Case Study: Yomi.ai & Ada Pay

A case study that illustrates the migration of a small business from accepting fiat to ADA.

Small business owner, Loxe Inc. team, experienced and hackathon winning group of Plutus developers, and startup-experienced web developers.

Yomi.ai is a subscription-based website that provides over 5,000 authentic Japanese texts with tools to assess and increase reading comprehension. Paid subscribers also get access to regularly scheduled Japanese zoom-classes, recordings, slides, other learning material and access to a Discord community. As a small business launched during one week in April 2000, the business has remained profitable since launch. Through stripe integration fiat payments can be regularly withdrawn from customers from around the world.

This proposal is trying to answer the question "What is the benefit of accepting ADA?" from the perspective of a small business owner in the online education space.

The scope of this proposal includes the implementation of accepting ADA, tracking sales, and compiling documentation that either:

• surface the benefits of accepting ADA over or in addition to fiat
• acknowledges what is lacking for small business owners to accept ADA as a viable option

Impact

The COTI challenge came out of nowhere. While ADA has been jokingly labelled as a stable coin by some, there is no clear indicator that people would feel comfortable parting with cryptocurrencies by spending these on products and services found in industries that have not yet been significantly impacted by blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies.

This case study is impactful because it measures with an already established business whether new and existing customers would like to pay using ADA and if the user experience paying with ADA is as seamless or better than with existing solutions that companies like Stripe offer.

The value of this proposal is to establish whether Ada Pay brings value to business owners outside the Cardano bubble.

Feasibility

Team members of Loxe Inc. are experienced software developers with a track record of working in and leading various commercial projects.

Yomi.ai was conceptualized, built and launched within a few weeks by the main proposer back in 2020. The implementation of this proposal would be supported by experienced and IOG Hackathon award-winning team members and Plutus and Prism Pioneers of Loxe Inc.

Integrating ADA payments into one well-understood service is more likely to succeed than starting with a general plugin that has no established real use cases.

Our development team: https://winwin-team.web.app/

Risks

We do not see any challenges or risks associated with implementing this proposal.

Tech Stack

The frontend is built with Vue 2, Vuex, Vuetify, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

The backend utilizes Rust's actix-web framework and provides a REST API.

Databases used are PostgreSQL and Redis.

Payments are processed through Stripe, which communicates with the REST API via webhooks.

Budget

80 Backend development hours at $65/hr = $5,200

160 Frontend development hours at $50/hr = $8,000

160 hours on Marketing, documentation, and publishing at $40/hr = $6,400

Total = $19,600

As this is a proposal with actual market rates, no additional funding will be required.

Since the project is already cash positive, no budget needs to be allocated to infrastructure costs.

Roadmap

The work will commence in March, as the team will be focused on bringing prior funded proposals over the finishing line.

March 2022

• Implement ADA Pay API into Yomi.ai website
• Document integration work
• Set up A/B test: Fiat only / Fiat & ADA option

April 2022

• Marketing campaign via various online channels
• Capture conversion rates

May 2022

• End A/B test and select the winner
• Publish findings

Launch: By the 2 yr anniversary April 1st 2022

Metrics

• Customers signed up with fiat-only option
• Customers signed up with fiat / ADA option
• Conversion rates
• Customers paying with ADA

Success

after 3 months: Clear indication whether small business owners would benefit from offering ADA as a payment option.

after 6 months: Ideally gathered more customers through the attraction of ADA payments.

after 12 months: Nobody wants to pay in fiat anymore.