I hate announcing an announcement. I know other blockchain based projects’ CEOs use their social channels to create FOMO and pump their coins, but that’s unfair to the people who really believe in the product — but great for those believing on buying a Lambo out of pumps and dumps . Furthermore, we could have started generating some hype based on future events that eventually will happen at some point, and rush to deliver. Or be sorry for not. Something I’ve learnt as the CEO of Flixxo, a company building a new technology, challenging models that have been ruling for decades, is not to rush. There is a lot of pressure from the community, and we would have really loved to have delivered yesterday, but we are building something totally new and we need time to focus on the product. Meanwhile, the communication is being built. The marketing strategies, the visual pieces for a campaign, are being developed, one by one.
Last year, we rushed development by setting a release date for the beta in June, when we could have waited one more month to have a better, more solid app. If you had seen the faces of the developers then, working 24/7 those final few weeks to hit the deadlines… I had a meeting with the project manager and asked him if the team needed more time, he told me that they would delay the release a week. Only a week! They really wanted to deliver as promised. So we communicated that to the community, and we set a launch date without having a working app. And then everything crashed. BitTorrent is a protocol that has a lack of documentation and, a week before the release, Flixxo was not seeding content at all. We put four more developers to help finding the bug, we set a couple of emergency solutions in the case we didn’t find it. And finally, after a long week, one of our developers had a conversation with somebody in a BitTorrent chat and he found out that we had set a parameter that turned off all the seeding. We changed one line of code, turning a 0 into a 1 and everything started working again. But the deadline had been set, and even though the team was burned out, we needed to move forward. It was insane for the team, and it was unfair for the community that received a first version of the platform that was not working properly.
On the other hand, we also have some strategies that we don’t show the world. We won’t tell everything, we can’t tell everything. We’ve seen other platforms following our strategies before, and we need to be smarter now in order to have an effective launch. Does Apple tell everything prior to a product launch? Neither do we.
Development pace
I’ve been showcasing the mobile version for the last two months, but we didn’t make it public because we believe it is not ready yet. Can it play videos? Yes, it can. But there are some mechanisms that are fundamental for the project that have not been implemented yet. We need to fully develop a gamification scheme, to check that every user is actually a user — since, after all, we are handling money — and to build tools for communicating with our users.
The web version is ready as well, but it is only a copycat version of the desktop app. While it was a real pain in the ass — excuse my French — to develop, the challenge was bigger than expected as the web protocol — WebRTC — had some differences with the actual protocol, which made our seedboxes crash with only a couple of users. Although it needs a couple of tweaks, we decided to focus all our efforts on the mobile version. We could easily open it up for you to take a look at it — and we might — but one component of our strategy is to consider the desktop, mobile and web versions as different entities, each with its own logic.
On the desktop app and back-end side, we have improved seeding speeds and implemented dynamic pricing for the content — creators are now able to change the price of their videos — but this is just the beginning of something that we have seen is key for the user experience: to set a price that matches the advertised reward, setting how many ads a user needs to watch before watching a piece of content — e.g. 1 ad per video or 2/3 ad per video — creating a similar user experience for somebody in USA and for a consumer in Venezuela, even though the user in USA gets a bigger reward for watching ads. We have also improved pagination, both on the seeder and creator dashboards, and sizing for thumbnails, covers and avatars.
Marketing and communication
Flixxo is getting ready to launch for a mainstream audience. Forget the logic of a tokenized or blockchain based project, we need to reach a critical mass of non-crypto users. That’s why we have focused our content strategy on professional, short form series instead of user generated content, and that’s why we spend hours every day reaching out content creators one by one in order to have a good amount of series in the platform for when our D-Day arrives.
That said, the crypto ecosystem is our heart and soul and we are working on a MKT and PR campaign on that side as well. We are still working on having more exchanges for Flixx and integrating with other apps that would make it easier to non-crypto users to handle their tokens.
We are working on an aggressive digital marketing campaign, and we have already been creating and working with many fun images and the concepts. You’re going to love it! I do.
Flixxo will launch with an event for the press and influencers, presenting the platform and our first original series ALT ESC. We have two more series and a movie in development . Since ALT ESC was produced by and starred by two of the biggest influencers in Latin America — together they have 5MM subscribers only on YouTube — and since the media here is really interested in the project, we expect an amazing reach both on social and traditional channels — press, TV — ALT ESC is ready, but the date for the launch is not yet carved in stone, as we need to deliver mobile versions first.
Finances
We have stated some months ago that keeping the current development pace and at the price of ETH at that moment, we had resources for one more year — you can read Coindesk’s article here — . Since then, the price of ETH doubled and some of the tokens we had ready for partnerships performed even better. On the other hand, we have improved our spending and now we have resources for — at least — three more years. We aim, however, to prove our model pretty fast and bring new resources for extended marketing and further development.
Conclusion
After 18 months of development, we are still holding fast to our initial vision, we have moved forward following it. We have survived the crypto winter, without even slowing down the development pace and without reducing our team. Since we are in Argentina, our cost in salaries actually decreased (in comparison to USD), so this is a good situation for our finances.
By showing the evolution of the app — both desktop and mobile — to the industry, we are more confident than ever both in the potential of what we have already built and in the strategies we have planned for the future. It is getting easier to attract content creators with a working app and we have already built a reputation into the ecosystem of the short form series — I’ve been invited as part of the jury for Cannes Series last April, and this is just one example.
I’m proud of our developers, proud of the content and communication teams and proud of having been ready for a change in the strategy if the crypto winter was longer or our vision was not the right one. But we didn’t need to change it. I’m proud of my partners and co-founders who breath and sweat Flixxo, and help making this dream come true. Flixxo is the same great idea we had some years ago, the same vision written in the White Paper, the same concept that you supported during the ICO, and the platform that evolved out of the feedback of our community. Flixxo is the product we have imagined all this time.
Will Flixxo be a crypto killer app? Will Flixx be the first cryptocurrency of thousands of Centennials and Gen-Z kids? We’ve been working really hard for that. Now the time to prove ourselves is coming.
