PORT Harbor — January ‘22

A Monthly Letter from the Founders

ANCHOR POINT

Set Course for the Mainland -

Looking at what we’ve accomplished so far is not to be understated. Erecting a new paradigm within the e-commerce tech stack, that transitions power to consumers, enabling them to tokenize their feedback and monetize the value that their data can create, is a monumental shift away from Big Tech’s traditional mining-of-users. PackagePortal equips-users-to-mine.

The foundation we’ve built is solid. It’s radically innovative, solves real problems, and saves real money for one of the globe’s most integral industries. But it’s merely the foundation upon which we build. We’ve got broad ambition, and we intend to build many more features upon our cornerstone of Proof-of-Receipt.

New ways to earn will be coming to the app. We’ve outlined creative ways for users to engage with retailers, ecosystems, and communities, and we’ll use cutting edge integrations to make it all seamless.

Together, as builders and users, we can demonstrate to a watching world, that each datapoint and contribution gathered from a consumer (which is the lifeblood of any successful merchant’s journey), should come VOLUNTARILY by that consumer, AND carry an immediate transfer of value for its creator.

This new model will become the new standard. And with it, will come a world of opportunity, for both merchant and consumer alike. Fabricating a new engagement layer and constructing a data bridge between seller and shopper, should’ve been done from the beginning. But the tech didn’t allow until now. By grand design, it’s us who have seized the opportunity presented to us, and we will execute with fervor, to shine the light of innovation into the darkness of legacy systems globally.

The APP

Since launching V2 in Q4 and beginning our first merchant pilot, we have been hard at work improving the self-entry process for tracking numbers. We will be providing new ways to auto-import the packages you want to track via Order Email Forwarding and Gmail Integration. We have also been working on an intuitive way to allow new users to create a non-custodial wallet, without the traditional private key security concerns.

These are extremely exciting features to bring forth, and they are part of our primary objective: which is to enable and produce massive user growth in 2022; by both volume, and engagement. We’ve baked our roadmap priorities around this objective, in parallel with some features already on the roadmap (e.g. referrals). But our brainstorming sessions as a team this month spawned even more. We’ll reveal more later 😉 but here’s a hint: we’re adding more ways to earn rewards.

After a successful Q4 launch and start of year, we are ready to plow ahead and begin adding the tools that millions of people will use to monetize their e-commerce experience. — Gabe

THE BUSINESS

Biz-dev efforts are seemingly under constant acceleration. It reminds me of a flight and that feeling just after liftoff: how you can feel the rapid ascent while pressed into your seat. Watching your starting point get smaller in the distance, as you climb towards cruising altitude and top speed. We’ve just taken off, but we’re moving faster and climbing higher every week.

As we continue to gain altitude, we were recently shortlisted for an award at the UX Design Awards. This brings great notoriety to our business and product, testifying to the off-chain value and creativity we bring to this space, apart from tokenization. You can go and vote for PackagePortal at the awards website.

Also, our pilot program with Keoni is doing well and on-going. It’s been a pleasure working with their team, and we look forward to sustained growth between our extended communities. As that campaign continues, we’re also excited about another company integrating with us; we’ll share more as we’re able.

Aside from that, the founders have continued to work with our legal team, as we seek approval on some applications that would be the first of their kind and be quite nice to have as a US entity. Due to the private nature of this process, we will not be able to share more until a public release is approved in the future.

THE TOKENS

The value of our token rewards are largely determined by macro market forces. And we’ve seen that evidenced already, as 2022 started out with heavy risk-off conditions causing high volatility and uncertainty. We’ve seen the S&P respond to the FOMC, and BTC then respond in-kind…which is then inevitably correlated to every other digital asset under the sun, causing market wide liquidations.

But what excites us, and gives us confidence as we build, is the beautiful truth that PORT is designed to ultimately decouple from such macro events. Overtime, as retailers come to learn the value gained by engaging consumers at this level, they will remove PORT from circulation in order to participate.

This dynamic demonstrates the true utility of PORT; functioning as a perpetual license for access to the platform. In this way, PORT moves outside of mere speculative trading circles, as a required membership token, thereby making retailers natural buyers without reason to sell, regardless of external volatility.

Providing services that become invaluable to our partners is the goal. We believe our model will demonstrate this on-chain, as we continue to onboard new members who will acquire PORT. With a growing suite of services, broadening user base, and fixed supply, supply and demand may soon reach an inflection point.

A Final Word from the CEO:

By J.G. Whitley, CEO

As a startup, it’s good to be agile, and have the ability to adapt to new variables, new tech, and new paradigms within your industry. For us in crypto, that means there’s a new opportunity or trends every other week. But setting objectives to concentrate your energy towards, is as important as setting the heading for any vessel. Whether a simple dinghy, or an extravagant super yacht, changing course with every gust of wind will only lead to being tossed about by the turbulent waves around you. You must chart a course.

For that reason, I’m grateful to have the men and women around me that I do. We had the full core team together in Phoenix for a week this month, so we could do in-person huddles and planning for the objectives laid forth this year. It’s always a sweet time when our families get to hang out together along with the engineering team.

Over the years, we’ve all become good friends and enjoy building together, and also spending down time together. During the week, we mapped out a path to increase our daily active users, and we assigned multiple new features & integrations to work on, and then we closed out the week by off-roading in the desert!

It’s great to work on something you love, and even better to do it with people you enjoy. As a team, our goals are aligned and we’re all working together unimaginably well, loading more & more cargo into the ship. Whether that’s importing tracking data into our systems, ushering new members aboard, or packing more features into our product line, there’s just a constant flow of mass in motion.

What lies ahead for 2022? Only God knows. But what we do know, is where our North Star lies, and we are on a direct path, rushing towards it like a meteorite.

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