Swissness, what is Swissness?

The soul of an ICO is the whitepaper. This document took over the role of the pitch and business plan when presenting to venture capitalists and the prospectus when preparing for an IPO, an initial public offering. Together with a corresponding website the whitepaper is supposed to give a complete overview of the ICO. It started out as 10–20 pages of typed text in early ICOs. Nowadays, it has to be a thoroughly designed masterpiece. The ICO website and the whitepaper have to be made of the same mold, look fantastic, and entice potential investors. Naturally, we had to make ours look good too.

Introduced by BVV, add to the team the Crypto Gang Agency with its head, Stan Polyakov. The burly Ukrainian came to Zurich to learn more about Securosys before he and his team decided on how to take on the job of designing our whitepaper and website. As an experienced branding professional, he understood that the USPs (unique selling points) have to be shown off in order for potential investor to immediately be clear about them. So, after we gave him a short overview on Securosys, he quickly came to the point: “What is the USP of Securosys?”

Now, we’ve been on the market for a while. We have our list of USPs: Our HSMs are the highest performing on the market. They are, according to customer feedback, much easier and faster to integrate into systems than others. They are tamper protected from the second we load our software and firmware. And, since we develop and manufacture them in Switzerland, they are more trustworthy than competitors’ products.

So, when Stan asked what the USP of Securosys was, we simply answered: “Swissness!” For us this word neatly summarized our trustworthiness, which is the key aspect of our USPs. Not for Stan. Puzzled, he looked at us and asked: “Swissness — what is Swissness?”

We tried to explain it to him: our engineers are Swiss, they work in Switzerland, and we manufacture our products in Switzerland. We have the whole supply chain under our control here in Switzerland. Thanks to having everything under our control, we can guarantee to our customers that there are no backdoors into our products. He nodded politely, but clearly remained unconvinced, asking: “What else do you have?”

Honest feedback very often comes across as harsh and unsympathetic. However, whenever you receive blunt feedback, you shouldn’t disregard it just because you don’t like it. Apparently, we had been caught in our own reality distortion field with the preconceived notion that “Swissness” was the most crucial element to our product. This notion that was strongly supported by our Swiss customers! Yes, Swiss quality matters. But it is not the panacea for everything. Particularly in these new markets of Blockchain and crypto assets, what you deliver matters more than where you’re from!

Stan and his Crypto Gang team did a fantastic job on our whitepaper and website design. Ultimately, even he had to agree that protecting the whole Swiss banking place served as a cool reference. They also showed incredible patience with us, even after our umpteenth modification to the designs and content. Now the focus is on our capabilities and our references, while the “Swissness” only shines lightly through.

Editorial note: This post appeared first on medium.com and is reposted here. It is the fourth blog in a series describing the Securosys STO.

Here is the previous, third blog "Oh, you're a real company!"

Here is the next, fifth blog "Moving to a Security Token"

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Robert (RoRo) is a technology executive and entrepreneur. He is the CEO and co-founder of Securosys, a leader in cyber and blockchain security, serving customers with its HSM network appliances (and cloud service) all over the world.

You can connect with him directly or reach him via email: roro (at) securosys (dot) ch

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