Just to be clear, the price may go up or down after you buy.   This is not investment advice (I want the price to up).
• Go shop.  We make money.  You get deals.  You get Bitcoin.  You get stock.  Our making money helps your company become more valuable.
• Tell friends to join and shop.  You make Bitcoin when they shop, and you make more when they shop more.  They get Bitcoin and stock.  We make money.  And that helps your company become more valuable.

SEC update.  We’ve submitted a new version of our offering to the SEC.  There is a reasonable chance they will qualify it this month.  It’s changed somewhat from the last version.  We’ve removed most of the discussion about the issuance of our own crypto token.  We changed the minimum investment to $100.  The price per share at which we’ll be selling is still $.15.  Lastly, we added some data on how our Bitcoin transition went in its first month, with a focus on new customer profitability.  The money we raise from this offering is meant to help us grow, mostly through customer acquisition.