EXECUTIVE UPDATE: ON TRACK FOR LONG-TERM SUCCESS!
Exciting times are ahead for our team as we move into the second quarter of the year and edge ever closer to our platform becoming a reality. Having now added sales and legal staff to our team, we continue to develop in terms of size and expertise. We have now begun spending the marketing funds allocated to ensure the platform integration of the small businesses covered by our ERP deals, and our designers have been busy applying the finishing touches to our new look landing page. With the improvements made to the platform’s overall design and user-flow, our focus now is on getting the platform finished on time and ensuring that the user base generating demand for HVN is integrated.
Our CFO, Ugur, made it clear we are on right path in his Business Report, and Dejan and his team of developers are making swift progress on the delivery side, with some of the brightest minds from the AI and factoring industries now on board to help us deliver the truly ground-breaking platform we promised. And our expanded marketing, sales and legal team here at Hive Project HQ in Ljubljana have already exceeded expectations, often sacrificing their spare time and working late into the night to the benefit of the company, the product and our amazing community. Seeing all these incredibly smart and highly motivated people working as a unit makes me incredibly proud of what we have already established and what lays ahead of us all. The solid foundations we have taken so much time to lay make us increasingly bullish about our long-term success.
Q1: Still on track for long-term success!
The end of Q1/2018 is here and we have made some very important steps forward regarding our business and product development, securing new markets, getting new deals in place and working on delivering the platform we are all waiting for. As you all know, we are very hard on ourselves and have delivered on every milestone we have set ourselves so far. And as can be seen from the evidence to date regarding factors within our control, we will continue to progress on the business and tech development, the areas where our long-term success will be determined.
Unfortunately, however, we will miss the deadline we set ourselves to get HVN listed on a major exchange. I am not running away from responsibility. We had an agreement in place, but the other party changed its conditions once the deal had been concluded. These changes meant that the deal was not right for Hive Project, causing it to be revoked, and negotiations are now at an impasse. I had to think long and hard before making this decision, but I am duty bound first and foremost to consider the interests of the company, product and our contributors.
Nevertheless, this delay with getting listed on a major exchange has no effect on us achieving our business objectives. We will continue searching for the right deal and, most importantly, with an exchange that conducts itself properly and serves its purpose as a long-term partner. To reiterate, we are on track with our technical development, business progress, sales and compliance to bring the platform to its full glory by the end of Q2/2018.
With regulation now the key word in the blockchain world, we have been making sure that we conduct ourselves in a manner that is compliant with the regulatory and legal requirements in all of our markets, ensuring we are here to stay for the future. And the biggest exchanges out there, some of whom have hit the top of the volume rankings only recently and may leave just as quickly, are no exception to that. Regulation is now a reality for them too, and many are very underprepared, which is in fact the norm for such a fledgling and rapidly evolving industry. We are therefore only interested in working with exchanges that have a long-term future. Decentralised exchanges such as Next.Exchange or exchanges, such as Lykke, give us the confidence we need to ensure that HVN can be purchased easily once our platform is up and running, and they are both solid bets to ride out the regulatory storm to come. Nevertheless, we are not closing any doors and firmly believe HVN will be listed on a high-volume exchange very soon. We are back at the negotiating table, and now that our self-imposed deadline is going to pass unmet, our negotiating position has become vastly stronger. We refuse to let that deadline be used as leverage against us and our contributors — and we refuse to blink first.
[Q2/2018] In one word — DELIVERY!
During this quarter, the focus of the community, which includes our contributors, users, small business owners and investors, will be on getting the platform done on time. And we will deliver. Simply because we always do so when all factors are under our total control. I am convinced this will be the case as we deliver v1.0 of our platform in Q2, opening our first markets and scaling up quickly — with the foundations set by all our amazing team leaders in the past weeks, and we have no intention of letting up the pace now.
We are now in the process of compiling a database of the first users of the platform, working closely with our partners in the ERP and e-invoicing businesses. Our sales team is also making swift progress with clusters of potential users, joined under the umbrellas of institutions, partnering organisations and accounting companies, getting the word out to small businesses and investors. The funds we have set aside for incentivisation and sales are proving crucial to our early successes here.
With our new and improved UX of the platform and our ALL NEW PRODUCT PAGE, small businesses will soon be able to get a real feel of what it will be like to use the new platform. Here, you can get some early insight into what we have in store, and we are incredibly proud of what we have managed to get done.
We will be releasing more screenshots of the platform’s new look landing page very soon!
We continue to try keeping our heads while those around us are losing theirs. And we are on the verge of something great, but there will always be ups and downs along the way. Life does not always go according to plan, especially in an industry that changes as quickly and dramatically as crypto. We must keep our feet on the ground and be ready for minor falls when they happen.
However, it is how we get back up on our feet that will define us, and we have always fought back to deliver after every setback. And that is why I know we will fulfil the key promise we made to our contributors: to create a state-of-the-art invoice financing platform, powered by blockchain and HVN utility tokens. And to be the first.
Thank you, as ever, for your support. We remain undaunted and our focus is unwavering, and our ultimate victory will be all the sweeter for having gone on this journey.
