✏️Strategy

Risks, competitive position and competitive strengths

• How can one win in a competition with the rivals who have infinitely greater capabilities? What can a startup set against the IT giants?

• How can the audience be quickly engaged and retained?

• How do we manage to make the standard offered by the platform recognizable and universal? How do we assume leadership in this sector?

The answers to these questions lie in the domain of decentralization.

Problem #1: IT giants’ substantial domination in resources

No independent team of developers working on a project can compete with the giants in keeping up the development pace, at least in the domain of the corporations' visible priorities.

But, just as any startup is infinitely small compared to an IT corporation, any IT corporation is infinitely small compared to the number of developers outside of it.

The aim of outperforming growth rates can be efficiently resolved by establishing the conditions under which independent developers from around the world will obtain the opportunity to work on the platform project and earn money on it. Focusing the developers’ interests will support the product that will allow them, rather than an IT corporation, to earn money.

The world knows successful examples of open-source software competing successfully with commercial products. The best-known example is the Linux-based OS family. Linux systems are the server market leaders, they prevail in the data centers of enterprises and organizations, occupy half of the embedded system market and hold a significant share of the netbook market. All in all, according to data provided by Goldman Sachs, Linux’s market share among all electronic devices constitutes 42%.

The world today has changed, and making a profit has become feasible. The humankind has found the technological solutions to ensure the scalability of this project, and, starting with the launch of Ethereum, which opened up the era of practical decentralization, it is now the IT corporations that are experiencing a shortage of resources in comparison with the huge open world that’s infinitely greater than they are. While it has not become apparent just yet, the industry is growing

spectacularly and becoming self-aware, and in the very near future it will be manifested in a multitude of different spheres and types of human activity.

Problem #2: Engaging and retaining an audience under resource shortage conditions

Corporations already possess access to their audience, comprised of hundreds of millions of people, they have their points of contact with it, and can engage the audience in the new services they offer. Corporations are capable of investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the promotion of their products.

What can a startup set against that?

The keys to taking the lead under the conditions of an aggressive competitive environment are:

• Ensuring the intensive growth of the number of platform users and its daily audience

• Efficient audience retention – implementation of conditions under which users will remain

  loyal to a specific platform, and will be motivated to remain within its digital space.

  Without the audience growth to tens of millions of people, there’s no way to successfully implement monetization models, to concentrate the specialists’ attention and resources, or to assume a global leadership position.

  How can audience growth be induced?

  It is apparent that the platform has to create a product (service), which will be both interesting and useful to the target audience, becoming the first driver of platform growth. The platform must create a product that will satisfy the daily needs of this user group. The main user product of the Spheroid Universe is the AR social network. For more details, please see the Product section.

  How can audience be retained?

  The Nobel Prize in 2017 was awarded to the American economist Richard Thaler, who demonstrated in his work how human characteristics systematically affect people's decision- making process and market results.

  Economists have traditionally proceeded from the premise that people and organizations act rationally. Thaler has demonstrated the opposite: investor behavior is determined by “allegedly insignificant factors” linked to emotions and mood, far more so than they would like to admit. In his work Thaler had introduced more realistic assumptions regarding human behavior, limited rationality and social preferences.

  One of the practical consequences of the experiments conducted by Thaler postulates that people value things that they possess more than the same things that they do not own.

Problem #3: Efficient priority management

As they compete with each other, the giants are motivated to create the best products, have the resource to research user needs and the methods of getting their products across to the end consumers, embedding them into the product ecosystems they are creating.

What can decentralization offer in countering this approach? How can platform development be focused on key directions? How can priorities be efficiently identified and determined?

An important and mandatory condition is preserving the chance to manage the platform's development vector via targeted financing of ideas and projects, which the platform will implement through the use of revenue from Space sales.

How is it possible to organize a quick and efficient signal transmission from the market to developer teams?

For this purpose, the platform is creating a system where platform users will be able to:

• Propose ideas for platform function development and vote for those that will receive financing

• Vote for teams that implement ideas

• Receive rewards for ideas and their successful implementation

  With the emergence of the blockchain technology, the corporations have lost their main advantage – the monopoly of efficiently organizing the joint activity of numerous people, expressed as the opportunity to focus, record and guarantee payment for these activities.

  Speed and dynamics, lack of bureaucratic barriers, developer team competition, platform users’ readiness to spend a lot of time to attain success – these are all drivers of the platform’s exponential growth and maintenance of the market positions.

Problem #4: Control of software and hardware platforms by the IT giants

Corporations control the software and hardware platforms and are committed to promoting their products. How can a community of platform users counter that? How can the standard established by the platform become recognizable and accepted?

The community has a powerful resource – the right to monetize its content.

Content is the asset that we seek in the corporate product space. Corporations create and promote their platforms and services and maintain their functioning. They lead the users there to create content, which is then used by corporations to make profits.

The users’ chance to use the services for free in exchange for corporations monetizing the content created by the users –this formula is the foundation of most corporate projects.

• The value of Youtube.com for users is the content that users create and publish. The leading position ensures the attraction and concentration of interests of various user groups – content suppliers, viewers and advertisers.

• The value of Instagram.com is in your friends, who share the space with you, and with whom you’re sharing your life stories. They are the reason you are there.

• The value of Yelp.com is in the chance to find the best cafes and restaurants based on reviews of users from around the world, which we perceive as objective rather than promotional.

  IT giants today are creating and buying services that we use every day, they are consolidating and monopolizing the market.