Let’s start with the fact that the application still operates: nims are accumulating, and there is life going on within the social network. The company does not disclose the details about how many users are registered in Nimses today (in August 2017 there were 3 million of them, and later Nimses was launched globally and opened access to the Goods in major cities of Ukraine).
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.”
