Scaling up Maecenas — Communications (Part 1)

With the one-year anniversary of our token sale coming up, I am in constant disbelief at how quick time has been passing!

Since then, at Maecenas, we have been working tirelessly towards one goal — delivering what we promised. Last August, we achieved our first significant milestone in this process, the successful completion of our private beta.

The Andy Warhol painting that we auctioned, which meant the first tokenization & sale of an artwork through our platform, raised over $1.7m for a 31% ownership stake at a valuation of $5.6m.

As a team, we are immensely proud of being pioneers in the asset tokenization space — not only probably being the first ones to tokenise an asset of such value, but also running the entire bidding and pricing process through a smart contract over the Ethereum Blockchain.

It’s certainly been incredibly hectic for us — the blockchain and crypto world change very quickly, much faster than in other industries. As a start-up company within this space, it’s particularly relevant that we ensure to keep up.

However, at the same time, it is also important that we still take time to introspect, brainstorm and strategise about the direction we want to take. Going blindly at full speed in the wrong direction, without ever looking back, is not going to get us where we want to be.

After having just completed our most significant achievement to date, it is paramount that we continue to build on it.

With this in mind, two weeks ago, we got together in Singapore for a two-day offsite exercise. Through taking time away from our desks, we were able to openly reflect on the work we have done so far (both the positives & the not-so-much) & defined strategies to build on the three key pillars of Maecenas (Technology, Finance & Art)

For the benefit of our community, I will attempt to summarise the result of these sessions over a number of blog posts.

In this first one, I will be focusing on the biggest shortfall we identified — Communication.

Mea Culpa — Communication

We unanimously agreed that we have not been communicating effectively with our community.

While we are active in our Telegram channel, and I certainly do make a best effort to engage with the community and answer queries, it has been mostly a reactive approach rather than a proactive one. Instead, we prioritized launching our platform, bringing our product to market and achieving the milestone of being the first company to tokenise a multi-million dollar work of art. In that process, we unwillingly isolated ourselves from our most valuable asset: our community.

The facts

• Our team has grown to 25 members globally, including some really high calibre people, whom we have not yet introduced to our community.
• Our website has not yet been updated which has meant some content is now obsolete.
• We haven’t been sending periodic newsletters to our community to keep them informed about our progress.
• There isn’t much educational material explaining how Maecenas works, which meant some people felt a bit lost when trying to use our platform the first time.
• We did not keep our roadmap updated. Certain documents were taken offline due to containing inaccurate or out-of-date content, such as our white paper.

The reasons

• We do not yet have a dedicated communications leader in the team.
• Almost all content published by Maecenas used to be written by me. As the CEO, since our token sale, my workload has increased significantly as I had to take on new responsibilities.
• We focused almost all resources into launching our platform, which left some areas unattended, with comms being the main one.

Our plans

• Assemble a fully dedicated comms team.
• Define and direct a communications strategy so that we can have a proactive approach instead of reactive.
• Schedule and execute periodic communications, including but not limited to a company newsletter.
• Overhaul our website, migrate it into a proper CMS so that we can keep our content updated regularly.

In future posts I will be covering these other important topics:

• Financial Product / Regulation
• ART token economics and utility
• Platform / Technology
• Long Term Objectives

Originally published at blog.maecenas.co.