Meet Zippie’s new Chief Marketing Officer, Heikki Vänttinen
Meet the man responsible for taking Zippie’s marketing to the next level: Chief Marketing Officer Heikki Vänttinen. As a young entrepreneur, Heikki embodies the Zippie can-do mindset. With years of experience helping blockchain and non-blockchain projects alike, he also knows what it takes to succeed in this unique space. To welcome him aboard the good ship Zippie, and to find out more about the man behind the marketing, we asked him a few questions.
1. You’ve been working in the blockchain space for a while now, when and how did you realize its potential?
Working in an agency or freelance role and consulting all kinds of companies with their marketing, you need to be pretty naturally interested in different business models and technologies to be able to do your work and create stuff that resonates with people. From this sort of professional background, getting introduced to Bitcoin first and then the broader idea of blockchain technologies happened relatively soon, although I have to say I was at first fairly skeptical of the idea of digital currencies especially (these, at the time, were pretty much the only application of blockchains) due to their extreme volatility.
However, after realizing that my skepticism wasn’t really based on any hard arguments against the tech itself, I decided to study the topic and actually learn about the underlying technology a couple of years ago. That was really the beginning of my personal journey into the space both as an investor and a marketing professional, since it didn’t take long after starting to read up on this stuff to become convinced about the potential of blockchains, decentralized applications and smart contracts hold for the future.
2. How does the presence of ICO crowdfunding change the dynamic in open source projects?
There are really too many things to mention, but for one it basically makes your project a publicly listed company from the communications perspective — except Fortune500 companies only really need to do quarterly reports, whereas most projects in the blockchain space are in a constant dialog with their contributors through chat groups, blog updates and reddit etc. almost 24/7. In that sense it’s a lot more community oriented, which is fitting since a strong core “tribe” is something that is necessary to grow these technologies out of the whitepapers and into the mass markets.
You need the people who can see your vision and who are as excited about it as you are. Then you add in an economically incentivizing element, which is the token, and it hopefully becomes a sort of self fulfilling prophecy of like-minded early adaptors working on a shared goal of having their project come out on top to be the Amazon, Google or Facebook of the Web3 era. Also it’s not like I don’t think this was the case within companies of every previous generation too, but I think the token economy has transformed the ability of people who are not partners in a VC firm or early employees of these revolutionary companies to capture that early value (that they also might be producing by being an active part of the community).
3. Zippie’s already working hard to bring blockchain to the masses with its mobile OS. What kinds of companies, services and dapps do you think will drive mass adoption?
It really is too early to say, so I won’t hypothesize too much about what is going to be the first truly viral mass market blockchain service or dapp. That’s also sort of the beauty of being a platform provider: All you’re trying to do is give these projects the best possible soil to grow from and reach their audiences, and given that it’s an equal playing field to all, the best projects should come out on top. I think it’s sort of a meme when during and immediately after each huge publicity-wielding Bitcoin bullrun people in the blockchain space start to lament how the real early adaptors were those who bought bitcoin in 2009, when in reality blockchain adoption isn’t even in a comparable stage to how the internet was when you couldn’t choppily load your nudie pics online if someone was speaking on the telephone at the same time.
During those days, nobody (though I should say very few) saw the emergence of services like YouTube and Spotify, and it was mostly due to the limits of the technology itself (bandwidth). I think this is also the case with blockchain technology, and with how people are having a hard time envisioning its future due to factors that in their current state are keeping these scenarios from playing out, but that will most likely get solved, such as scaling. You could sort of condense it to 1990’s internet bandwidth problem = 2020’s blockchain scaling problem. I think history will show that both got solved.
4. What’s your vision for growing the Zippie community and how can the community help Zippie succeed?
I think right now it’s a sort of a show-and-tell exercise of showing the community our vision and the path we need to travel to get there, and then telling them each day, week and month the steps we have taken to get to that vision. It’s really a product-centric approach and a challenge of trying to get as many people as possible to see that vision at an early stage, so that we have a healthy core tribe to spread our collective word from day one when we launch. I don’t think we’ve done an especially great job at communicating this vision in the past.
Consequently, I’d say it’s my absolute first priority to facilitate the production and communication of all the necessary building blocks of that vision for the community, such as what the OS can do and how it’ll look like, token economics, roadmap, exciting brand identity and initial applications on the OS etc. I think the community can help with this by staying active, asking questions and voicing their opinions (for example about which projects they would like to see on the OS when we launch). We are very much all in this together and early community should in my book be considered as vital to a project as early employees in many ways.
5. Gazing into your crystal ball, where do you see Zippie and blockchain in 5 years?
Well if most people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in ten years, that would put the five year mark somewhere in the range where you can make realistic expectations I guess. I would think the mass adoption of blockchain technologies has begun in all p2p, b2c and b2b segments with the big triggering factors being scaling, interoperability and oracles from the point-of-view of blockchain technology development, and the emergence of mobile integrations as a driver for the viral spreading of blockchain solutions.
From the perspective of Zippie, this means that we should have our platform full (obviously only figuratively, since web3 can never be full) of really awesome dapps and token-enabled apps that you won’t find on AppStore or Google Play, and that go way beyond what the technology enables today and claim the promises we’re hearing projects make in their whitepapers today and more. I think it’s really an awesome vision and something we’re working hard to make true every day.
6. Summer’s a big deal in Finland, more so than for people elsewhere around Europe. What are your plans?
Yeah it’s special because it’s so short and sometimes it just sort of… doesn’t happen. So you’re right, when it does happen, people here really come alive and there’s all sorts of rock festivals and events going on all throughout the summer. Personally I’m going to be working from our summer house on the lake in Eastern Finland for most of the summer to try and catch as many of those cosmic rays as I can, while enjoying the peace and quiet that one cannot always take for granted having lived in the center of Helsinki for the last couple of years. No real holiday or anything, since I’ll be working on Zippie every single day, but certainly a more comfortable work environment than the city.
If you have any questions you want to ask Heikki just head on over to our Telegram channel, where you’ll find him regularly sharing his thoughts.
