1) Can we start off this interview with an introduction of yourself?
I am Arfy Shah, the CEO and Founder of Shrew. My professional experience spans many roles including software engineering, data analytics, solution design and professional audit. I love technology, especially blockchain and crypto and graduated with a degree in Computer science from a UK based university. Since then I’ve worked for some of the biggest companies on the planet, for example, Bank of New York Mellon, Pricewaterhouse coopers – also known as PwC and Capgemini. I set the vision for Shrew and lead the team to fulfil our goals.
2) Can you give us some background of your teammates too?
We have a very diverse team at Shrew and this is great because it means we have all the skills we need to make Shrew a success. Shaz, our social media director has worked as a content writer for a number of years supporting organizations with marketing campaigns, editing and managing content. This includes informative posts, blogs and building brand awareness through various social media platforms. He’s been spearheading our social media strategies at Shrew and has produced a lot of our stunning content too.
Azar has worked in various sales and public sector roles in his career. He’s done some amazing work for Shrew already, getting us listed on many sites and also running some of our ad campaigns.
Sufi, has been working in the IT industry for over 10 years in many different roles. He has helped us to spread the word about the Shrew project, including getting us listed on partners such as Coingecko.
Bandar, based in the middle east and he graduated with an honours degree in Forensic Science and has since started businesses in digital marketing. With deep cryptocurrency and blockchain connections within the MENA region, he is heading the marketing drive in this area.
3) Please tell us what is Shrew all about? What is your vision?
So Shrew is a new blockchain start-up that’s aiming to revolutionize the multi-billion dollar reward points industry. Current reward programmes are ironically unrewarding for the consumer, prone to attacks by hackers, expensive to run and tedious to use.
Shrew aims to use cryptocurrency and blockchain to revolutionize the experience for customers and open up the industry to more retailers. Any retailer no matter their size will be able to join the Shrew ecosystem and run a rewards programme with low barriers to entry. Customers will have the convenience of a single app to earn, spend, trade and send reward points across a multitude of stores.
SHREW stands for shopping rewards and our aim it creates an ecosystem of stores that will accept and pay SHREW as reward points. We’ll have a single Shrew App and debit card that will encompass Google and Apple pay where the consumer can scan their app on a card terminal to earn SHREW coins on a purchase. That SHREW that you earn is the reward point token of the ecosystem so you can then spend that at other stores within the ecosystem whether that be online or on the high street.
In addition to earning and spending SHREW reward points at your favourite retailers, you’ll be able to send your points to your friends and family over the blockchain as well as convert them into fiat.
We’ll also create the Shrew Platform which will allow us to onboard stores and manage their SHREW reserves and handle the disbursing of funds to their customers.
4) What is your tech roadmap?
We have a very clear roadmap for Shrew and right now we have hit some of the milestones ahead of Schedule. Our main focus right now is token adoption and we have already gained more than 6,000 holders and 4,500 Telegram members in less than 2 weeks. We’ve also listed on Coinmarketcap and Coingecko within a few days of launch. Our next aim will be to get Shrew on the bigger centralized exchanges. Now in terms of our next stage of building the product. We will focus on creating the Mobile app for Shrew consumers and Web platform for onboarding and handling the disbursing of Shrew for retailers.
Once this is complete we will create web integrations for accepting and pay SHREW on e-shopping sites. We will also partner with a major card provider which will mean we’ll have the capability to integrate Google and Apple pay into our mobile app.
5) The tech portion seems to be a breeze for you. Can you tell us what is your revenue roadmap like?
Yes, sure. There is a combination of revenue models and a lot of these have been included in a venture capital pitch deck. We will also look to get venture capital funding later in the journey. Before I get onto the business model, I just want to mention that the loyalty rewards industry will be valued at $25 billion by 2027 and these are the most conservative estimates. This means even a small share of the market could mean a very profitable model.
Our future revenue model will be made up of 3 main components:
– Transaction fees on fiat currencies through the debit card
– A tiered subscription fee for retailers to the Shrew platform
– Combined Data Analytics subscription for retailers
The above 3 mentioned revenue streams are just a few of the many ways we can monetize Shrew – not to mention the advertising space in-app and on the website that we could offer stores. All of the above also doesn’t take into account the growth of the token price itself.
6) How do you plan to market yourself? This is a marketing intensive project based on what I can see so far.
Our marketing will be a combination of paid marketing and building the right partnerships. In terms of paid marketing, in the near term, we will be paying influencers on social media, doing press releases with crypto companies that have a professional presence and paid ads. In addition, we’ll build the right partnerships and this in turn will also connect us to more investors and users. For example, we have already partnered with Chainlink, a multi-billion dollar crypto company to bring us real-time price feeds. They have agreed to do co-marketing and have already tweeted about Shrew.
The partnerships with providers and stores will in itself be great for marketing. As this is going to appeal to the general public too, in store and on television marketing would come into play once the Ecosystem has been built out for adoption
7) Which geographical location will you focus on for your project?
Shrew will be a global undertaking. The great thing about crypto is that it is easy to span geographies. We will have a heavy focus on the United Kingdom to begin with then branch out to the United States, Asia and the Middle East.
United Kingdom is where most of the team are based so it makes sense to first start here and then span further afield but we are looking to become a global rewards system
8) What kind of marketing and partnerships do you have planned for the next 6 months?
We will look to create partnerships with small retailers, starting with online stores. Our near term aim will be to partner with some of the biggest exchanges out there to get Shrew onto a platform that it deserves. We will also look to finalize our agreement with one of the biggest card providers in the world, I can’t name any names yet but it will be one of the big 2 debit card companies and we already have very positive conversations started so this is not a dream but a goal that is very much in our reach. As mentioned, Chainlink is looking to up its marketing with us once we start to implement their feed into our platform. We have already started paid ads recently and will continue to ramp this up. We are also preparing a press release with a large cryptocurrency news outlet
9) Do you think Bitcoin’s price is co-related to Shrew’s price? If there is really a bear market coming soon, what are your plans for the token then?
In some way yes, because our coin is currently paired with BNB which does follow bitcoin to some degree, all coins do to some degree. I personally don’t think a bear market is coming, in*-*fact I feel we are in store for an upswing. One thing to bear in mind is that Shrew is a long term project with real utility. We should not focus on very near-term prices but more the value that a SHREW token could be in the long term, which I personally think will be many order of magnitudes higher than what it is now.
10) Share an inspiring quote for our users please to end this segment.
Shrew is on a mission to revolutionize a multi-billion dollar industry. If you want to be part of a project that has real utility and ambitious plans that look to disrupt an entire industry then join Shrew. We aim to be the biggest and best reward points ecosystem on the planet.
