Inspiration
My brother Matt and I are the founders of the company. We come from a business / indie film background. The idea of RHOVIT came from frustration of trying to get a $3m film made that had everything going for it except distribution. At the time Matt was also working with a gaming company that was facing similar issues. This caused us to really look into digital distribution and decide we could build something better.
The first version of RHOVIT we built was a better system but it still didn't answer the questions - how do you get people to pay for content, especially independent content? How do you help creators build their audience? So we shelved the project until we could figure it out.
About a year ago a couple of things happened. An indie provider came to us to see if we still had the platform and an Advisor of ours on another company kept telling us to look into blockchain. So we did and we realized utilizing blockchain and our own token in an innovative way would allow us to answer all the questions we couldn't before.
From there we built our team, including 3 in-house devs and 2 UX/UI designers.
What it does
RHOVIT allows Users to earn money to pay for content and then rewards them for spending it. It allows Providers to keep 100% of their earnings, plus earn tokens to promote themselves. It also allows them to sell all their digital content - films, series, books, comics, games, music, podcasts, vlogs - all in one place.
We use a dual currency system. Coins (Virtual) are used to buy content. They have a set price of $.005 and can be earned/purchased by users. Coins also allow providers to accept micropayments.
RBITS (Crypto) are distributed on the platform according to activity. They are used as backing to distribute Coins to users as well as fuel for all ads, promos and incentives on the site.
How I built it
The first version of RHOVIT we outsourced to developers in Argentina. We actually had a really good experience but it just didn't solve all the problems. This version we really wanted to build an in-house team and searched through Linkedin and Craigslist and found a group who were really excited about the idea and how we were utilizing blockchain.
Design of how the system works we did, including writing the whitepaper.
Challenges I ran into
It's always more difficult when you're not the coder, especially at first when we decided to add our own token and bring blockchain into play. It required quite the learning curve trying to figure out how to integrate the cloud based system with the token.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
Not having a technical background and deciding to build a platform like we did, there's a lot that could go wrong, especially the first time when we outsourced it. But we did our homework, educated ourselves and were able to have a very smooth build with a great result - at least technically.
This time I think we figured out a creative solution utilizing blockchain in a way that really solves the problem of content monetization - a way that is slightly different from how others are doing it.
What I learned
Attack your concept from all sides. If it can't stand up to questions and debate, then it needs to go back to the drawing board.
What's next for RHOVIT
We begin testing our MVP in May. We've started a Pre-Launch sign up campaign with a little over 22,000 people signed up so far.
