market. And because of the fact we get so many opportunities to get in front of people, then it becomes a little easier. Ultimately I don’t want to be like ‘So we
do all of this!’ if you’re a developer and you only do two things. I always want to talk in context and about what’s relevant It’s challenging, you know, if you ask
somebody like Microsoft ‘What do you do? Oh, Xbox, right. Oh, you’ve got Windows’ But in terms of [Microsoft as an] organisation, it’s a multiple platform offering that goes across so many different things. So I think a lot of the time now, the large organisations very much focus on brand awareness and then tactically talk about, ‘We’re the experts in webshop, or we do this over here, or we do that over there.’ I think we’re very good at that - talking tactically about our solutions in context. Doing so as a generic storyline, or in a simplistic way, is really quite challenging.
So brand awareness is working, but product awareness not so much? Think of it this way. All the solutions we have, we don’t charge up front. So every solution we take to market, we work with our partners on. We support them on the journey to monetising what their product critically is. We’ve just brought out a product called
X.LA
(
https://x.la), which I love. It’s basically a gateway to a whole host of influencers, about 125,000 inputs that represent 1.4 billion eyeballs. We don’t charge for this, but if you’re working with us we plug you into that. You go into that marketplace where people say, ’Yeah, we like working with that brand’ or ‘We like that genre’ and then some of the mega guys will say, ‘I’ve got a community of three million, so let’s work out the deal’. What we do then is we’ll build a purpose built web shop. We’ll put it for that product with that community. So when that community purchases from that web shop they get a commission to the influencer who owns the community. We don’t get involved in that line other than what the customer is making at the end point with our usual commission, but there is no charge for that. We’ve built that. We are investing more in that, because it makes you do better in terms of getting to market and product awareness. That’s true of a lot of our products. We are trying to advance the journey of monetisation so that you can get to the end quicker, smarter and in a more effective way.
Is
X.LA a product that could help with that other problem that developers have, visibility? Yeah. I’m a big advocate of direct to customer, but D2C is really challenging in regards to the roadmap to get to market. We have all the solutions for you to actually take your product all the way through and monetise that, but you’re in a very congested marketplace. Even if you’ve just invented the most perfect product, you’ve still got to get awareness for it. So one of the things I say to developers now is that you’ve got to be good at doing what you do, but you’ve also got to understand what the go to market is, and know what that means. And you’ve got to understand what monetisation means, because you’re going to have to raise more money at some point in time. You’re doing good to know what the ROI of your products are going to be during that time, but also making sure of the go to market. If you’re releasing in six months time, you should already be on Discord. You should already be building out your community to be able to do that. And as another example, we are now putting a solution in place where you’ll be able to sell to your Discord community. So if you’ve got a million people on Discord and they have already engaged with
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