Zippie Monthly Update — June 2018
It’s been another super busy month here at Zippie. We’ve been developing our product, sharing its benefits with users and partners around the world, attending community events, promoting our new airdrop, and much, much more. In short, we have lots to share with you all. So, let’s get straight to it.
Product news
Starting this week, we’ll be posting a monthly tech/dev update where we go into greater detail about our progress. In the meantime, here’s a quick overview of what we’ve been up to product wise. Firstly, we’re still working hard to get all the bits and pieces functioning together for personal multisig. We’re also making payments easier for our next version as well as working to get rid of iframe in the current implementation.
Happily, Zippie card software is done. What’s more, we’ve placed the first Zippie card order to the manufacturer and have an estimated delivery date to the Zippie warehouse in the 2nd half of July. In addition to all this, we’ve started to document UI design in the GitHub wiki, which will be opened at some point soon. Then there’s the security audit, starting in early July and taking up to 7 weeks. After that, we can move the product from testnet to the Ethereum mainnet.
Marketing updates
From a marketing perspective June was a pivotal month as we hired a new Chief Marketing Officer, Heikki Vänttinen to start planning the marketing strategy for Zippie to take over the world. In the past months, we’ve been laser focused on building a revolutionary product for everyone to enjoy. Now, our product is getting ever closer to launch, Heikki’s goal will be to make our solution as attractive to the masses as possible. Our goals for the coming months in terms of marketing:
Goal 1. Grow our community
Our aim from the start has been to build a Zippie community of people who are excited about our vision and want to be the first to experience the Zippie OS in action. To incentivize more people like this to join our active community, we decided to launch our Early Christmas Airdrop program. But this is just the beginning. We have lots more plans on the horizon.
Goal 2. Communicate the product vision
For our community to get excited about our vision for Zippie, we’ll need to communicate it as clearly as possible. In the words of the Albert Einstein: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”. As our aim is to make blockchain technology accessible to everyone, this one is vital for us and we’ve already taken strides to explain to everyone in the blockchain community what it is that we are building in as simple terms as possible. With this in mind, we decided to do a slight makeover for our website at zippie.org, to show some mockups of what the Zippie user experience will look like. Going forward from here, we aim to provide our community with as much information as we can about where we are headed with our OS, as well as illustrate in video form what the finished product will look like.
Goal 3. Start laying the foundation for product launch
As our product development progresses, so do our marketing efforts. In the end half of June, we started a rebranding push with the Argentinian blockchain branding powerhouse Entrecasa, who’ve previously worked in this space with brands such as Decentraland and Zeppelin. We kicked off the rebranding effort with a team meeting to define our goals and values to use as the basis of our future look and feel. I think I speak on behalf of the whole team when I say we’re very happy about the way this turned out.
As a team, we share a very unified vision of what Zippie should be, and we can’t wait to show you our new and improved look as we get closer to our product launch. For those hesitant about another rebranding: Don’t worry, we won’t change our name this time, and the whole point of this is to build on the positive things we already have. We also want to create an identifiable brand across all environments, right through to the look and feel of the OS itself. In addition to the rebranding, we’re constantly talking with other projects who want to have their dapps live on the OS as soon as we launch. Our aim is to make the user experience as amazing as possible from the very beginning.
Team news
As we’ve already mentioned, we’re very happy to have hired a new CMO, Heikki Vänttinen. As a result of working at Spacegrade, a strategic blockchain advisory firm, Heikki has a background working on a wide variety of blockchain projects. He’ll be using his proven strategic marketing expertise and experience to help drive the Zippie brand forward, whilst growing our community. We’ll be publishing a more detailed story about Heikki later this week, so be sure to look out for that.
Needless to say, we’re always looking for top talent, so if you’re curious about what it takes to work for us, check out our Meet the Team series on our YouTube channel and ping us on Telegram. Otherwise, to keep up to date with the project, be sure to follow us on Twitter, YouTube, Telegram and Reddit.
