InToken

White paper

Version 2.3 - 10.2.2019

Our vision

Artificial Intelligence will replace us for most jobs as we currently know them. This is a dramatic paradigm shift, and will unleash human potential and fundamentally transform how our societies are structured.

The advent and growth of cryptocurrency tokens has opened up a new opportunity to participate in the wealth created by the progress of technology. Tokenization will enable people from all walks of life to share in the value created from a new protocol.

Inbot Ambassador is a global community of individuals that help businesses grow by making introductions, eliminating the need for local sales teams.

We are developing an autonomous organization that runs the business with AI, implements fair and transparent community rules with smart contracts on the blockchain, and pays the members tokenized dividends from the value being created.

This white paper is our vision for how this reality will become achievable.

In Berlin, on February 10th, 2019

Mikko Alasaarela

Founder, Inbot

The purpose of this white paper is to define the architecture, rules and use cases of InToken cryptocurrency. This document will be updated regularly to reflect the decisions and design choices that we collectively make.

Our vision        2

1. Value Proposition        6

2. Introduction        7

2.1  The Problem with B2B Growth        7

2.1.1  No trusted sales platforms for B2B        7

2.1.2  The Problem with Marketing Automation        8

2.2  Solution: Inbot Ambassador        9

2.2.1  People Graph AI: Privacy Friendly Trust Discovery        10

2.2.3  Ambassador Community        10

3. InScore & InToken: Growth from Trust        11

3.1  InScore Multiplier        11

3.2  InScore: Dividend Multiplier        12

3.3  InTokens: Simple payments        13

4. Market and Competition        13

4.1  Positioning of our offering        13

4.1.1  Partner Program        13

4.2  Competitive Comparison        15

5. Implementation and Distribution        16

5.1  Implementation: a Stellar token        16

5.2  Initial Token Supply and Distribution        16

5.2.1 Bonuses and bounties        17

5.3  Future funding        18

5.3.1 Roadmap        18

6. Team        20

6.1  Advisors        22

1. Value Proposition

With InTokens, you can reward people for sharing your message, and for referring and introducing you members, customers, investors or key hires. With InToken, the rewards are escrowed and paid automatically, and you don’t have to worry about currencies, payment fees or cross-border wire transfers.

The value of InToken is based on the balance of supply and demand. As the business on the Inbot Ambassador platform grows, the demand for the tokens grow accordingly. We want to make the Inbot Ambassador community and platform the most trusted way to do business globally.

We work to make the Inbot Ambassador platform the best channel to grow B2B business. We continuously explore new use cases for the InToken cryptocurrency to increase its utility and broaden its adoption.

InScore automatically measures the effort made by an Ambassador on the platform, and increases their score every time they successfully deliver value until a maximum of 200%.  If the ambassador engages in bad behavior, the InScore decreases.

InScore is an automated way to weed out spammers from the Inbot Ambassador community. It also incentivizes members to invite other trustworthy Ambassadors to join the community.

2. Introduction

In this chapter, we introduce the current problems in B2B lead generation and sales, especially when expanding internationally, and our solution to these problems.

2.1  The Problem with B2B Growth

Growing a B2B company is challenging. Direct sales is expensive, and “inside sales” is one of the most despised jobs in existence. Sales development reps do not last long in their jobs. A sales executive who’s good at closing deals usually does not want to do cold outreach, as it is a “dirty job”.

When expanding internationally, these problems multiply. Companies need to manage multiple teams in different geographies that require a nuanced understanding of cultural differences and local business practices.

2.1.1  No trusted sales platforms for B2B

While low-cost digital products and services have such widely trusted global distribution channels as Amazon, Apple App Store, Google Play and Alibaba, there is currently no trusted global platform for selling high-value digital business products and services. 

As B2B business has moved from packaged offline products to online services, traditional reseller channels don’t work anymore. Resellers make their living from owning the customer interface locally. This puts their incentives in direct conflict with customer expectations of dealing directly with the service provider.

Customer acquisition is an expensive process with a typical SaaS (Software as a Service) company often seeing CAC (Cost of Acquiring a Customer) of over 12 months of revenue. The faster you try to grow, the more expensive your CAC is.

Growing a B2B business rapidly requires a lot of venture capital, unless the company finds a mechanism for viral distribution, which is only possible for products that are targeted to communities of professionals like Github, Slack and Dropbox.

Companies launching from smaller home markets have to invest millions to open local offices to larger export markets. It can become an existential risk to the company. This is why many potentially great B2B companies have settled to staying small and being local leaders in their home markets.

2.1.2  The Problem with Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation is often pitched as the best answer to scaling B2B customer acquisition. It has become one of the fastest growing segments of enterprise software worldwide.

According to Chiefmartec, who released their latest marketing technology landscape in May 2018, there are approximately 7,000 vendors of marketing automation software. Unfortunately, most of marketing automation today amounts to little more than automated spam over email and social media channels.

As much as we hate spam, automated cold email drip campaigns are still the most popular and cheapest way to promote B2B products and services. But as everyone grows more resentful of spam, it provides its users ever-diminishing returns.

Robotic emails with fake human signatures certainly don’t build trust, let alone series of pre-scheduled social media posts by a bot that pretends to be human.

Search Engine Marketing and Optimization are another popular mechanisms to generate leads. When someone is searching for a solution, they are signaling demand. What could be a better moment to engage?

For most B2B companies in their early growth stages, it is expensive and difficult to dominate keywords. Larger competitors outspend you at all times, and if you don’t show up at the top of the search results, you don’t exist.

Getting a good ranking on search engines is a by-product of creating a lot of social media content, and getting people engaged with it to create a lot of backlinks to boost the organic standing and relevance of the search result. This motivates people to use marketing automation bots to create a lot of fake content with fake engagement.

In our opinion, marketing automation is creating a vicious cycle of one-uppance, where bots are competing against each other in an ever-escalating war. We have social media drip bots, email drip and response bots, customer service chatbots, ad-clicking bots, pageview-boosting bots, profile visitor bots, bots that comment and like posts, bots that send friend invites, bots that give 5-star reviews, and much more.

In our opinion, automation should be used for discovery of opportunities, not on sending maximum amount of messages. Successful B2B companies of the future will favor signal over noise, and building trust over sending spam.

The following chapter explains our solution to these problems.

2.2  Solution: Inbot Ambassador

A simple truth is that businesses can only grow at the speed of trust. There is a reason why Harvard Business Review found that 84% of all B2B deals start with a referral. There’s almost nothing that builds trust more than referral from a person the customer already trusts.

But how to scale trust? British Anthropologist Robin Dunbar has proposed in his studies that any person can hold a maximum of 150 stable relationships. It is called the Dunbar Number. This is widely believed to be the upper limit of a person’s trust circle.

Therefore, hiring sales people is a slow and expensive way to grow a B2B business. No sales executive you hire has existing personal relationships with more than a handful of relevant decision makers. They have to build each relationship for the purposes of the deal, which is time-consuming and expensive.

You should not try to build a large sales organization anymore. Instead, you should leverage existing trust circles to be able to approach the most relevant customers one-by-one, by receiving introductions and referrals from people they already trust.

Inbot Ambassador is a platform for business growth. We started by creating People Graph AI, an AI-powered trust graph database and search engine. We invited a global community of Ambassadors, who are trusted entrepreneurs, executives and investors located in all major hubs around the world. We asked them to securely upload their relationship data for us to be able to suggest them relevant companies to help.

With access to thousands of trusted Ambassadors, a trustworthy entrepreneur can enter a large number of trust circles worldwide in a rapid succession. Once the trust is built, the location of your company doesn’t matter anymore.

The following charts illustrate the differences in conversions between warm introductions and today’s marketing automation.

The historical data from our Inbot Ambassador service shows a company with a great product can achieve 75% conversion rate from introduction to meeting, and up to 50% conversion rate from introduction to deal. The actual results vary depending on the company, but we generally expect our Partner companies to convert more than 10% of the intros they receive to remain successful on the platform.

In addition to customer introductions, businesses can also reward introductions to key hires, investors and partners, as well as place rewards for member referrals and sharing their content in social media. This way, they can build the whole marketing and acquisition funnel on top of Inbot Ambassador platform.

2.2.1  People Graph AI: Privacy Friendly Trust Discovery

People Graph AI is our AI-powered search engine for finding the most trusted path to targeted decision makers. We have developed the current People Graph AI technology since 2014.

During this time, People Graph AI has grown to cover 7,000,000 contacts. The machine learning -powered database analyses millions of data points against these contacts to understand, who are the best Ambassadors to make the requested introductions to our Partner.

These data points include overlaps of social graphs, communication patterns and job histories. We call this “contextual relevance”. A person with the highest contextual relevance is likely to build the most trust between the B2B company and their prospect customer. We leverage this scoring when suggesting introductions to our Ambassadors.

People Graph AI enables us to keep the trust discovery process private and discreet. Instead of publicly exposing the identities of our Ambassadors, who are often VIPs in their own communities, we suggest them opportunities that they can take or leave. Their identity is only exposed to the Partners who they personally decide to help.

2.2.3  Ambassador Community

The early members of the Inbot Ambassador Community are trusted entrepreneurs, investors and executives. The membership includes VIPs such as unicorn founders, public company CEOs, partners of top VC funds and other notable influencers.

We launched the community in late 2016, and have grown since then to over 66,000 members in 183 countries by February 2019. Ambassadors are incentivized to invite their well connected friends to the community, as their InScore will increase when the invited person makes their first introduction.

3. InScore & InToken: Growth from Trust

InScore reward multiplier and InToken utility token enable a completely new programmatic model for rewarding trust. This unique model rewards long term relationship and trust building, as opposed to sales agent commission models that reward short term hustling.

3.1  InScore Multiplier

There are several types of distributions paid to the Ambassadors from the ongoing business. Inbot Ambassador platform charges a 30% platform fee from the Partners offering rewards for Intros. Inbot is a non-profit entity, all of the accrued funds will be invested back into the growth of the platform and therefore to the value of the ecosystem and the utility of InToken.

Each Ambassador gets paid for the Intros they make based on their InScore.  The difference between the Ambassador’s InScore and the maximum of 200% will be added to a reward pool that is shared among the most active Ambassadors.

The following charts illustrate the intro reward distributions in two scenarios. The first chart describes the distribution when the Ambassador has a 100% InScore. As you can see from the chart below, 50% of the rewards are distributed to the reward pool and 35% to the Ambassador.

The second chart illustrates the reward distribution when the Ambassador has a 200% InScore. In this case, the Ambassador keeps 70% of the reward.

With InScore, the platform can automatically reward the Ambassadors for the trust they build, and discourage spamming without human supervision. 

Every new Ambassador starts on the platform with a 50% InScore, and can build up their score by adding contact data, completing KYC and making introductions. Each endorsed introduction to a new Partner increases the InScore by 10%. Each disputed introduction reduces the InScore by 10%, enforcing good behavior.

Connecting an email or joining the Telegram group offers a simple way to boost the InScore by 10%, and offers the matching algorithms better data. People Graph AI uses the email metadata (contacts, timestamps) to establish contextual relevance between the Ambassador and their contacts. To protect the privacy of Ambassadors, People Graph AI does not read or store content of the emails.

The InScore acts as a direct multiplier to the Ambassadors rewards. At maximum of 200%, it can multiply the income of an active and trust-building Ambassador.

3.3  InTokens: Simple payments

InTokens offer Ambassadors a simple way to get paid for their introductions. To preserve the simplest possible user experience, intro rewards can only be offered from the official Inbot Ambassador Wallet.

You can transfer the InTokens from the Wallet at any time to any Stellar wallet and trade it in the Stellar-based decentralized exchanges, or spend them on offering rewards for introductions.

4. Market and Competition

B2B technology products and services are a giant worldwide market. iGate Research forecasts the Enterprise Software market to exceed $500Bn by 2022. Artificial Intelligence is one of the fastest growing segments in this market. According to Statista, the AI market will grow from $2.4Bn in 2017 to almost $60Bn in 2025, a 50% CAGR. The global Big Data market is expected to grow 11% a year to $210Bn in 2020.

We expect the demand for artificial intelligence and data-driven services to grow rapidly for the foreseeable future.

4.1  Positioning of our offering

The Inbot Ambassador community focuses on the market of business (B2B) referrals. We do not serve introductions to consumers. We plan to expand our services to recruitment and investment introductions, and add other ways for the ambassadors to earn tokens, including sharing our partners messages in social media.  

4.1.1  Partner Program

The Partner Program focuses initially on AI and data-driven services, as companies in these markets have a massive growth in both venture investments and customer demand. This focus can be expanded as the markets evolve and change. To be accepted as a Partner, the company has to have:

• Innovative product or service with proven product/market fit
• Existing customer references
• Trusted and reputable management team
• Deals sizes of $10k-$1M
• Ability to serve customers in targeted territories

Inbot offers the Partners service packages depending on the size of the purchase.

In addition to InTokens, Partners gain additional services such as free promotion to the community and in the Inbot Social Media channels, as well as active searches for intros to their listed dream customers. The following table lists our suggested rewards for different types of meetings.

Inside sales is currently the most common model for deals between $2,500 and $10,000. By creating a free listing and offering a reward, a company can complement their inside sales with introductions from the Inbot Ambassador community. Listing in the Inbot Wallet is an easy way to receive introductions for these kind of deals quickly and efficiently.

Currently the most common models below $2,500 are freemium, app stores, online advertising with free trials, and automated conversion flows with self-service sign-ups. In the future, we plan to offer incentivized invite based referral code programs and rewards for social media promotion using InToken as the reward for this segment.

When deals are large, personal relationships are important, and you can only win the deal if you gain the trust of your customer in person. In this category, we compete against direct sales teams and resellers.

In the future, we plan to expand the Partner Programs to recruitment and fundraising. We understand that relationships are very important in investments and hiring, and these programs can help solve a major problem in these industries.

4.2  Competitive Comparison

In this chapter, we will compare the Partner Program to the main competitive options currently available for international business growth in our category: local direct sales teams and resellers.

When compared to building local sales teams, the savings are obvious. The investment to set up a country office ranges from hundreds of thousands to millions. This creates an unnecessary burden on short term profits, and rarely guarantees results.

Realizing the risks, many businesses prefer to start via a reseller. The problem with resellers is that their livelihoods depend on their ownership of customer interface, which is directly at odds with the interest of the vendors. You also have to negotiate and contract with multiple resellers to cover different geographies, adding to the risks and complexity.

The commissions by resellers are often steep, and usually they ask for revenue share from the whole duration of the relationship. A typical reseller represents multiple vendors with relatively small teams, making the relationship difficult to scale.

The following table illustrates some of the benefits of Partner model over its main alternatives.

As this table illustrates, there is no cheaper or better way for B2B company to expand internationally, when they have deal sizes over $10k that require direct sales force. It is possible to grow globally just with online advertising and without direct sales, when the price of the product or service is small enough, typically below $3k.

When we talk about disruptive innovations - which is our core focus market - it is even more important that the people who intimately understand the technology in question, the founders, are involved in the sales process. The Inbot Ambassador community can build the trust, and the founders can scale their innovations without the need to build large internal sales organizations.

This is the power of networks that Inbot Ambassador unleashes, for our Partners, and to the benefit of all InToken holders.

5. Implementation and Distribution

5.1  Implementation: a Stellar token

InTokens are tokens running on Stellar blockchain. We chose Stellar blockchain to enable fast and free payments from the Inbot wallet. Currently, the Stellar blockchain has a transaction confirmation time of less than 5 seconds, and the transaction fee on the main network is 1/100,000 Stellar Lumens (XLM). As of 9th of October 2018, the fee is in US dollars $0.0000024. The transactions on the Inbot wallet are free of charge.

We currently do not plan on implementing our own blockchain technology for the purpose of managing InTokens, but we may support running the token on more blockchains in the future as the market evolves.

5.2  Initial Token Supply and Distribution

There will be a maximum of 10 billion InTokens in circulation. The initial float will be a small fraction of that. The distribution table has the following allocations.

As mentioned in Chapter 3.1.1, the reward pool is rolled out over 20 years, creating a slow and steady increase of the token supply for that period. The team incentive tokens are vested over the period of 48 months to each team member. The advisory tokens are vested over 24 months.

The token structure and circulation model encourages using the tokens for introductions, as the increase of activity level on the platform helps increase the value of the whole InToken ecosystem.

5.2.1 Bonuses and bounties

As Inbot Ambassador is a platform for referral rewards, we see it fitting to have a bounty program that rewards members for increasing the visibility and membership of the community.

Ambassador Rewards Program. Each member of the Ambassador Community can invite their friends to join. There are multiple rewards for the invites, some of which are specific to the token sale event, and some to the long term earnings on the platform.

We have put special attention to create a referral rewards program that does not resemble a multi-level marketing program. Our vision is to make everyone in the community see themselves as shareholders in the success of the platform.

When an invitee makes their 1st successful introduction, the Ambassador who invited them will receive 10% boost to their InScore. This motivates Ambassadors to invite people who can add value on the platform.

The following table lists the current member rewards.

5.3  Future funding

Inbot Ambassador is an ambitious long term project to build an autonomous organization that governs a trust-building process between people and pays dividends automatically. We understand that realizing our ultimate goals will take a long time, and will require a lot of resources.

The good news is that we have already accomplished a lot. People Graph AI already works and covers millions of contacts. The Inbot Wallet is ready and functioning. There are already a number of Partners on our platform. We have early revenue.

Our architecture has been built from the beginning to eventually enable completely autonomous organization. We will work hard in the coming years to automate all aspects of trust discovery, intro delivery and community rewards.

Because we didn’t organize an initial coin offering, we will need additional working capital and development funding over time. We plan to arrange that in form of secondary token offerings within the limits of our token supply.

The development funds will be invested to People Graph AI, automation of introduction processes, and implementation of a great user experience in the Inbot Wallet. The working capital funding will be invested on managing the manual phases of the introduction processes until we have achieved a full automation.

5.3.1 Roadmap

Our development and business roadmap is as follows.

6. Team

Inbot has an international team of experienced serial entrepreneurs, developers and researchers. The core of our People Graph AI and smart contracts are built by two experienced PhD researchers. The applications and interfaces have been developed by an experienced serial entrepreneur in software engineering in cooperation with experienced design entrepreneur.

The business model has been tested during the past year, and we believe the model to be sound.  The core team below is behind the InToken design, implementation and economics.

6.1  Advisors

In addition to an experienced core team, Inbot is advised by well known cryptocurrency experts and investors, as well as industry heavyweights.