Imagine a few years from now, Flixxo has become a big hit and a Hollywood studio decides to make a movie — or a series, or a short-form series — about Flixxo. Even though the script would lack a romantic plot — there won’t be a love story between me and Pablo — it would be interesting to see how they would envision the creation process of a startup. For instance, right now, September 2019, would we still be in the first fifteen minutes o the movie? Are we still in the first act?
Remember the scene in the The Social Network, when Facebook reached its first million users? They had a trendy office, lots of employees. And everybody was clapping and cheering.
In our movie we have just reached 1000 downloads of the Android app. The actor playing Sergio gets the stats from the Play Store and shares the news with the rest of the office — actually three more people as devs were doing a home-office day —
Who’s going to play his role? Who’s going to play my role? Would that actor be able to share with the audience the emotions I felt in that moment?
We are excited about this mini-milestone as most of these downloads came from new users. With our desktop app approaching 4000 users, it adds up to 5000 people running Flixxo on their devices. A small step for an app, a giant leap for video distribution-kind.
In Flixxo’s movie — or series… I wonder how would they call it — there’s a scene in which the actor playing me reaches the AWS offices in Buenos Aires.
It is a sunny but cold winter day, and the character hates going downtown. The office is on a seventh floor, and the view of the river is astonishing. The actor playing AWS’s head of LATAM is waiting for me with a smile on his face that’s almost as huge as the meeting room we’re in. “Good news!” he says as the actor playing me enters the office. “Seattle has given the green light for us to support Flixxo. We will grant you an insane amount of dollars in AWS credits for you to keep growing your amazing project on top of our infrastructure!” — legal disclaimer: dialogues may have not been exactly as they really happened; this is a fictionalized version, of course — The actor playing me is shocked: that’s huge support, and almost no other Latin American company has been granted such credit. The conversation continues as they plan on working together to promote their partnership in upcoming events, such as Latin American blockchain conference, LaBitConf.
AWS support means much more than just money. Their support is a confirmation of the path we are taking to fulfill our vision. Confirmation directly from the biggest company in the world.
Fade to black. Tom Cruise wakes up — the studio has decided that, even though he is older than me, he looks young. And Leo DiCaprio was shooting The Wolf of Wall Street II and was not available to play the part, even though he told People Magazine he really wanted to — Tom reaches his phone and reads some emails… and he finds a late night email from the other side of the world saying that Flixxo was delisted from Kucoin. Tom sits on his bed, this sounds like bad news. Of course, in the movie version, there’s a storm outside of his window precisely as that happens, although there was no storm in here during the events the movie is based on.
When we listed Flixx in Kucoin they were a small exchange and they were 8 people. Now they are more than 200, and we’ve also lost our point of contact there. When we listed Flixx on their exchange, we thought we had found an exchange that was aligned with our vision of the whole token ecosystem. But a few months later, they started to demand a certain amount of trading volume per day. I do remember the times when Flixx’s trading volume was around USD3MM a day, but these were crazy days. The only way of assuring a certain amount of volume before actually launching the app, was buying our own orders. Wash trading. And, even though our volumes were almost the volume they have asked for, we refused to make that move — we place integrity above all. So we got delisted. Luckily, we are still integrated with Bancor and listed in Livecoin and Liquid, and Idex is likely to list Flixx again. We have found in Liquid an amazing partner, a partner who can follow us and help us growing as we develop and launch the app. We have a close relationship and we can plan together strategies for our token.
Some pages later, one month after the delisting, Flixx’s value is 3x the price it was when listed on Kucoin.
The cast director of the film — or series — is reading the script and stops at the page retelling the events of September 2019 — would that be one of the first pages of the script? — And she reads the page a couple of times to find out that a lot of new characters are stepping into the story. What’s going on?
Well… a lot of new faces are joining us. First, you may already know Kelly, who is responsible for our social channels. After one month she revolutionized our Instagram and we have started to feel that we are building a community around the content — not around the technology — of the platform. On the other hand, we have reached a stage in which we decided to make a change in our development strategy, to focus on the user experience. And we have found an amazing partner for that: Paisanos. They are not just a software factory, but they are part of the team. We’re keeping some of the long-time Flixxo developers to join forces with them, and Paisanos will push the project together with us. Our original development partner, Edrans, has built the pillars, the infrastructure, for Flixxo to run on; and Paisanos will help us improve the platform to make it appealing for millions of users in the upcoming months.
We have also partnered with some of the biggest video creators in Spanish, with content that reaches more than 1 billion views per month on social networks and YouTube. We will keep you posted on this ;)
The producers are asking for some action scenes. There is still no love plot, so they are eager for some cars crashing and buildings exploding. So we started our own private war. Last week Pablo — Steven Seagal — had a call with the people that pushes LATAM projects in Apple’s app store to explain why they should not reject Flixxo because of its BitTorrent integration.
P2P technologies can drastically reduce energy consumption on video delivery. Given that video distribution consumes 80% of the Internet’s consumer bandwidth, and having already proven that a video on Flixxo could take up to 90% less energy than a video on Netflix, letting us be part of Apple’s ecosystem is a must. The world needs a better, greener Internet, and we will fight to set the cornerstone for an improved logistic infrastructure for online content distribution.
In the next scene, Tom is writing this very article.
Sometimes, it is very complicated to be proud of — and share with the community — all the achievements when there are so many challenges in the future, when we still need to put together most of the pieces to have something to show. We know that the desktop version needs improvement, that mobile is still a first draft, that web version has not seen the daylight yet. And, sometimes, we choose to work hard on stuff you won’t see, instead of improving the parts you do see. In the upcoming pages of the script you will be able to discover the front end of the work we are doing in the back, not only on technology, but also on partnerships, promotion and content. Flixxo story began three years ago — our official birthdate is August 19th, 2017 — and there is a long road into the future.
The next pages of the script have not yet been written, but what a hell of a story so far.
