Hi all,

I haven’t been an active poster on the forum throughout my poker career, so to the forum regulars I might be unknown. But in the poker community I’ve met many of the poker nomads across the world. Plus I’ve played high volume mid stakes cash-games, so many of you might know some of my screennames.

I’ve played online poker for approx 8 years, with my main games NLHE 6max & HU cg. My last & best 2 years of poker were 2015/2016. My main stake was NL1k in those glory years. Some screennames you might know are: £uND€rcoverr (PS), Khaliesje (PS.it), v1cto1re (PS.fr) Ciro1234 (Ipoker.it), sl1pp1nJ1MMY (888) , ch1angma1gr1nd (Partypoker)

I liked to be a hero in my days: https://www.weaktight.com/h/5859b763d39043073f8b4862

I moved away from online poker to start a business.

In 2017 I was heavily involved in cryptocurrency (as a lot of you were). I founded AirdropAlert.com in that period and it’s been a crazy ride ever since. Other sites owned by AirdropAlert are BountiesAlert.com & Airdropster.com. More sites are in development to capitalize on the traffic we already receive. Despite the bear market of 2018, we’re always able to attract new users to our platform.

What makes us stand out? We are the first mover and therefor we created a whole new space.

That has some advantages to come with it. Past year we served over 200 clients, including Waves, BRD & Nexo. Key partnerships are established with DDEX, Mazee & Civic. The bigger media outlets spotted our growth & niche and mentioned AirdropAlert in their publications, including Bloomberg, Wired & Bitcoin.com.

Funfact: AirdropAlert.com reached visitors from every country in the world.

Right now, we are at a crossroads. Do we scale or maintain?

Scaling will mean accepting outside investment for the first time to invest in team / marketing / user acquisition. Which will put is in a much better position to capitalize when the crypto market turns around.

Or do we keep our current team as it is (5 employees, 8 contractors) and maintain or market position, focus on quality content and wait for an upswing.

To run a team like we have now can be challenging already. Scaling our team will add new levels to running a company. It will also require some fund raising, which will be a whole new game of preparing financials, pitching and investor relations.

I feel like this spot is comparable to getting staked/coached in poker to move up in stakes and would like to hear your opinion on it.

New challenges should be welcomed.

That is certainly true.

Accepting investments often results in selling equity of the company.

That's why I compared it to staking deals in poker. Where you get better faster, move up in stakes but give up some % of your profits. In poker it also took me quite some time to take that step. Eventually that turned out as a key point in my career.

With investors, it is not per se that they will help us grow. However the investment allows us to scale the team with people who will increase the growth.

The involvement depends on which type of investment route we take
- Private/friends
- Angel investors
- VC's

VC's are often more strategic, but I hear there is huge variance in the involvement of VCs's

If you were very profitable during the greatest fraudulent ICO ponzi bubble we're ever likely to see, why do you need investment money?

If you weren't very profitable during the greatest ICO ponzi bubble we're ever likely to see, then what is scaling up going to achieve?

Perhaps I misunderstand the nature of what you do, but your business model appears to involve collecting the drippings from (and promoting) something that's not terribly different from scams and ponzis. I don't think that's long term sustainable.

If your business was more mainstream crypto I'd definitely say get investor money and keep your business going longer/get to size in case mainstream crypto roars back. But I'm not sure there's a big growing future in (these particular) scams and ponzis.

We had very high rev in 2018, however running a start up will rack up the cost, espes in the crypto sphere. Accountant, lawyers, tax advisers, corporate advisers you name it.

Having a crypto start up, gave us some initial hick ups as well, we weren't able to open a bank account with any of the mayor banks in The Netherlands. Even though we are not an ICO ourself, anything blockchain related just got a instant red flag.

Therefor for a very long period, we weren't able to swap crypto to euro's, without getting into personal tax situations. Or, we were advised not to. Therefor company liquidity dropped a lot with the bear market. We were finally able to open a bank account in September, but the biggest damage to liquidity was already done.

As for ICO's, we have a due diligence team of 3 people and a 4 eye principle to make sure no scams get listed on our platform. As they have read over 2000 whitepapers each, we can comfortably say they are as close to expert you can get in this field. Currently ICO's are our bigger clients, but Airdrops are not only an ICO marketing tool. Actually the concept of give-aways is broadly used everywhere. You ever get free samples while walking down the street?
We are marketing towards clients and businesses that are post-ICO, or not even do/did an ICO at all and we will help this space to grow beyond just an tool for ICO's.

We are also building several other platforms within crypto, that have nothing to do with ICO's at all. Are platform is great for "beginners" to get into crypto. We will guide them through the beginners steps and introduce them to our other platforms later.

nicely seo'd spam

The goal wasn't to SEO this, but I'll take all the backlinks we can create right?

Nice forum alias btw

Just being honest and say you profit off of promoting scams to fish. Your explanations of the business are so facile there is also a chance you are honest but too dumb to see the scam.

The next scam airdrop/ICO bubble comes *after* this current one crashes fully, purges, recriminations and lawsuits settle, etc. Set your calender's for 2024+

I understand the "negative" opinion some might have about ICO's. But to claim all ICO's/Airdrops are scams, is similar to saying all pokerplayers are gamble addicts.

Remember when you could accidentally get a computer virus if you clicked on the wrong link. Were all links virusses at that point?

I know it's dangerous to compare apples with oranges like this, but hopefully my point is clear.

Yes, there have been scams amongst Airdrops & ICO's. Like anything on the internet that is new, people find ways to exploit the "fish". It will evolve once the market is more mature imo and we already see it evolving actually.

Stellar, a top 10 coin, is currently doing an Airdrop in collab with Blockchain.com the biggest Bitcoin Wallet provider. I doubt anyone would claim that's not legit.

Going with half too dumb to see things and half a scam promoter. But it doesn't matter because the market is 'evolving' and if you weren't scamming people someone else would be. Cool.

Also learned top 10 coins are legit by definition.

*Should note I am parasitic draw on these same fish

I would not scale bigger. The crypto space no longer has the hype it once has. It looks to me that your business model is to advertise airdrops for crypto coins in exchange for money from the companies doing the airdrop. Is this correct? What exactly would scaling larger accomplish?

Also, you're lucky a mod hasn't penalized you for posting links. I always got my posts deleted and faced infractions from linking to my own pages even when I wasn't selling anything. I still have an infraction with no expiration date and it never goes away.

The links have a nofollow tag so backlinking won't work this way.