It's been two months since our last blog post. I just wanted to give you a quick update on what happened so far. In our last update we told you about our website and social communities going live. Here is what happened since then:
We:
- Founded our company
- Acquired new awesome advisors
- Moved our domain to our hosting provider
- Had many productive talks with our advisors
- Are in talks with a very interesting Accelerator Program
- Are preparing for our first alpha team tests via Testflight
Company Founding
We founded our company in march this year and it was a lot of paperwork. The planing and execution of the founding took a few weeks and there was a lot of back and forth with the notary office. Every clause in the contract needed to be discussed and carefully reviewed. The lawyer mentioned that they never had a founding with six co-founders. We were their first which was quite interesting. The paperwar is still going on as we wait for our tax numbers and some documents from the district court. Luckily opening a bank account was way faster. That just took a few days. Too bad we didn't have any time yet to celebrate our founding!
Additions to our advisory board
We can call ourself really lucky for having such an broad spectrum advisory board that caters very well to our advisory and company needs. Our app will contain gamification elements to keep the users hooked to the platform. Malte Behrman is a professor at BBW Hochschule Berlin and also does lectures at Game Academy Berlin. He served for over ten years as General Secretary of the European Game Developer Federation. He therefor has great insights into what gamification elements work well to keep our user interested and hooked over a longer period of time.
Joshua Scigala is the founder of Vaultoro a crypto to gold exchange. In case of crypto market uncertainty you can switch to gold keep your portfolio stable instead of selling to unstable fiat currencies. Joshua is one of the early birds in the crypto space and is well known as a top expert in this space. His insights will help us tremendously bringing out our own token and sailing safely through the dangerous seas of the crypto space.
The contact to investors is important and we are happy to have Max Narr on board. He previously worked as an lawyer at Baker McKenzie but is now responsible for the investor relations at IBU-tec a german company that is developing materials and processes in a sustainable way. Max was assigned to bring the company to the stock market through an IPO and succeeded in doing so. Finding the right investors and establishing a professional connection will be key to the success of our company and we feel that Max is a great addition to our advisory board.
As a startup it is hard to create and follow your own business strategy. We are delighted that Jonas Toutaoui decided to join us as advisor. Jonas is working as consultant for McKinsey & Company a globally well known and respected company that offers high level management consulting. With over 14 thousand consultants world wide it is one of the leading companies in it's field. With Jonas at our side we feel well prepared for the future.
The fast and precise execution of a project demands good strategic planing and is not to be taken lightly. Everything stands or falls by how fast and well you can deliver a project. Grigorii Gerdzhikov is a german officer in the Bundeswehr, TED speaker and startup advisor. He will help us in the strategic planing of our projects, how to organize ourself and how to avoid getting lost in microstasks. We welcome Grigorii as a great addition to our advisory board.
Productivity, Progress and Focus
Over the past two month we had quite a few meetings and calls with our advisors and they helped us tremendously on our tasks at hand. With their help we have
- A better overview of investors and partners needs
- How to focus our app development to launch faster
- How to organize ourself better
- How to plan our tasks according to our mid term goals so that we don't get lost in microtasks
We are really grateful for the advise and insights we receive from our advisory board. All the feedback we receive is constantly implemented in the daily work we put into SpotShot. We work hard to show them and the world the progress we have made with their help.
Slow loading times
After launching the website we noticed issues with the loading speed. Some requests resulted in a timeout with HTTP Error 503, it was unpredictable to say which one will fail – that happened even before our caching engine. This was pretty embarrassing when presenting it to someone you want to pitch to. We did a lot of testing and determined that it must be a DNS issue. The domain provider pointed their fingers at the webhoster even though it was obviously not their fault. Before launching the website on spotshot.io we had tested the website under a different domain on our webhosters servers and it ran just fine. We decided to move the domain to the webhoster and now the website runs without issues.
Our Application to the Iconiq Lab ICO Accelerator program
I attended many crypto meetups in Berlin and one of them was organized by Iconiq Lab. They are an ICO startup accelerator based in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Iconiq Lab held an event in WeWork at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. Everyone in the crypto space was welcome to join the event including investors, startups and crypto enthusiasts. On top of that they had free pizza and beer! It was also the meeting where I met our Advisor Joshua!
Patrick Lowry held a presentation on what Iconiq Lab is and what it offers for ICO startups. I was so hooked after he finished! What I saw that day was exactly what SpotShot needs to launch our own ICO. The value provided by Iconiq Lab to ICO startup is tremendous!
Doing an ICO is not an easy task. You have to take care of a lot of things including legal matters, marketing and KYC & AML. Iconiq Lab helps you with all of that and so much more!
Patrick mentioned that 165 startups applied for their first round and only 5 made it! These 5 startups where also present that day and held a pitch presentation to the audience. These startups are taken in a roadshow around the globe to pitch their product to a wide variety of investors helping them reach their funding goal quickly.
I applied to the program as soon as I could. Soon after I had my first call with Max Lautenschläger and we talked about SpotShot and what we have to offer to the world. The meeting went really well and just a few days ago we received a notice that we are in the top 20 of the next round! Of over 180 applications only 20 startups were chosen for the next round of due diligence meetings. Our next call is friday this week. We are very confident regarding the future of SpotShot and we believe that Iconiq Lab sees the potential in our project.
For the next round of startups Iconiq Lab will only pick five and we are working really hard to be one of them.
Preparing for the first test flight
In order to test our app we need to run it on multiple devices and with as many test user as possible. Right now only our Lead Developer Marcel and Lead Designer Jakob can test the app. That is why we applied for the Apple developer program to easily distribute alpha versions of our app to testers so that non technical people can test the app. At first we will test it internally in an alpha version and move on to a private beta version later with friends and influencers. Apple's Test Flight makes it easy for us to just send out invites to alphas and betas. Updating the app will be done through it too. It makes the app testing very convenient for testers and we feel that is necessary to get good feedback. As soon as we have a public beta we will let you know and hope you will join us on our journey.
That's it for now. We have our next meeting today and are planing for our next hackathon in two weeks. Our advisor Grigorii will come to Berlin for a few days to guide us through the hackathon so that we can be as productive as absolutely possible. To have a more visual insight in our journey please follow us over at Instagram!
Until next time.
Mersad
CEO @ SpotShot