Case study: Kaleidoscope and Artizen

Kaleidoscope started its days producing VR movies and helping independent film festivals to find fresh quality content for their premiers.

When I met founders Rene and Selena in 2017, they ran a small VR professional network using a basic CMS, and they wanted to explore the concept of connecting creators with film industry leaders.

For more than four years, KaleidoscopeVR has had many versions.
Some of them are:

States 1 - Networking:

The initial business idea was to create an invited only network, where only members from the industry would join. The platform would promote high quality and targeted connections among the members who would be willing to pay for the service.

We spent the next six months building the new platform using pure Front-end React, graphQL backend as service, ChatJs and AWS to host and run many tests with different price tiers and feature configurations. Big companies and organizations were the most willing to pay to find new VR films, besides these big organizations, not many regular users showed interest.

State 2 - Events

Rene and Selena had an extensive background in running geographical based events and incubators, so they instinctively gravitated towards adding this new feature to the app. Events allow members to submit their projects and get showcased in the event premiers if selected.

Outcomes:
It proved to be an exciting concept and brought many new members to the platform. The use based increased from 2000 to more than 6000 also to 1200 movies and 21 festivals.

Kaleidoscope has partnerships with big players in the space like the Tribeca film festival or Cannes. The service was used along with other festival promotional apps as a channel to find new content.

Around a year from the events feature launched. KaleidoscopeVR joined forces with the Museum Of Other Realities (MOR). Run some successful events with them.

We moved the frontend code from regular ReactJS into NextJS to improve SEO and boost performers with server-side rendering. The backend was further optimized using serverless functions. We introduced Algolia for improving searching and search analytics. Finally, unit testing suites moved to end-to-end testing with Ghost Inspector.

State 3 - Grants

The idea of running grants where members could decide what project will win by voting submission was born in the last interaction of KaleidoscopeVR. It was positively welcomed by the members. Rene decided to double down our efforts on this business model and reshape KaleidoscopeVr to a new platform for grants in the Art industry and killed events for good. Artizen was born!.

After almost five months of running community-driven grants and having some severe growth to a 10k user base, a new challenge presented when Stripe decided to cancel the payment account. We had to start exploring a crypto-based solution and rebuilding the platform again. Revealing us how traditional FIAT payments solutions and banks are preventing innovation from moving forward.

State 4 - Grants. Art token and a new beginner.

To be continued