A detailed look into the Futourist
By: Ziga Luksa
Tags: Blockchain, Traveling, Platform, Travel, Travel Writing

The Futourist fundraising and the “Market”

When Futourist project started raising funds in January 2018, the global crypto market was booming. After that, as you probably know, the markets went bearish and most tokens lost roughly 80% of their value before the end of that same year. Not even the biggest pessimists have thought that the market will fall to such lows and won’t recover to this day.

As we have explained in the previous blog post, the market instability affected our development a lot and the value of raised funds has dropped by nearly 80%. Because we were one of the smallest fundraising projects at that time, we did not have a chance to be as resilient as other big projects who raised millions.

In January 2018, we started with the first round of fundraising, offering tokens to a few individuals who have been supporting our project from the beginning. Since they were the first who supported us, we called them “Angels”. Angels are people we knew and some of them were involved in the seed phase of our project in August 2017. At that time, the market was at its peak, ETH being at the all-time-high value of 1120€. At the time, we were selected to be one of the Cofoundit incubation projects, which would give us their full support with marketing, community and blockchain development and so help us with fundraising. Because a lot of angels were also connected with both Cofoundit and ICONOMI projects, in the ‘angel’ fundraising round, we accepted CFI, ICN, ETH, and BTC tokens. In the open public contribution, we accepted ETH.

More than 3100 people applied for contribution to the Futourist fundraising through our KYC webpage, of which 2914 have passed the KYC due to a very strict AML. In the end, 774 people contributed. The major reason many people did not contribute, was because the market was starting to drop significantly, or so they said.

Just before fundraising started we pegged values of ICN and CFI tokens to ETH. Using those pegged values, the calculation is that we raised 4200 ETH. In reality, the value of all those tokens was much lower. Between 14th of January and 21st of March of 2018 (while our fundraising was live), ETH price dropped from $1,378 to $589 (more than 50%), and so did the value of CFI, ICN and BTC tokens. Calculated at the end of fundraising, the value of all the tokens we raised was actually just 3154 ETH.

Since the end of the fundraising, we spent 2181 ETH on the Futourist project. Not a single ETH was spent on anything else. The major monthly expenses were:

SALARY FOR 11 PEOPLE

LEGAL EXPENSES

MARKETING (conferences and tourism fairs)

SUBSCRIPTIONS for 3rd party service providers

THOMSON REUTERS World-Check integration

OFFICES & OTHER EXPENSES (futourist.com domain, etc.)

Being blockchain believers, we believed that what happened was a regular market correction, and since ETH started to rise back in value in May 2018, the concern was not great. But that wasn’t what happened. By the end of 2018, we had to pivot in order to secure a bright future for our project. All about the pivot was explained in the previous blog post.

The Renewed

The assets we have raised have stayed untouched since January 2019 and we had a reason to wait and not shut down the project. Last year, a lot of tourism orientated businesses recognised us as one of the most promising startups in travel market, and we got invited to apply for one of the biggest EU travel projects, together with 11 other companies. It was an amazing opportunity for us, since the project would guarantee additional funding and on top of that, it would lead us to a practical use-case of the Futourist platform and considerable media coverage.

This August, the project was confirmed and we got in! Needless to say, it is a huge game-changer for us. All information about the project will be released soon in a detailed blog post. We assume that no funds will be touched for at least three further months.

A Quick Development Update

Since we resumed the development of the Futourist platform we have:

- finalized the mobile app development plan and design

- finalized the feature list for the next release of the web app

- resumed development of the web app — with focus on video reviewing and place ratings

- developed an advanced search architecture, based on the elastic search principle, offered by a 3rd party provider

- replaced our video and image backend providers, which are potentially the highest expenses we will have long term. Backends we are using are now more than 80% cheaper while offering better UX.

Current development roadmap:

- September 2019: the release of the next version of the web app — video reviewing features, place ratings, advance search, UX optimizations

- Late 2019: the release of the iOS and Android mobile apps with features equivalent to those on web

Next up

We are planning to release a new development update at the end of the month. We are also planning to release a new, updated roadmap. We are still not spending any of the remaining funds until the detailed information about the European project is fully disclosed to us.

Many teams in a similar situation to ours have shut down. We decided to do everything in our power to keep it alive. We feel a high obligation to fulfill our promises towards you — the community. At this point, we’d like to thank you again for your support at the beginning of our project. We sincerely hope that after reading all of the above, you understand the struggles we went through. At this time we need your support and trust more than ever.