We’ve Hired A Marketing Firm, Have A New Advisor… And More!

We’re excited to bring another week of ELIX updates to our community!

Beta Signups

This week, we’ve reached 975 Beta signups. Get the app by signing up at elixirtoken.io.

Creator Submissions Portal

If you’re a creator looking to crowdfund crypto for a project or idea, sign up on our Creator Portal. We’re looking for original, creative ideas to have on Boost.

Marketing

Up to this point we’ve been focused pretty exclusively on development since we believe that having an awesome working product is the most important part of what we’re doing. However, we understand that there are other aspects of the business that will also be crucial to our success including, as many members of our community have been asking about, marketing. As we get closer to a public app launch, we’ve decided that now is the right time to start amping up these efforts.

This past week we hired a growth focused PR firm, Energent Media. Energent Media is a San Francisco based firm with experience connecting brands to media companies like Entrepreneur, Forbes and Huffington Post, as well as other cryptocurrency publications. Energent Media has a proven track record of success and comes highly recommended from other startup founders we know. We’re excited to begin working with them and are confident they’ll be able to get us some great results. Expect to see articles and press coverage surrounding ELIX as the engagement develops!

Advisor

We’re really excited to have Devin Smith come on board as a technical advisor. Devin has 15 years of technical experience working on every step of web and app publishing. He’s worked on projects for companies such as Walgreens, Toyota, Tokidoki, Luma Pictures, Red Cross, Get Ur Good On (Miley Cyrus’ Charity), and Flickr and in addition to being the co-founder and CTO of startups. He has the process of creating dynamic, rich UI websites and apps down and we think his expertise will be really valuable as we bring our beta into the mainstream. Not only is Devin a top notch developer and technical architect with an eye for great design, but he also is a beer geek who enjoys doing things like creating one of the fastest PHP frameworks, Tipsy, in his spare time. Check out Devin’s personal website and past work here and his blog too. We’ll be adding him as an advisor to the ELIX homepage soon.

In addition to scoring a great advisor, this week Melanie also met with an awesome developer in Venice, Italy to potentially have come on board. More details about our plans to accelerate development to come!

Design

Jane & Rosello have been working to continually improve and expand upon designs in our app. For example, they’ve added transaction history for contacts into the designs.

Transaction histories for contacts will make our UI more detailed and easy to use.

They are now focused on creating the first version of the ELIX website interface, so that our community can peruse the website and find information about projects on the ELIX app. They’re also working to develop additional designs for new features and elements of the app.

Development

We’re continuing to make UI updates and changes based on the suggestions of our beta testers. We’d like to thank all our beta testers for all your feedback! It’s been great to hear people’s ideas we strive to create an app that’s as user-friendly and intuitive as possible. We’ll be releasing a new build with some of these updates in the next couple days.

Additionally, we’ve integrated changes to support crowdfunding with Ether in addition to ELIX. We’re adding this in after discussions with potential creators. Although we’ll likely offer incentives for creators to accept ELIX, we felt this was important to include in order to make the process of onboarding potential creators as frictionless as possible so that the app can have great content early on. Regardless of whether the final product focuses exclusively on ELIX or not (we’ve heard the feedback from our community and read the various Reddit threads discussing this feature), we believe that contracts compatible with Ether leaves our options open as we move forward.

We’re testing the Android app on an android device and are getting a few friends to test. Since there are a variety of Androids out there, we’re doing this internal device-level testing before sending out beta invites so our Android users will be able to get a more polished experience. Android users can expect to start receiving invites sometime next week!

Crowdfunding Smart Contract

Our ELIX crowdfunding smart contract is now on our public Github. You can view the code here. This smart contract handles all blockchain level interactions between users and creators. This contract is currently in use on the Ropsten testnet Beta. The smart contract is written in Solidity, and is part a larger set of smart contracts that AE.studio helped create automated tests for earlier this year — also available on our Github. Here’s a sample showing the pledging function:

When a maximum funding goal is reached, ELIX is immediately dispersed to the creator and host in the subroutine on line 244.

Note that there is a minimum and maximum goal, as well as an upper bound on the goal of a campaign — preventing goals above the maximum possible supply of ELIX.

We look forward to sharing more updates with our community in the near future! Be sure to sign up for the Beta at elixirtoken.io to get early access.

Be sure to sign up to get early access to the Beta on our homepage as well as connect via social media on Reddit, Twitter, Discord, and Telegram. We also have new Facebook and Instagram pages, and a newsletter you can sign up for at the bottom of our website. Our Creator Portal is also open for submissions here! If you have any questions, let us know and we’d be glad to help clear things up!

We’ve Hired A Marketing Firm, Have A New Advisor… And More! was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.