• 211steps is a platform and toolkit for creating immersive and interactive performances. The platform offers users a choice. Each project on 211steps can be divided into several sections — at the end of each of them, users have to make a decision. Depending on the choice made, the beginning of the following section changes.
• According to Sirchenko, there is no ready-made solution that would allow creating such products and putting them in users’ smartphones. He believes that the format of a mobile app will make it possible to cover both functional and marketing needs.
• The project’s portfolio already includes two audio stories allowing users to influence the flow of the story. They were created by Tamara Trunova, director of the Kyiv Academic Theatre of Drama and Comedy. The stories “Return to Dignity” and “Return to Humanity” are about the Revolution of Dignity and the occupied territories of Ukraine. There are also several performances on the platform.
• The app’s users will pay 30-60 hryvnias (approx. $1-2). Sirchenko expects that one user will play 5-6 interactive games a year. There are also plans to raise a funding round in 2022 and enter the Canadian, US, and British markets. Right now, the project receives financing from angel investors.
• The co-founders of 211Steps are Andrii Sirchenko and Yevhen Utkin, the sole investor in the project. He has already invested $500,000 in the startup. Sirchenko and Utkin had already worked together for the Ukrainian social media Nimses.

At the end of September 2019, it became known that Nimses, one of the most sensational and mysterious Ukrainian startups, is having financial troubles. Since January 2019, Nimses began to delay payment of salaries, as several employees reported to AIN.UA. The startup itself confirms that there are delays, but all financial obligations will be fulfilled after raising a new round of financing.

Despite financial troubles, the management encourages developers to do overtime and kicks off expensive advertising campaigns. “Surrealism, manipulation, and laundering of investors’ money,” this is how one of the startup’s former employees who wished to remain anonymous describes the atmosphere prevailing in Nimses. Not only employees were left without the promised money, but also startup partners, in particular, sellers on the Goods platform. However, the project is not officially closed, they continue hiring people.

AIN.UA editor explains who stands behind Nimses, where the money came from, and why the mysterious startup has not yet become a big story.

On hype

In the summer of 2017, Uanet and Runet were teeming with discussions about the unusual Nimses App. It suddenly blew up the top charts of the App Store and Play Market as either a social network, or a dating app, or maybe a crypto startup. Fancy black interface, evangelists like Ivan Dorn and Onuka, articles in popular magazines. Social networks were filled with referral links, and the SMS verification gateway was collapsing from all the verifications by phone number.

Everyone used Nimses in their own way. Some used it as an Instagram and just posted photos, some used it as a dating app, like Tinder, and others enthusiastically collected nims as a game currency.

In fact, the startup was trying to offer users a ‘multi-use superlike.’ This super like was represented by ‘nims’ – the in-app currency, which was accrued to each user every minute from the moment of registration in the application. It was planned that users would be able to buy real goods and services in exchange for nims and likes expressed in nims would become a more tangible manifestation of sympathy. In addition, thanks to the geolocation component, it would be easier for users to get acquainted with people who are physically close to them.

In August 2017, Nimses representative Yegor Okhotnikov in an interview with AIN.UA said that the service had over 3 million users in 13 countries. Also, 20,000 partners expressed their willingness to partner up with the company. The startup paraded across Ukraine and the CIS and was preparing to meet a wave of traffic from 70 countries around the globe, including the United States.

Digital Utopia

All those Nimses users needed to do is simply live their lives and accumulate nims. Over time, the startup promised that it would be possible to buy anything for nims, and at a fixed rate: 1 dollar = 1,000 nimes. The goods and services were to be provided by partners who in exchange received data on the whereabouts of users and could trap them with their advertisements directly in front of their stores.

The business came to Nimses even before they launched the Goods platform. Shops began to sell fancy clothes, accessories, coffee and muffins, and even marketing services offline in exchange for nims. Having a couple of thousand nims “in your pocket” could buy a fashionable sweatshirt from FINCH and a fanny pack from Vsi. Svoi, have a coffee in KavaBulki or order pizza in PizzaPlace. You just need to simply come to the place and transfer the required amount to the seller’s account.

Real money was excluded from this scheme. The question was how will Nimses earn money? And the company had the answer: over time, the nims were supposed to turn into a fiat currency, which could be cashed. And it looked like the team was going to deliver.

But something went wrong.

Marketing Tool and the Human Factor

Like any other popular social network, Nimses was filled with spam accounts, the only task of which was mining nims and fraud. Of course, such accounts were of no value to advertisers, moreover, nims value began to drop, jeopardizing the entire startup model. To tackle this problem the team introduced a verification system, giving permission to use nims only to those users who could confirm their existence in reality: for this, it was necessary to get the support of 10 other users who have already received verification.

But selfish miners invented more and more ways to accumulate nims. Soon, they began to sell verifications. Social networks were flooded with ads like “Verification for nims, all details in PM.” For a couple of thousand nims, any bot could be approved by a user with the status of “Human”.

The idea of ​​making talented people rich was also unsuccessful. The “Angels” in Nimses were getting fewer super likes than ordinary hotties who were ready to share photos of their body curves and selling even more revealing photos in exchange for nims. Millions of users eventually abandoned the service.

Nimses partners were initially satisfied with the collaboration. This social network became a good marketing tool: brands received impressive coverage and targeted “barter” actions. As a spillover effect, they got media references about Nimses.

“We presented almost all the basic goods from the store at the Central Department Store, and at that time it was the most effective advertising of our brand,” said Kateryna Byakova, founder of FINCH. According to her, the campaign in Nimses paid off better than those on Facebook or Instagram and got a long tail. The FINCH significantly increased brand awareness and customers continued to call and come to the store long after they stopped selling goods for nims.

Other companies also told AIN.UA about their fruitful cooperation with Nimses.

But there were some subtle nuances. The sellers’ nim exchange rate was different from the official one. Small items that cost a couple of bucks, like a USB cable, could cost hundreds of thousands of nims. A branded T-shirt would cost a million. Several times the company tried to adjust the rate to the originally declared 1,000 nims per dollar, but in response, sellers simply removed their goods from the Goods platform, provoking user dissatisfaction. The administration of the service was forced to give up and allow the trading platform to set its own rules.

Soon the sellers decided that the benefits in the form of advertising weren’t enough for them – they wanted real money. In response, Nimses launched the Exchange where you could exchange nims for money, but the amount had to be not less than 80 million nims (for which they promised 15,000 euros).

New mechanics

At first, Nimses regularly delighted users with announcements, but each time it greatly delayed its releases.

The team promised to launch the Goods platform in June 2017, but it only started working in Kyiv in September. The delay was justified by technical modifications, which were needed to be done due to the unexpectedly rapid growth of the Nimses user base. Only in December, the Goods section was launched in other big Ukrainian cities.

In June 2017, the administration of the service promised to launch a legal music service, where you could make payments in nims. The launch took place indeed, but almost a year later – in April 2018.

The team became more careful and stopped making further announcements, notifying about the changes only after the launch. All in all, in 2018, there was little information from Nimses. The members of the initial team – SMO Andrey Sirchenko, speaker Yegor Okhotnikov, and others – that AIN.UA previously communicated with were one by one leaving the company.

By that time, the hype wave settled down. However, the platform itself was constantly changing. Nimses tested more and more new mechanics that appeared and disappeared suddenly, without warning, which completely perplexed users and partners.

The triumph of the human ego

In February 2019, the company introduced a major update, and the initial goals have changed dramatically. Earlier they dreamed at Nimses of giving users the opportunity to show each other that they care, but now the service decided to switch to the good old self-absorption. “All eyes are on you. You are in the center. The world is shocked. And life really will never be the same,” said the newsletter describing the update.

Now, the status of an angel could be acquired not only by talented users who were making the world a better place with their creativity but anyone who collected 1,000+ nominations from other users (by the way, the nominations quickly turned into the same scheme as verification in its time). The “Angels” were becoming curved girls and sociable guys, rather than representatives of the creative class.

Despite the fact that this version was supposed to be final, Nimses continues to change every month. If you remove the application from your smartphone, and after some time download it again, you won’t be able to immediately find out what is happening here. One thing is obvious – it is still alive and still has users.

So Secret, Much NDA

Сompanies in Ukraine prefer to keep things private. The owners usually don’t like to go public about anything so as not to attract the attention of tax and other inspection authorities.

At Nimses, privacy is part of the corporate code. Owners and top management created an aura of mystery around the startup, which performs two functions simultaneously. The first function is purely marketing. The more they hide something from people, the stronger the intrigue: though people are not that interested in Nimses, the intrigue has not disappeared completely.

The second function of secrecy is protection. The less they know about the company, the less vulnerable the company is. Therefore, any collaboration with Nimses begins with the signing of a non-disclosure agreement. This applies to everyone: partners, employees, and even candidates (they are allowed to be interviewed only after signing an NDA). AIN.UA learned it from the company’s ex-employee Andrey (the names of respondents are changed hereinafter).

“Product Company. Secret Startup. NDA project. These are the nicknames that the company’s recruiters chose for their headhunting, ” describes the hiring process Andrey.

Employees are not allowed to specify Nimses as their place of work. You can work only through the corporate network or using a VPN. Everyone had an MDM profile installed on their working computers.

Ukrainian businesses that sold their goods on the Goods platform for nims also signed the NDA. “We have a non-disclosure agreement [with Nimses], so I can’t comment. I can say anonymously that we, as well as others, are waiting for payment,” one of the sellers told AIN.UA. According to him, they have been waiting since January 2019.

One cannot enter Nimses office from the street. Those few people who turned out to be privileged enough to get inside were met by company employees in the courtyard and then led inside. The office itself is spacious, modern, expensively equipped and decorated with artificial plants. The employees feel comfortable there and get delicious and healthy free food. However, according to Andrey, recently there have been problems with all that.

But this wasn’t their biggest disappointment. According to Andrey, the processes at Nimses turned out to be the worst of all in his career: the developers were constantly given unrealistic deadlines without clear justification, and if they failed, the management would put pressure on them and demanded to work faster, sometimes in a boorish manner.

Deadlines were given names like “Martial Law scope” to emphasize importance and urgency. And all of this in face of constant product pivot when the application had to be rewritten almost from scratch. As a result, the team was forced to work overtime, and, according to Andrey, they weren’t paid for that.

And employees’ reward for their efforts was supposed to be the awareness of being on “top of the product development chain” and being a part of the company’s ambitious mission: victory over the banking system, cryptocurrencies, and social networks. In the end, the most persistent employees were to find themselves as a part of a “billion-dollar company that has received worldwide recognition and changed the lives of people.”

C-level and investments

Information about the owners and investors of the project is also classified. This is all we could get from the sources:

• David Mironovsky – co-founder, CEO and chief ideologist of the project;
• Victor Strelbitsky – СОО;
• Vladimir Milman – CFO.

Andrey Boborykin, who replaced Yegor Okhotnikov, is responsible for communications in the company. Six months ago, he quit and launched his own business. Okhotnikov refused to comment on the situation and climate in Nimses that prevailed during his time at the startup.

The representative of the company in matters of intellectual property – Yulia Skochilo. The startup itself is registered in the U.S., in the state of Delaware, but the rights to the trademark are also registered in Ukraine. Today, according to YouControl, in Ukraine Mironovsky owns only the company named “Big Caps”, which sells tea, coffee, and hot drinks wholesale and retail. Another beneficiary is Strelbitsky. (Update: in the first version of the article we mentioned that the rights to TM Nimses were transferred to Yulia Skochilo from MIronovsky. It is a mistake: Skochilo is the representative of the company in matters of intellectual property.

We couldn’t find out who were the investors in the company that has been working on a startup for several years. As AIN.UA came to know, one of the investors is a Ukrainian investor and entrepreneur, director of Kvazar-Micro Evgeny Utkin. He confirmed to AIN.UA the reliability of this information: Utkin has been investing in the startup since 2017.

“I’ve been a shareholder, angel investor, and strategic advisor to the company since 2017. Almost half of my time is spent developing the company, but not its operations. Nimses is a very innovative, modern company that has presented a number of completely pioneering ideas to the world in two years. “Time is money,” unconditional basic income, impeccable design, innovative blockchain, temples, showcases. All this came to the market at once, there were mistakes and failures. Such a turbulent agile that is possible only in Ukraine. The company has been developing on a scale surprising even for Silicon Valley, but still from Kyiv with very limited access to any financing,” Utkin answers the question of why he invested in the company.

AIN.UA found out that Russian investors are also involved, as well as an employee of Ukrainian ICU fund: this is his private investment (Updated: the first version of the article indicated that one of the investors was the ICU fund. In fact, this is a private investment of one of the ICU fund employees, but not the fund itself).

According to former employees, they promise to pay the unpaid salary at Nimses after attracting a new round of investment. Representatives of the social network confirmed that they are working on attracting investments, but there are no details: “Wait for the press releases,” Nimses responded shortly. Utkin assured that the startup will also pay off all employees and partners, and the startup itself is busy right now attracting new investments.

The editors of AIN.UA couldn’t find anybody in the market who heard about Nimses looking for financing right now: local business angels and investors are not aware of such a request. “There is no upcoming funding, these are empty promises (“at the final stage”, “there will be news next Tuesday”, etc.) last since January and never stopped,” commented a former employee Roman. According to one of the Ukrainian investors in an interview with AIN.UA, no one will publicly give them another round: this is a closed company without a clear monetization model. And Nimses, in turn, will not take a public round, as it has not done it before.

When the problems started

According to AIN.UA sources, salary delays began in January 2019. At first, they paid in full or partially, but by the summer payments to employees had ceased.

Vladimir hasn’t been paid for two months; Andrey says that the average debt is for 3-4 months of work. “The remaining employees have not yet been paid. Debt repayments do not occur either,” he says. Nimses confirmed the existence of debts and added that they have a plan in place to repay them.

Partners are also waiting for the repayment. In one of the intermediate versions of the product (if you can call them that), merchants were promised 15,000 euros for the “infinim” (about 80 million nims as of October 2018). Then Boborykin told AIN.UA that some merchants had successfully converted their infinims. In order to do that it was necessary to go through the verification procedure – in other words, to verify that the nims were earned in accordance with the rules of the platform.

One of the merchants at Goods, who wished to remain anonymous, said that, like many others, he was still expecting payment from Nimses.

“We went through all the “honesty verifications” of the earned nims in February and March. The last time we talked about payments with support was in May when we were asked to be patient. Recently we wrote to support again. There hasn’t been an answer yet,” he said. His page managed to collect two infinims, that is, about 160 million nims. He still didn’t get the promised 15,000 euros for the first infinim from Nimses. The merchant was no longer applying for the conversion of the second since he didn’t see the point in doing so. Since May 2019, his page has suspended work at Goods. During the time of cooperation with the service, he sold for nims about UAH 100,000 worth of goods. Nimses said that all payments are in line and the startup will pay off all debts in the future.

The editor of AIN.UA also contacted the company Zvuk, provider of streaming music for Nimses (the parties haven’t disclosed the terms of their cooperation) and asked to confirm or deny the existence of Nimses debts to Zvuk. “We have no problem with Nimses. We don’t comment on other issues/questions,” answered the Head of Partnerships at Zvuk Edward Davydov.

Despite financial problems, in June 2019, Nimses paid for expensive advertising integration with the most popular blogger on YouTube: a video with Nimses advertising was released on the PewDiePie channel. Felix Chelberg devoted more than a minute at the beginning of his video to the Ukrainian service. Also, a link to the application can be found in the description under the video. The video collected 6 million views.

Nobody knows the exact rates for Chelberg’s ad placements, but earlier he confirmed in one of the podcasts that he makes about $ 3,400 per hour off his videos. A post in PewDiePie’s Instagram costs $70,000. According to Nimses ex-employees, they paid for the marketing campaign involving the famous streamer with a loan from a private person. By that time, Nimses was already experiencing problems with paying salaries and affiliate conversions through the Nimses Exchange.

(Non)massive layoffs

Nimses refutes the fact of massive layoffs, “The employee turnover within the company is no different from the average on the market both in terms of quantitative indicators and in terms of reasons,” Nimses noted.

However, according to one of the interlocutors, the layoffs did take place. “A few people were fired from the development and product management teams (one of the first people on the project), because they were considered “ineffective” according to the freshly hired “vice president of engineering,” the source said.

“David, CEO of the company, has a very strange idea of ​​how to do business. It feels like he’s just trying to melt human resources into a product’s popularity without thinking about anything that might be common sense,” says Vladimir.

The exact number of employees in the company is not disclosed, so it is difficult to conclude how massive this case is. Nevertheless, according to Andrey, the company’s staff has shrunk by more than half. Those who demand their salary are offered to leave and sign a non-disclosure agreement and a completion deed, promising to pay money in the near future. And the rest are told to embrace for the next tremendous amount of work that needs to be done “yesterday.”

“At the same time, people were still hired even with a hole in the budget, and they continue to hire people,” emphasizes Andrey.

While employees suffer from overtime and lack of money, top management of Nimses, according to Roman, “does not suffer from any lack of finances. But maybe it’s just a coincidence, and they have income on the side,” he says.

According to employee observations, Nimses lacks a product strategy and monetization model: supposedly no one understood the company’s product from the very beginning. Four years passed, but nobody can still understand. It is not surprising, given the number of pivots (since the last major update, the interface has changed dramatically again). But if in 2016 the misunderstanding caused mystical delight among users, whereas in 2019 it caused more of a confusion. The promises laid out in the description of the application, “recognition, glory, success, influence, and power” sound unconvincing.

Nimses still has a “tail” of user activity following the end of the hype wave: according to SimilarWeb, the average DAU for Android in the second half of 2018 in Ukraine is 8,500, and in Russia – 10,500, and MAU, according to a former employee, for the same period amounted to about 200,000. But if the company’s past successes in PR are unconditional, then the future of the “multi-use superlike ” is now in question.

What’s new?

On February 13, the team made an official release and presented new Nimses for the first time in a year and a half. It is reported that in the new release, Nimses economy locked in a full cycle.

More nims = more coverage

The basic concept of the project remains unchanged: from the moment of registration, for each minute of life, the user receives 1 “nim”. However, the influence of the “nims” balance on everything that the user does has changed. Now the number of nims on the account determines the coverage of the user’s posts.

In simple words, the more nims – the wider the scope.

Each user now sees the ratio of his/her balance of nims with the number of people who see his/her next post.

Dominim

In Nimses, a new unit of value appears, or, as it is called in the social network itself “dominim”. One dominim is equal to one year of life in nims, and anyone who has accumulated 683,748 nims can buy it. Also, the possibility of buying dominims for “fiat” money inside the application starts.

What is dominim needed for? Dominim adds coverage to the user’s records, and also visually identifies those who have one, but the main attraction of the dominim is that this is the only way to own the Temple (you can read about what is Temple in our previous article).

How to become a Master of the Temple?

As explained in the project, Temples are the basis of the Nimses economy. Millions of nims are made at Temple every day, a significant proportion of which is contributions from Temple residents. Now each user has the opportunity to become a Master of the Temple and take all the contributions for him/herself.

The cost of the occupation of the Temple around the world will start with one dominim. The user will be able to remain a Master until no one offers more dominims for possession of the Temple. Depending on the number of inhabitants, some Temples will be much more attractive than others, because the cost of densely populated Temples will increase.

Communities

In the new version of Nimses, a Community appeared. This is about the same as in other social networks, but with the proviso: the founders of the communities earn nims. After all, each new subscriber is +1 nim per day.

Nominations

Now in Nimses, users can nominate each other for Angel status. To become an Angel, you need to collect 1,033 nominations. Angel status automatically increases the visibility of user content and, accordingly, its coverage.

As emphasized in Nimses, today, the nims accrued for life minutes are only an unconditional basic income, and to participate in all aspects of the project’s life, you need as much as possible nims. Here users have several earning scenarios: bring new users to the system; create themed Communities; collect subscribers and become an angel; sell goods and services in Nimses Goods; buy dominims for “fiat” money.

What was removed?

In the last Nimses release, the team tested the so-called infinims. It was an “entity” equal to one human life — 120 years or 63,115,200 nims. To buy an infinim, it was also necessary to pay 30% of the user fee, it turns out a little more than 82 million nims. For each infinim, Nimses promised to pay its owner as much as 15,000 euros.

This was used by many merchants at the Goods site. It was only necessary to sell the goods for 82 million nims and get the income in foreign currency. In October 2018, we were informed by Nimses that some merchants were thus able to convert their stocks of nims.

With the disappearance of the infinim, the Goods ecosystem has noticeably changed. If earlier it was possible to buy a lot of different goods especially for nims, now many merchants do not want to give away their goods this way: mostly “discounts” are left in the market – when you pay 50% of the cost with them, and you transfer the rest to the real hryvnia.

You can see what the social network was like at the beginning of its existence and compare it with what it is like today in our article about the first release of Nimses.

Since then, much has changed, including the design of the interface and its structure.

“All attention is on you. You are in the center. The world is shocked. And life really will not be the same,” this is how the changes were commented on in the mailing list to users on September 21.

If we believe the administrators of the service, this is the final build of Nimses. It has a lot of new features, among which financial ones are announced. For example, users are promised the opportunity to convert nims into real money. Previously, the service introduced a buyout of nims only from business accounts, and for 2 million nims were going to pay $100. However, this was an experiment and it did not last for a long time.

The course for merchants has changed since then, however, nobody knows in which way, and Nimses refused to comment on it (by the way, it is still not known who are the sponsors of the project). The merchants themselves also do not disclose exact figures, however, they claim that it is profitable for them to sell on the site.

Let’s see what has changed in Nimses for users and partners.

Photos, statuses and new tariffs

All navigation has moved to the top of the screen: here you can move between sections of the Goods, “temple” and “city”. We will get back to the Goods a little later, but for now let’s start with the Temples.

How UI Nimses looked from the very beginning, you can see here.

All cities in Nimses are divided into temples, or districts. The user’s identity to a specific temple (citizenship) is determined automatically based on its geolocation data.

In the Temples tab, you can now see not only all users who are nearby, but also their messages, which are available in a separate tab. Apparently, this function was made as something like statuses, with only 120 characters allocated to the text, almost like on Twitter. However, in fact, it reminds more of a bulletin board: someone offers verification for nims (recall, unverified users cannot use the Goods and the music service), someone is looking for a company to go to the movies, and someone is looking for people who would “share some nims” with him/her…

You can comment and like these statuses, just like regular photo posts, but you can publish them for free, while publishing a photo costs from 50 to 100 nims (depending on the source of the photo the price is 50 nims for photo taken with camera, 100 nims for photo uploaded from the gallery).

Moving around the city or country, you can subscribe to non-native temples in order to follow the lives of users in those temples, and it will cost 3 nims a day. In the “City” tab you can see all publications of users nearby, or publications of users you are subscribed to in a separate tab.

In the nearest future they also promise to update the chat interface.

“Infinims” or 15,000 euros for “life”

Each temple now has a “master”. He/she gets the treasury of temple for the day. The treasury is formed from transfers of Citizens of this temple (living in the area of ​​users). To become a “master” of the temple and get all the nims from the treasury to your account, you need to spend one quota of infinim, but this opportunity was not available to me because, obviously, I didn’t have enough nims on this quota.

By the way, ‘infinim’ is another new problem in Nimses. If ‘nim’ is the minute of a person’s life, then an ‘infinim’ is a whole life, or 120 years to be exact. In Nimses, it was estimated that 120 years in ‘nims’ is 63,115,200 nims. If you add another 30% of the user contribution to this amount, you get a little more than 82 million nims, that’s what you can exchange for the cherished infinim.

What for? For money. For the Infinim, Nimses promises to pay as much as 15,000 euros.

According to Andriy Boborykin, who is responsible for communications in Nimses today, it’s the infinims that are to be converted into euros through the Nimses Exchange platform. This offer is valid for both users and merchants. That is, in order to withdraw their expulsion to Nimses in foreign currency, they need to accumulate 82 million nims.

“In the Goods tab you can see the number of purchases by good, the activity there is high and there are enough opportunities to earn infinim, especially at the current stage, when the competition is relatively low,” says Boborykin.

What happens in Nimses Goods

Marketplace Nimses Goods remained almost unchanged on the outside. The interface remains the same, except that filters were added so that users can select products or discounts.

The buyer must deliver their receipt within 24 hours after purchase.

Among the first business partners who came to the Nimses platform were several well-known brands, in particular, “Vsi.Svoi” and FINCH. Moreover, they launched sales for nims before the launch of the Goods. Today, large sellers cannot be found in the Goods tab, mainly you can find goods and services from individual traders displayed there.

There are proposals from the indie brand Bee’s Knees which is the only clothes available, this is an atelier for sewing designer clothes, whose products, in addition to Nimses Goods, can only be found on Instagram. There are also craft goods like leather and textile covers, wallets and cardholders.

Many offers come from dropshippers. These are Chinese goods of a very different profile, starting from USB cables and banana bags to cheap watches like the ones OLX is filled with. There are also typographic products (notebooks, photo magnets, posters), educational courses, books, and, of course, food.

Proposals in the Goods tab are not sorted by geolocation, meaning the user from Kyiv sees goods and services from all over Ukraine. There are even offers from our eastern neighbors, for example, the residence “Two yews” in the Krasnodar Territory offers to stay in their guest house or take a steam bath at the bathhouse in exchange for nims.

How profitable is it to sell in Nimses Goods? Sellers’ reviews

For the first business partners, Nimses became an exclusively marketing platform, moreover, quite effective one. Even before the launch of the Goods tab, “Vsi.Svoi” released a special limited collection “I am Mine. Time is Yours,” which included caps, T-shirts, banana bags and iPhones covers. They sold all of these goods for nims, according to the User to User model.

“All the clothes for nims were sold out in just over an hour. However, the prices we set were just a convention: as long as it’s impossible to cash out, this activity is good as a way to increase our brand’s awareness,” the organizer and founder of the market and the “Vsi.Svoi” store Anna Lukovkina told back then.

FINCH also launched the stock before the opening of the Goods tab, and then for some time it was present on the Nimses trading platform. “We represented almost all of the basic products from the corner in TsUM, and this was at that time the most effective advertising for our brand,” says brand founder Kateryna Byakova.

FINCH offered its models with discounts up to 70%. The basic things of the brand cost an average of 1,500 UAH, and if you paid with 20,000 nims (equivalent to a falafel or a pair of coffee from the first sellers), you could buy them for 400 UAH. “But given the marginality and the TsUM commission, it would be imprudent to continue selling on the same conditions on an ongoing basis,” Byakova explained: in a couple of weeks, using the hybrid scheme of hryvnia + nims, FINCH sold no more than 50 products.

“Economically, this “almost” sampling turned out to be more justified than investing in an advertisement on Facebook or Instagram, where getting into the audience is more difficult and, in most cases, there is no conversion of likes or comments into the purchase. For a couple of weeks, we sold no more than 50 products using a hybrid scheme of hryvnias and nims, but after the goods were removed, we continued to receive calls and have people come to the corner for a long time. In general, we profited.”

What about today? For Anzor Abuladze and his coffee-to-coffee network partners, “KavaBulki” Nimses is not only an advertising tool, but also a platform for sales. Today, KavaBulki is one of the most active sellers on Nimses. Almost the entire range is available for nims.

According to Anzor, guests with checks from the Goods can make up to 20% of the daily visitors of “KavaBulki”. “During the summer, their number was less, it was the time of the outflow of students, who make up at least half of such clients. The location of the coffeeshop matters: the least of all guests with the Nimses app are located on Dorogozhychi, most of them are located on Lev Tolstoy, in the center of the city,” Anzor says. Some of the guests from Nimses have become regular customers of the network.

Recently, Nimses offered “KavaBulki” to test a new advertising tool on the platform: the user is invited to see an advertisement, and he/she is getting a certain number of nims for this. It looks like this:

To get nims for advertising, the ad must be viewed within 5-6 seconds

For now, the instrument is being tested, however, according to Abuladze, the results are not bad:

“Under the conditions of the test, the CTR of our first advertising campaigns is 10%, which is very good for advertising in social networks. Although in general, our sales within the application have declined. Unfortunately, together with the start of testing an advertising tool, the developers severely limited the number of purchases by one user in the entire store to one per day. Thus, we cannot yet fairly evaluate the effectiveness of the tool before and after its implementation.”

Such advertising is paid for by nims.

Dmytro Pinchuk has several accounts selling in the Goods at once: SquadyX (design services and creative goods), SX Print (printing services), Kievday Shop (original gift shop). The latter was registered immediately after the launch of Goods, the rest were added later.

According to Pinchuk, Goods is perhaps the main platform for the sale of goods and services of his companies. “Almost all of our products are unique in the framework of the Goods, many of the product lines we produce and sell exclusively on this site. Today, exactly those products that have become the most popular for the entire period of sales on Nimses are located in the Goods,” says Pinchuk.

According to him, more than 50% of all sales for today are carried out through the SquadyX store in the Goods.

“If earlier the sale of goods on the site were an alternative, in the near future Nimses Goods could be the main source of income. Over the last month several hundreds of goods/services have been sold there. Nims today is the most accessible cryptocurrency, and everyone can easily join this fascinating world. We believe in the great future of Nimses.”

FINCH left Nimses last winter. “We moved to the 3rd floor in an open space and changed the conditions of interaction with the TsUM, it became more difficult to resolve issues. It is not the worst thing to explain the conditions of purchase for nims to the dozens of sellers of each shift, leaving the device to accept nims; it’s more difficult with accounting, where each discount must be justified and approved by a number of TsUM specialists, and then all the rules must be drawn up, while eliminating a possible fraud. We were held hostage by bureaucratic procedures,” explained Byakova.

However, FINCH emphasizes that they have not lost interest in the platform and they do not exclude their return to the Goods. The company is interested in the opportunity to promote its products outside Ukraine after the global launch of the trading platform:

“Now the interest in buying for nims in Kyiv seems to be dead. But as far as I know, Nimses are entering new markets and opening up the sale of goods online, which will simplify everything, and we will be ready to return our goods to the Goods tab. We will receive not only the Ukrainian market, but also the USA, Europe. It is very interesting.”

Will goods merchants get real money for their sales?

No matter how Nimses developers tried to fix a nims rate, in fact it is determined by merchants. Initially it was assumed that one ‘nime’ will cost $1. However, at the same time the prices in the Goods tab could reach millions of nims for things worth a couple of thousand hryvnias.

Today, prices at the site of many merchants exhibited at the rate of 1,000 nims for 1-2 UAH. For example, a USB cable, which is sold at the price of 400 UAH on the website of the same seller, could be bought in Nimses Goods for 100,000 nims with a surcharge of 175 UAH.

Good things are more expensive: starting from 400,000 nims for designer pajamas to 1,5 million for an electric guitar. Then the developers introduced a new rule: the price per lot cannot exceed 100,000 nims. It did not strengthen the nims rate, the merchants simply removed expensive goods from the platform, or re-priced them including a discount. “It is simply not profitable for us to sell goods this way,” one trader explained in a private conversation with the editor of AIN.UA.

“We set prices considering other offers in the Goods tab and an attempt to maintain a balance in which we will not get any profit and will be able to continue using the Goods tool. We spend money on advertising,” said the co-founder of “KavaBulki”.

The conversion of the infinims to Nimses Exchange was launched back in the summer. According to Boborykin, there are already several merchants in Ukraine and Russia who have collected infinims. “After the necessary verification procedures, they will be able to withdraw them,” he said.

“After changing the rules of Nimses Goods, we are in the process of accumulating the right amount of nims for cashing. We will be able to give a more detailed answer to this question in the future,” says Dmytro Pinchuk.

“I had no illusions about converting earned nims into real money. And I don’t have these illusions until now, when the withdrawal threshold has increased 40 times, and the amount of expenses per person per day has fallen to 100,000 nims,” admits Byakova.

“The main thing is not to think of nims as a real currency as long as there is no 80 million in the account. This is, first of all, a gaming scheme that allows you to stimulate demand and raise recognizability.”