AMA with Presearch.io CEO Colin Pape (full script)

On Jan 9 we’ve had a very informative AMA with Colin Pape (CEO of PResearch.io)

Below please find the chat script in chronological order:

#1

Q: How can you describe Presearch.io in a single sentence

A: Presearch is building a decentralized search engine, powered by the community, that rewards you with crypto when you search.

#2

Q: Can you please summarize the top 3 use cases for PRE token?

A: Immediate major use case is staking to receive free traffic. The new platform is going live on January 29th: https://medium.com/@presearch/what-is-keyword-staking-b063324a2e85

PRE will be consumed during the purchase of ads, though this is in phase two of the ad platform release.

Providers and projects who wish to participate within the Presearch Ecosystem must purchase tokens for the number of services we offer. Visit https://store.presearch.org/product-category/services/ for a list and pricing.

#3

Q: Colin, why you decided to start a marketing campaign now? And what types of marketing channels you’re planning to utilize?

A: We will also be undertaking paid campaigns with channels like Quora, Twitter, and Instagram. We’ll be using our email list of 1.3m registered users. We’ve just started sending out emails this week. Lots more on the horizon that we’ll be talking about as well.

#4

Q: What is the potential market for Presearch? How many people care about privacy and how many people care about blockchain companies?

A: The search market is massive: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-09/alphabet-nears-1-trillion-value-on-rising-ad-growth-optimism?srnd=markets-vp

We are the current leaders in the search space within the crypto sector and we now have all of the foundational elements in place to go-to-market. We expect big things.

We just published this blog post the other day: https://medium.com/@presearch/keyword-advertising-a-100-billion-dollar-opportunity-380739dc422f?

#5

Q: For the search engine you will need a lot of cloud capacity, both storage and compute (inventory of indexes, …) and with a high service level. How do you think to achieve that?

A: Absolutely. We’re working on a model that will use IPFS and nodes installed as part of our browser/browser extension that will enable users to crawl the web as they surf and be compensated in PRE.

This crawled information will then be sent to another layer of nodes that will index and distribute that index to local datastores using excess datacenter capacity in exchange for PRE. There are many up and coming technologies that we’re watching and believe that in the next 18–24 months there will be some significant technological breakthroughs that we’ll be able to take advantage of.

In the meantime, we’re mainly focused on user acquisition, token economics and go-to-market strategy knowing that as the tech matures, we’ll be able to implement it to a huge audience in a working token-denominated ecosystem.

#6

Q: Who are your main competitors? What stands you out from them?

A: Google, for sure. They are dominant obviously and it’s tough to beat them from a user experience standpoint, but we think that with our community packages, which we’ll be focusing a lot more attention on in the next 3–6 months, that we’ll be able to create a bunch of really compelling on-site experiences that will enable us to be highly competitive and possibly superior with the depth of offerings.

Think all of the tools they have built-in now — weather, flight status, sports scores, etc.

You can see an example of ours here for crypto: https://dsearch.com/search?q=bitcoin

There are tons of other places we can go deeper with community participation.

#7

Q: How will Presearch operate as a community-driven company? User polls? And will token ownership allow some to have a louder voice?

A: To start, I’m super active in Telegram and we’ve invested heavily in that channel and being open to community contributions. That ‘staking’ graphic in the blog post above was created by a community member who I just saw join your channel, for instance — Aloha, Todd!

We are launching on Monday a new Trello board that will enable the community to participate more actively in the future of Presearch.

Also, through the community package program that I linked to above on Github.

In the future through the task pool concept, we’ll enable more participation in order to create and promote the service.

#8

Q: Why your search implementation would not work without a separate token (e.g. using BTC/ETH chain or without it at all) and how your search compares with other search engines (core business)?

A: The PRE token with a fixed supply is the key to closing the circular economy of the platform, similar to Brave. We reward people with PRE and sponsors pay for ads / buy tokens to stake, closing the demand side of the equation.

Running it with an external token would be very difficult as there would be no way to force demand.

It is also key to our brand and to marketing within the crypto sphere. Having a token listing on CMC is an advantage over a non-tokenized project.

There is a significant utility to the platform and its multi-search UI, however, especially in the early days, the token rewards are the main attraction.

It gives the community an incentive to promote and use the platform and helps them benefit from the project’s success. It wouldn’t be possible if we were just giving out BTC or ETH.

And the ultimate implementation with nodes will absolutely require a token to incentivize that layer of participation as well.

#9

Q: How do you plan to enter the search field in non-English native languages?

A: We already have some localized Telegram groups and meetups that have sprung up.

We are big in Central / South America — the heart of crypto adoption due to their economic challenges already — where they speak Spanish and Portuguese. Users are running browser plugins that automatically translate the site.

We have localized providers like amazon.com.br for instance that are options. There will be more localized language specific collections of resources in the future.

The plan is to empower local advocates to start building out usage through the referral program. One of our community members, Tor, in France is building presearch.fr as a French info page for the service, for example.

Ultimately, there will be fully localized versions with all local-oriented default provider collections.

#10

Q: When do you plan on releasing updated white paper and roadmap? Or is that put on pause, for now, to see how “keyword staking” goes?

A: The updated white paper and roadmap will be out ahead of the launch of the keyword staking platform.

We are very bullish on the Keyword Staking model and think it’s going to take off really well.

We are targeting affiliate marketers, so we don’t need to go directly to companies to get them to advertise / stake, and will be building out a bunch of content around how to stake, which keywords to choose, connecting people with solid affiliate offers, etc., to really drive adoption.

Here’s some more info in a blog post that we’ve drafted but haven’t published yet:

https://medium.com/@presearch/your-staking-strategy-242aca2f6e8d

https://medium.com/@presearch/the-presearch-affiliate-opportunity-7a20d18b6b1c

#11

Q: Do you consider Tor browser a competitor in a way, given that it is also privacy centered? If yes what is your competitive edge, just the fact that Tor has a bad reputation and the fact that Presearch pays its user or something else as well?

A: I don’t think it’s a competitor — that’s the really nice thing about not being purely browser dependent and being able to work within any internet-connected browser — people can choose whichever platform they want to use to access the property.

#12

Q: Several questions about revenue, how many searches do you currently get per day, how much do you get paid per 1,000 searches, who pays you that revenue and how much revenue do you make per month currently?

A: Currently around 300k through the platform. Was at over 2m per day before we implemented an anti-abuse platform last February. We’re working back up to that level and are seeing great growth over the past few weeks, even through Christmas, since changing the terms of our referral program, ramping up marketing, etc. Hoping to be over 400k this month.

Making about $18 per 1,000 queries right now. We get it through some search monetization partners powered by Google and Bing currently. We’re shifting more and more traffic over to Dsearch where that monetization takes place and is on track for about $30k in monthly revenue through that channel in January which is around breakeven. We just launched it in November, so it’s still early days for optimization and is growing rapidly.

#13

Q: When you’re planning the next listing? What exchange? Thanks

A: There’s a new Probit BTC pairing coming in the next 7 days, and after that Kucoin within the first quarter. We have not focused on exchanges so far and our HitBTC listing was done by a community member, for instance. We haven’t wanted to go there until we really had the organic demand loop closed through the ad/keyword staking platform. Now that the gap is almost closed, we’re having those conversations to increase people’s ability to buy and sell the PRE token commodity given for rewards and needed for staking.

#14

Q: So far it seems to me that Presearch aims to become major/mainstream in the search engine industry. However, I don’t think any project stemming from crypto which aims to disrupt a more traditional/legacy industry has had mainstream success. How do you plan to accomplish becoming mainstream and not being seen or dismissed as a niche browser for crypto people?

A: We’ve been approached by several large corporations (mainly due to users in tech roles) with thousands of employees, and they’ve asked about getting a preconfigured version of Presearch with the ability to search all of the different resources that their employees might want to use (ex. searching a company intranet or an industry-specific database), and with the set up that the company would get the tokens generated by their employees.

That’s a really interesting strategy as well…

Right now, we are largely focused on the crypto sphere and figure we’ll be able to get to 5m users, just like Brave did in their early days, over the next 12–18 months.

#15

Q: What are your personal favorite coins within the industry? :)

A: BTC, BNB, BAT, ETH, HOT (Holo), Dash, personally. Probably forgetting a few.

Love anyone who’s pioneering real-world usage in the utility token sector though. I know many of you like DENT, and I can see the appeal. It seems like a great model there.

1UP — Uptrennd has a great utility token for its community.

#16

Q: Beyond the 6–18 month “keyword staking” trial period what ideas might be implemented regarding staking? Such as if someone stakes 1 million on a word and they get a click on their ad will some of the 1 million PRE be then used as pay-per-click reducing the staking to below 1 million on that word? Not sure if I explained this well. And what new token uses can you share that might happen in the future?

A: Yes, that’s it exactly as the long-term destination. We ran some experiments there with our interstitial ads and some text link ads as a consumptive model but realized that staking was a much better way to front-load demand and complete the token ecosystem in the earliest days of the project.

The next phase will likely be a split traffic model — ex. top staker gets 50% of traffic, all stakers get a pro-rata share of the remaining 50%.

Then, as the project is running out of tokens to issue for rewards, etc., we’ll start switching to more of a consumptive model, with a percentage paid to the user, the node/infrastructure providers and a minority percentage retained by the project to fund marketing and operations.

#17

Q: What should happen for you to unlock the remaining supply?

A: We will have a schedule for token minting in the revised white paper. We are taking suggestions right now. Some have suggested 200m per year. Others, tying it just to rewards or to a number of tokens staked. At some point, we’ll need to mint more tokens, but when we do we’ll do it in a way that doesn’t impact the supply. What Ripple does, for instance, is crazy. We’ve already learned a hard lesson about too many tokens in the wild or too concentrated with the large buyer/seller last year and will not be repeating anything like that again. In the meantime, anyone buying now is reaping the rewards of that situation.

#18

Q: Why did you decide to build Presearch, what’s your mission behind it, is it because of a personal experience you had?

A: My other company, ShopCity.com, ran into a challenge with Google back in 2011 and it opened our eyes to just how much power they have.

We are looking to provide the world with another alternative that is much more community-driven and focused, where everyone who uses the project benefits instead of just the large shareholders.

We are leveraging as many Google resources as possible to challenge them (no point in reinventing the wheel) at this stage, and then ultimately, will have an open-source, transparent search resource that people can inspect and rely on.

Google operates in a black-box model, and when they do major algorithm shifts, it has huge impacts on real-world businesses and people.

#19

Q: Do you plan to burn some tokens?

A: No plans to burn tokens.

#20

Q: Have you thought of approaching Brave as the default search engine? Could you work together or are you too much alike in this space?

A: Yes, we have. It might be something we can do if we can really show some strength with the token. The current ambition is to just get in as one of the options so people don’t have to install the extension. That said, the extension is so easy to use, and there’s so much more advanced functionality we can build in, that it’ll likely remain our primary usage channel.

For instance, we ultimately plan to insert the top staked keyword ad into the autosuggest results within the browser address/search field, so that no matter which engine a searcher is using, the advertiser will get exposure.

It will also enable us to more elegantly insert our ‘coin flip’ token indicator into the user experience.

So yes, would be great to get that exposure, but not necessary.

Word on the street is that DDG is paying Brave a lot to be default currently, so realistically, there’s a bar there that we’d have to clear.

It could be possible if the token economics do what we’re projecting but it will take some time.

#21

Q: For token holders who don’t own a business and don’t have an interest in the income from affiliate marketing, will there be an open market where a person can lend tokens (for keyword staking or other token use purposes) to a business owner at the going market rate? And if so will the interest paid on lending tokens be paid in PRE, ETH, fiat other?

A: Yes, that is something that is on the road map. In the January 29th launch, there will be an info page about token leasing within the UI. People who are interested in leasing on either side will be able to learn more about the opportunity and indicate their interest. We’ll launch it as soon as it makes sense.

#22

Q: To my mind, the best strategy in crypto is to pump your token so that it gets exposure to the crypto community (let’s say through Coinmaketcap) Do you have any plan in mind to increase token value?

I: Yes, that’s definitely a great strategy for visibility. We are aiming to be in the top 100, yes. We have a way to go but believe with the size of the market opportunity and the role of the token within the ecosystem and our ability to create demand through the keyword staking model and focus on monetizing affiliate traffic that people will continue to purchase tokens at higher prices.

#23

Q: Since Google has very thorough algorithms to determine the relevancy of sites, how will you compete with that to be better?

Is your goal with community sides to be more relevant/accurate than Google, so you are taking the bottom-up instead of top-down approach?

A: We believe that community members voting, and the use of staking (ex. to submit a site for indexing, you may need to stake tokens), that we can create a really accurate formula for relevance.

The most significant challenge is long-tail keyword searches that are obscure and hard to determine relevance for, so we may end up running a hybrid approach where we have a community-curated ‘head’ index of say the top 500k or 1m queries and then we supplement results with the Bing API (also used by DDG and other engines).

#24

Q: I’m very curious if any Sales and Marketing people are employed to get more awareness to get (big) partners/investors on board (like the one you unfortunately lost)

Nowadays a good marketing person or team who has social media skills adds great value for PRE. Just like a Sales team that can attract investors. (I’m in Enterprise Sales so very curious about this roadmap)

A: Yes, we are looking to build out our capabilities in that department, but from my existing experience and some of the influencers we are connected to in the affiliate marketing space, this will definitely be a focus. As will reaching out to the domain name community, where we also have deep contacts and there’s a logical fit. We need the new platform in place to activate those relationships though, so we’re really excited about the launch!

#25

Q: Have you had any problems with getting into countries that have strict internet laws such as China?

A: Not yet, but we are obviously still fairly small and under the radar. Hopefully, we can circumvent some of the potential restrictions with decentralized node infrastructure by the time we get to the point that governments want to throttle/restrict us.

#26

Q: What market cap are you seeing for PRE in a year from now?👍

A: I would like to see a $50m+ value on the token economy. In my pie-in-the-sky aspirations, I can see how more than $100m is possible. We are going to work really hard to drive value into the token and ensure that stakers are creating a ton of demand.

#27

Q: With Presearch, every user is getting PRE tokens when he/her searches. More users = more tokens go for rewards. If the max supply is 1B PRE, is this possible that there will not be enough tokens for rewards? What is your plan to avoid it?

A: Great question! As we start approaching that boundary, we’ll need to decrease the number of tokens paid per search and also start shifting to the token consumption model where tokens are paid per click and Presearch retains a percentage to pay for rewards. As the price increases, that shouldn’t be a problem as people will still be rewarded at the same rate or even better.

Ultimately, the vision is for all rewards to be paid directly by sponsors.

#28

Q: What is your upcoming marketing plan?

A: We’ll be revealing the plan over the next couple of weeks leading up to the release of the Keyword Staking platform. It incorporates new places to buy/sell PRE, more integrations of our referral program into significant crypto communities, more email marketing to our community’s 1.3m users and the launch of some paid campaigns to test the ROI and raise awareness.

#29

Q: What the best way to invest in PRE? The volume is very low on HitBTC? But the market cap is suddenly very high?? Are people investing elsewhere? Directly?

A: You can purchase PRE utility tokens through https://marketplace.presearch.org, on HitBTC and on Probit.com currently.

#30

Q: Did I understand you correctly? Now you're giving PRE from supply but once all tokens will be in circulation advertisers be giving them, right?

A: Yes, that’s correct. And Presearch will retain a percentage of the rewards paid to fund marketing and operations.

#31

Q: Regarding your previous company shopcity.com, is it successful? Can you share any numbers e.g. revenue, number of employees? Is it taking up a lot of your time too or how do you balance out working on both companies?

A: ShopCity.com is a multi-million dollar business that I started when I was 20 years old, 20 years ago. It was run as a side business while I had other ventures for the first 10 years. There are around 50 employees and sales reps currently. We have a couple of people that are largely responsible for operations and a full team in place. I am mainly involved in strategy and finance at this point. It is a growing business and will ultimately have some synergies with Presearch via our feet on the street selling PRE to local businesses to stake, and our City Managers staking local keywords.

#32

Q: Whats about the number of tokens you get as a reward for searching, can it change or is the amount fixed?

A: The amount is currently fixed at 0.25 PRE per search, up to 8 PRE per day for any of the other search engines besides our own Dsearch engine which pays 0.5 PRE per search currently. Here’s some more info: https://medium.com/@presearch/how-do-rewards-work-73a545ceae60

I’d like to thank you, Colin, once again for detailed, straight-forward and insightful answers.

Also many thanks to both Quora Inner Circle and Presearch communities for participating and asking interesting questions