Everything I think is cool online...: January 2011

Friday, January 28, 2011

PayBox is a rapidly growing online currency and payment processing service. We're on a quest to become the best payment processing service anywhere. We aim to achieve this with the help of our dedicated EarlyBird users.

Our service is still in development. So, for now, all of our transactions are in a “Closed Box” system. This means that all payments sent, and all payments received, stay within the PayBox system at this time. Currently, our users can send person-to-person payments (within PayBox).

Our Goal

Our primary goal is to “Open the Box”.

Question: What does that mean? What would it include?

Answer: Opening the box means providing everything you would find in a full-featured payment processor:

Debit cards linked to PayBox accounts.
Easily buy and sell using your PayBox account.
Easily send and receive money using your PayBox account.
Purchase from nearly any online merchant.
Withdraw to nearly any bank account world-wide.
Possibly withdraw to other online payment processors.
In-exchange from any major world currency.
Out-exchange to any major world currency.

What will it take to “open the box”? Read on to find out.

What We’ve Achieved

We started on September 1, 2010 with a brand-new website and an idea. As of this writing, less than two months later, we have reached our Stage 1 goal with over 100,000 EarlyBird users. The following image is a graph of our Feedburner subscribers — EarlyBird users who follow our blog.

Our Next Target

It’s now time to take our service to the next level. Our Stage 2 growth target is somewhere between 2 to 5 million users. Once there, we aim to “open the box”.

Question: Why wait? Why grow to several million first? Why not “open the box” now?

Answer: Although we have over 100,000 EarlyBird users, our user-base is still incredibly small when compared to other payment services. Once we achieve the next stage of growth (2 - 5 million), it will open the door to be accepted into large payment networks and integrated as a payment option by major merchants. In short, it will help us to “open the box”.

We Need Your Help

PayBox is different. There has never been a payment service like PayBox. From the very beginning, we have relied on our users sharing PayBox with friends to fuel our growth.

Instead of spending millions of dollars on advertising, we are rewarding our EarlyBird users for helping us test our payment service as we build it, and only asking that you to share PayBox to help us grow.

To this point, we have had remarkable success with our grass-roots growth efforts. Now, we are relying on our members to keep spreading the word, helping us to take PayBox to the next level and “open the box”.

How Long Will It Take?

The truth is, we’re not sure when it will happen. Because we leave the sharing and growth of PayBox to our EarlyBird users, how long it takes to reach our next growth target and “open the box” is completely up to you, our users.

It’s really not that difficult to reach our Stage 2 growth target from this point. For example: If every EarlyBird user had one friend join per week, our size would double in the first week — and if we doubled every week, we would reach our Stage 2 growth target within 5 weeks.

Although we don’t expect our user-base to double in size every week, we believe we can realistically reach our Stage 2 growth target by early- to mid-2011.

Additional Fuel for Growth

Very shortly, we will be releasing a new program that we believe will help to fuel the growth of PayBox by adding a new level of rewards for some of our more ambitious EarlyBird users. In addition, they will have the opportunity to become experts in some very valuable skills along the way. We’ll have more details about this new program soon.