Most of the potential competitors have not entered this market yet but are looking at it carefully or even developing solutions and preparing to launch. It will not be clear who is directly competing and who is just launching a crowdfunding portal or a new startup stock exchange, neither of which are competitive to Public Startup Company, until the dust settles on this new industry.
We are not trying to be a crowdfunding portal, instead we help our customers use crowdfunding portals. For example, if Kickstarter decides to allow equity crowdfunding then our customers will be offering securities through Kickstarter rather than just offering 'perks' and benefits for product or service pre-sales crowdfunding campaign backers (the way that Kickstarter works today).
We are not trying to be a stock exchange, instead we help our customers learn how to do their own direct public offerings of unregistered securities using social media and direct marketing.
When and if our customers' investors wish to trade those privately-held unregistered securities in a secondary market, existing venues like Shares Post and Second Market facilitate that exchange.
Our product and service market positioning and message development are still in-progress but the core opportunity is already clear and people are responding very positively to our proposals. I will explain what we're doing in more detail later and provide copies of our Terms of Service. It seems wise to limit the distribution of the business strategy documents until we are in a position to bring this to market on a larger scale, otherwise we're just giving away the discovery of a valuable new business model before it has been protected either by patent or by business development.
It is still a process of customer education to teach prospective customers that the 80-year-old law changed so that it is now legal for them to offer to sell shares to the public, but next year when the final JOBS Act Title III (crowdfunding) Rules go into effect we will have the benefit of piggybacking on other people's efforts to educate the market.
