I am thrilled to share a wrap-up of the year 2023 from NClip with you.
Last year was a whirlwind of ups and downs as I worked to push my vision of elevating the creator economy to new heights.
From unexpected challenges to incredible breakthroughs, the journey taught me more than I could have ever anticipated—and I’m excited to share those lessons with you today.
Recap 2023
At the beginning of the year, I started NClip completely on my own because my developer, with whom I had worked for 1.5 years, left.
Nevertheless, we were able to make some further developments during this time, such as a ticket system. However, I quickly realised that I couldn't continue without technical support.
In February 2023, I published a job post on LinkedIn to find someone who is technically fit. That's how I came into contact with Mohamed, with whom I immediately got to work and redesigned NClip. The focus was now on campaigns consisting of quests and tasks.
At the same time, I was part of the STARTPLATZ Cologne accelerator, where I met Dominik. With funding from the "Mittelstand Innovation Digitalisierung" programme, I was able to commission Dominik and therefore eekigai to take care of digital security, the server infrastructure, smart contracts and the further development of my platform.
The close collab has allowed us to grow and we discovered more and more synergies. We therefore decided to start a co-operation between Dominik's company eekigai and NClip. In the end, Dominik became co-founder of NClip, which we registered as a GmbH and had our first brand project with Kiddinx GmbH as our client.
Things continued to go uphill: we received the NRW.Seedcon grant, which allowed us to scale up the team and hire freelancers, including a new developer, graphic designer and brand communication specialist. That took so much pressure off me!
After a kick-off workshop on strategy development, we put the avatar approach to the test and realised that the project was not scalable.
I also use events like the Video Days to get feedback from content creators. The development of our campaign idea was really well received - the route via NFTs was not.
NClip got its first users and other useful feedback through the JASON LUTZ project. Although we started too quickly here because there were deadlines that we couldn't meet, I learnt valuable lessons from the user feedback.
As you can see, we had to deal with a few challenges. Nevertheless, we kept our heads up and were able to win our second paying customer, TOUCAN EGG PIRATES, and generate sales.
We finally developed a workboard for working with brands and had planned an alpha test campaign, which had to be postponed due to the high workload - a bit of a luxury problem towards the end of the year.
Learnings
The departure of our former developer was an important turning point that forced us to rethink our strategy and look for a new solution.
The collaboration with Dominik proved to be extremely fruitful and led to a successful co-operation.
We learnt from our collaboration with JASON LUTZ and received valuable feedback for the further development of the NClip platform.
Top WIN & Top FAIL
Top WIN: The successful acquisition of our first paying customer, the TOUCAN EGG PIRATES, was definitely a highlight.
Top FAIL: The quick start with JASON LUTZ and the resulting challenges showed us that we still needed to make some improvements.
Stay tuned!
Stay engaged, stay connected and remember: the creator economy is a creative Eldorado where each of you has a voice that should be heard. ✌🏼️