Transcript
Speaker: Now this is podcast number one for the year 2023 Dream Slip and you're listening to Nicholas over there.
Speaker: Say hi.
Speaker: Hello.
Speaker: And Robert over here.
Speaker: Say hi Rob.
Speaker: Hi Rob.
Speaker: Welcome to 2023.
Speaker: Excellent.
Speaker: So everybody that's going to be listening to this is in the future.
Speaker: Now yes, that's right.
Speaker: Welcome to the past.
Speaker: This is the past.
Speaker: So we're going to
Speaker: And I think we agreed that this podcast is going to be about the future.
Speaker: It's going to be about what we're going to be doing in 2023.
Speaker: And we're going to make some predictions and some goals.
Speaker: And it'll be interesting to see how many of these predictions are actually going to come true.
Speaker: Well, you know, during high school, people used to say that my middle name was Nachodamas.
Speaker: So let's see how we go.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: Good, good, good.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: What was your middle name at high school?
Speaker: Dork or something.
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: Don't believe it.
Speaker: Don't believe it.
Speaker: My middle name has always been Martin.
Speaker: Martin.
Speaker: Yeah, that's my middle name.
Speaker: But my nickname was Aussie.
Speaker: Aussie.
Speaker: Aussie, because I grew up in Canada and I had an Australian accent.
Speaker: So when asked me where I'm from, I said I'm from.
Speaker: Australia.
Speaker: And I said, oh, you must be an Aussie.
Speaker: What is that?
Speaker: An Aussie.
Speaker: And I just got translated into an Aussie.
Speaker: Well, me, my brother and I, who are twins, we used to be the, uh, the Kazis because our last name was Caswell.
Speaker: Kazis.
Speaker: Oh, the Kazis.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So they go, hey, Kazi, Caswell.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But anyway, the, the funds of the fund, the excitement of high school, that was good.
Speaker: Good days.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Remember it like yesterday.
Speaker: I do remember it like yesterday, even though every year it gets further away.
Speaker: But let's talk about the future.
Speaker: The future now.
Speaker: Yeah, forget the past.
Speaker: Now, so a couple of exciting things we want to talk about DreamSlip, don't we, Nick?
Speaker: Yes, we do.
Speaker: One of which I'd imagine we'd start with the announcement of the MVP.
Speaker: Of the app.
Speaker: The app, yes.
Speaker: So would you like to take charge of that one, Robert?
Speaker: As soon as it's your brainchild creating it at that point.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Let's just talk about it in depth, if you don't mind.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Okay, we'll talk about the purpose of it.
Speaker: Or maybe we can see where we want to do it.
Speaker: So you and I know.
Speaker: Even like a background behind why we did.
Speaker: I'm doing it.
Speaker: I'm saying it.
Speaker: Sorry, sorry.
Speaker: I'll be quiet.
Speaker: As you know, we did the proof of concept system, which was the Dream Slip competitions.
Speaker: And that was every Thursday, every week, as much as we could get.
Speaker: And sometimes it was twice a week.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And the purpose of that is so we could get performers on
Speaker: and we can then get people to vote, and then these performers can win money.
Speaker: And the way it was created was that each performer, no matter how many performers were in the event, each performer would get some prize money.
Speaker: And we had a basic concept, which was people vote.
Speaker: for their favorite performance.
Speaker: And the percentage of those votes is what gets multiplied into the actual prize pool.
Speaker: So if somebody got 50% of the votes, they got 50% of the prize pool and stuff like that.
Speaker: And we sort of, correct me if I'm wrong, but over time, we sort of ended up slowly sort of perfecting the model there.
Speaker: Yes, we did.
Speaker: I think we had it about maybe about 70% right on the very first performance.
Speaker: And by the time we went to the last one, which we did the whole thing in 12 months, I think.
Speaker: 12 months, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So by the end of the 12th month, we pretty much had it honed in.
Speaker: We sort of like knew exactly what we were going to do.
Speaker: Now, and the purpose of doing all of that, we did it manually.
Speaker: And it was very costly in terms of time because it took, you know, a few hours pre-
Speaker: competition we had the one hour for the competition itself and then it took about a few hours afterwards post-processing and stuff like that and the tallying of their boats and and people didn't know if they won until a week or a few days later or 24 hours we were trying we were perfecting that sort of timing
Speaker: And then we also had to then distribute the prize money afterwards.
Speaker: And so there was work there.
Speaker: And also, you know, you had a team of people that were organizing the performers and stuff like that, too.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So that was sort of, they got better and better as we involved more and more people.
Speaker: And as the word got out too, you know, people got more excited about the Thursday nights.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: And it was good fun at the time, but we knew that we'd have to get to the next stage of that sort of evolution.
Speaker: And that next stage was to be able to automate all of this.
Speaker: All of that stuff that we were doing manually was to automate it.
Speaker: And so...
Speaker: And what we did a year back in, when did we start this?
Speaker: December or November, November 21, to start developing the full infrastructure to automate this whole thing.
Speaker: And so that's been a year in the making.
Speaker: And that infrastructure is basically there and through
Speaker: a front-end system, which is going to be a smartphone, performers can join events and events can be created by people and prize money and all of that sort of stuff.
Speaker: The idea is that that's all automated.
Speaker: I think the advantages of that is because
Speaker: When we're doing that proof of concept or that initial process that we did for the 12 months, there was obviously the idea to learn as much as we could about what the community wanted, but it's also
Speaker: you know, when we first talked about this, this, this dream slip, um, um, product, it was always so that the community had a say.
Speaker: Um, and I think with the Thursday things, we always noted that they sort of just had to do what we told them to do because it was in our hands.
Speaker: We had to run it ourselves, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: But I think with this new, um, platform that we've got, um,
Speaker: it allows for a lot more of the community to start having that sort of ownership of the process as well, which is exciting because that's where we wanted it to be.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: And though we did, of course, from the very, very start, this has always been community driven and we've always, and the communities helped get it through to this stage.
Speaker: And, and,
Speaker: And so we're at the next stage.
Speaker: So the next stage is the release of the application.
Speaker: And we did have a voting application that was developed at the time, which people could vote using their mobile phones.
Speaker: And that was released.
Speaker: And then when we stopped the events, then that app was then removed from the App Store and the iOS Store.
Speaker: And now we're going to re-release the same app.
Speaker: or the app, but the entire event is all on the mobile phone.
Speaker: So instead of being streamed on Twitch or Facebook or YouTube like it was before, it will be live on the phone.
Speaker: Well, not live, but it'll be on the phone.
Speaker: So you can watch the performances on the phone and you vote on the phone itself.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: And so this is this new product.
Speaker: If you went to the website, it's changed now, but on the website, we did announce the name of the product called Ascent.
Speaker: So DreamSleep Ascent.
Speaker: And, or maybe we'll, maybe Nick, you can just tell us why, why you called it Ascent.
Speaker: Well, I thought, um,
Speaker: The name was sort of appropriate for, because within the community, it may not be there immediately, but it's about building up your experiences, building up your fan base, it's building up your ability to make
Speaker: money out of the prize pools, et cetera, by the amount of effort you put in and the followings and so on.
Speaker: So in essence, you're ascending into this exciting world of DreamSlip, the platform and the social stature within DreamSlip.
Speaker: We should have called it Ascend.
Speaker: Yeah, Ascend.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But I think... We can still rename it.
Speaker: We can.
Speaker: But I like Ascend.
Speaker: I think Ascend's a good name.
Speaker: But again, we can have a discussion about it.
Speaker: We can even ask the community.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: Yeah, to Ascent.
Speaker: That was the thinking behind it because it's about building and getting stronger, getting higher, that kind of thing.
Speaker: That's good.
Speaker: All right, so we've got this new app that's coming out, which is called Ascent.
Speaker: And we're hoping to have that available for beta testers this quarter.
Speaker: and fully released by the end of the quarter.
Speaker: So by January, February, March, April, aiming to have it released.
Speaker: uh out of beta and so we're looking for beta testers and uh so at the moment it's it's probably more in alpha or pre-alpha uh so this is uh internal testing at the moment so what we're testing is you know is it the app engaging
Speaker: you know, in, in, does it actually, the main core of the application, does it work?
Speaker: That's what we're looking at.
Speaker: So the idea is that you, um, I won't explain how the app works, but the actual way we're testing is we, we using, uh, internal testers to be able to say, okay, can we do the performances?
Speaker: Can they vote?
Speaker: Um, and then we have to get the leader board and then we have to sort of figure out who won the event and
Speaker: What happens when the event closes?
Speaker: Is there a history or an archive of the videos or the performances and stuff like that?
Speaker: So those kind of things are sort of being worked out now, and they're not going to be finalized, I don't think, in the internal testing.
Speaker: They'll probably be more finalized through the alpha testing with the community members.
Speaker: So we'll get some people in there that we want to have to join the Discord.
Speaker: And once they're in the Discord and they go through some kind of questionnaire, we'll have a sort of a filtering system to see, you know, if.
Speaker: the people that are in the alpha phase are actually interested in improving the application rather than just sort of download it and then delete it.
Speaker: So we need really constant feedback through the alpha process.
Speaker: And that way we'll be able to sort of like make sure that, hey, that's really easy to use.
Speaker: People's grandparents should be able to use it to be able to vote.
Speaker: Actually, that was bad to me.
Speaker: That was ageist.
Speaker: I didn't say anything.
Speaker: I didn't.
Speaker: I said, even people over the age of 35 could use this app.
Speaker: So I meant that it's going to be super easy to use, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it needs to be fun.
Speaker: And our idea is that the...
Speaker: The reason for that is we want to be able to get a lot of people to use the app.
Speaker: And the more people that use the app, the greater the prize pools are going to be for the events.
Speaker: Therefore, it's better income for the actual performers.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So we're looking for the alpha testers in the first quarter.
Speaker: So if I was listening to this, Rob, and I said, okay, well, I'd like to be an alpha tester.
Speaker: I know you said to go onto Discord, but do we have a link somewhere on the website?
Speaker: Yeah, it's not.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: It's the link.
Speaker: The people that listen to this podcast are the kind of people that we want.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And so when I say want, I think that people need to earn –
Speaker: the community sort of to help, right?
Speaker: So what we want from Alpha testers is it going to be a little bit beyond just say, hey, test it.
Speaker: We want them to participate in everything that we do.
Speaker: Sorry, Robert.
Speaker: I'm listening.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: So we get them to...
Speaker: Now my thoughts are gone.
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: Oops.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I've just muted you, Nick, accidentally.
Speaker: So you've got to unmute yourself.
Speaker: I'm sorry about that.
Speaker: I asked my children to watch my daughter for a second, and she came in asking for my phone.
Speaker: So I apologize.
Speaker: I forgot where I was.
Speaker: Where was I?
Speaker: I'm easily destroyed.
Speaker: You're talking about the people who listen to this podcast.
Speaker: So the community members that participate in the podcast will ask a few alpha testers maybe to join us on the podcast to sort of like get their feedback and maybe we'll record the feedback on the podcast.
Speaker: Maybe, maybe not.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But the idea is to really be engaged with the actual development.
Speaker: And so it would be, and the benefit for the alpha testers, of course, is that they'll be first in to start earning.
Speaker: So it's either earning a franchise or they become promoters and stuff.
Speaker: But I won't go into actually how the app works.
Speaker: We'll save that till the next podcast.
Speaker: But I'll just, we'll talk about what we plan to do.
Speaker: That's in the first quarter.
Speaker: So first quarter is by March, by 1st of April, hopefully, we'll have the app public.
Speaker: And then during that period, then we're going to be start adding the other features to the app.
Speaker: And those kind of features include in the 1st,
Speaker: first sort of performances and events and stuff, payment and stuff like that will be done manually, like it was done previously, I suspect.
Speaker: And we'll start working on automating the entire payment system.
Speaker: So the whole thing is, if you enter in a half a dozen events or whatever, that you get a constant flow of results of the events, so you won or lost or
Speaker: the leaderboard and you get the prize money constantly.
Speaker: So you don't have to wait for, that's our goal anyway, you don't have to wait for somebody to process the payments and stuff like that.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: That's sort of like, that's the sort of the background, the background.
Speaker: So we're going to do that until for the first quarter and then the second quarter and then the third quarter is back up to September or September.
Speaker: try to get up to September on the last quarter, we want to be able to start expansion.
Speaker: So we go and we do localization of the application and get it localized in localized languages and be able to sort of have events that are particularly localized as well.
Speaker: Yeah, because of timeframes and so on.
Speaker: So that's the goals for the next 12 months anyway.
Speaker: From the app.
Speaker: You asked me to talk about the app, right?
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: No, that's excellent.
Speaker: And it'll just be for the iPhone and the Android at the moment.
Speaker: Yeah, this first 12 months, it's just be on iOS and Android.
Speaker: Yeah, beautiful.
Speaker: It's good.
Speaker: It was just how we had it before.
Speaker: Now, you know, we had...
Speaker: The other thing I guess we can talk about as well is we had a community that built over that first 12 months.
Speaker: It was like 7,000 people or something like that.
Speaker: So, you know, we'd obviously be engaging with them again and we look forward to giving the opportunity for them to come back and experience the new improved app, which is exciting.
Speaker: So, you know, we then
Speaker: We'll be expanding into other areas as well.
Speaker: Obviously, we'd like to do Australia.
Speaker: Being an Australian company, we'd obviously like to get that exposure here in Australia as well, which would be good.
Speaker: But like you said, we'll localize it towards the end.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Let's hone in.
Speaker: What I mean by localization, I meant even though it's built in Australia,
Speaker: There's very little Australian component into it.
Speaker: So it's not localized to Australia, not at all.
Speaker: It's only, when I say localized, it means it's localized in English.
Speaker: So the app will first be released in English, and the events will be English-based.
Speaker: And when I say then internationalized, I meant internationalized in terms of if you're in...
Speaker: If you're in Sweden, it'll be in Swedish.
Speaker: It'll be localized in the language there.
Speaker: And it will only show, if you like, the events that are held in Sweden.
Speaker: Oh, cool.
Speaker: Then you can regionalize it and you can just say, oh, I want to participate in events of Europe.
Speaker: And if you're in Australia, you can say, okay, I want Oceania.
Speaker: And if you're in North America, I want to.
Speaker: participate in North American events.
Speaker: You know, that's what I meant by localization and stuff like that.
Speaker: Not Australia.
Speaker: I think one thing that we sort of discovered in our proof of concept, less than 1% of our performers were from Australia.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: You know, and that's not, and Australia had the exact amount of, you know,
Speaker: connectivity and influences as let's say the Philippines, which was 80% of our performers.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So I think I wouldn't be trying to be, I would just say that the product comes from Australia.
Speaker: That's about as close as it gets.
Speaker: Sounds good.
Speaker: Oh, no, it doesn't sound good.
Speaker: It sounds bad.
Speaker: We need more performers in Australia too, you know?
Speaker: Because when we start doing country competitions, because that's what I'm looking forward to, when we have world events, we'll have things like New Zealand versus Australia.
Speaker: Beautiful.
Speaker: My house will love that.
Speaker: They'll be competing for the Oceana title, and then the Oceana, it would be like esports, then the Oceana title goes against the eight,
Speaker: southeast asia uh region and and so forth until you get the top um performers and we do talk about that with um uh future things when we start having clans so you can have you know teams so yeah you and it's no different than say chess teams and stuff so you have a club or whatever the title will be and you know where you say um
Speaker: four performers from Australia, they are part of this team and they compete in all the events and stuff.
Speaker: And depending on the amount of points they get, you know, they can get to the next level and, you know, and that's how they compete.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then there's a league and yeah, that's good.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Excellent.
Speaker: So what next?
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Well, you talk about the community then we talked about the app.
Speaker: What are we doing with the community for in 2023?
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So, um, like I said, there's, there's obviously, uh, a number of, of people that supported us last time, uh, which will be the first people that we obviously contact to start, uh, this process.
Speaker: Um, they're, they're sort of, uh,
Speaker: Since I've spoken to them about the release, they're quite excited about that.
Speaker: They're just looking forward to getting the information to move forward.
Speaker: So obviously, they'll be given that information to re-engage with the DreamShip platform.
Speaker: Moving forward, obviously, we're going to be able to put out some information as we get to a launch stage where, you know, letting people know it's coming, doing some marketing and so on.
Speaker: will be important, whether that's word of mouth, whether that's putting on really cool performance events with prize pools and so on to encourage people to come.
Speaker: That's obviously being worked out at the moment.
Speaker: So, yeah, the community side of things, yeah, just keeping this podcast is part of that as well, you know, giving information to the community, making sure they know where we're up to, et cetera.
Speaker: We're going to be doing one of these every week.
Speaker: It might turn into more than one, but, you know, at the moment we've committed to one a week, you and I, Rob.
Speaker: And like you said, as the testing goes on, we might get people onto these things to give us feedback, whether we record it or not.
Speaker: Yeah, just keeping the community abreast in where we're moving.
Speaker: And then as we get closer, I think, you know, sort of releasing that excitement into social media and so on as well.
Speaker: Yeah, no, it's good.
Speaker: We're just...
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The, the, the goal is to increase the size of the community as well, as much as we can in, uh, with using the app and, um,
Speaker: Well, I mean, the exciting part was when we first started the proof of concept, and I don't know if this is saying too much or what, but we started off with four performers that did one performance.
Speaker: The people who watched got excited and said, well, I'd love to join this, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: But we had to do that all manually.
Speaker: And the manual side of things, we were missing performers because we didn't get back to them quick enough and that's because it was all manual, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: There wasn't a vehicle.
Speaker: Then, as you said, we started off with it at a certain percentage of perfection or getting it right.
Speaker: And then we got better at that, better at that.
Speaker: And then, you know, we had some amazing people in the Philippines that said, okay, well, I'll assist you with that and scheduling and so on.
Speaker: So I think now that we have a platform that automates that process, I feel that the growth would be a lot more doable because there's less human error.
Speaker: It's all automated.
Speaker: That's just my opinion.
Speaker: That's not under any, I guess, factual thing.
Speaker: We'll find out as we go along, but I think that will help to increase.
Speaker: And the other thing about it was one event once a week.
Speaker: There was a lot of downtime where there wasn't that excitement of watching something else.
Speaker: Now we have the ability to do them every day, multiple times a day, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: I think that engages people a lot more and keeps them.
Speaker: So that'll be an assist.
Speaker: But I'm thinking the community is more than just the number of users.
Speaker: So the community is the driver of,
Speaker: of the, of the apps.
Speaker: And, and, and we say that in plural because it's the first app out of many.
Speaker: And so the whole, the community drives it all.
Speaker: So we need to get a lot of users for the app.
Speaker: That's that.
Speaker: And we're hoping to get that from the community and still have, still have people in the community that may never use the app, but they still want it.
Speaker: They may participate in the podcast.
Speaker: They may, you know, be waiting for the, our next, um,
Speaker: Next generation apps.
Speaker: But because we have like communities on Facebook and all our social networks.
Speaker: But ideally, they would use the apps as well to help the performers.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I understand what you're saying.
Speaker: So, you know, it's not a community of people, how many members we have.
Speaker: It's a community of active people that are actually building the community side of things, active members within the community, you know.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: Yeah, because that's the driving force because this is built for the community and we want the community to profit from this, you know, either through experience or through exposure or monetary or whatever, you know.
Speaker: You know, I don't know about
Speaker: what you're thinking, Nick, but my understanding is that we're doing this for the community.
Speaker: We're not doing it for, I don't know, shareholders.
Speaker: We've had that conversation.
Speaker: We're not greedy men.
Speaker: That's not who we are.
Speaker: It's about helping men.
Speaker: It's about direction and power and ownership.
Speaker: We said the community, if it's not driven by the community, then
Speaker: you know, then it's, you know, it's, it's the same as other things, you know, so we really need to get the feedback and, you know, and, and, and hopefully, you know, community members will, you know, will come up and, you know, start sort of helping drive these, these apps and these developments that are happening.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, that could even be done with,
Speaker: you know, we could do podcasts, but we could also do like forums where it's just, you know, give your opinion and let's have a talk about it and give information or, you know, a voluntary thing where people can come in and say, no, that's right.
Speaker: We would have groups.
Speaker: We'll have, you know, just like any MMORPG.
Speaker: So we would have support groups.
Speaker: We'll have advisors, you know, and stuff like that.
Speaker: And we'll have region advisors as well.
Speaker: So anything, you know,
Speaker: And volunteers that will help with the larger performance and events and stuff like that.
Speaker: So it has to be like that.
Speaker: Otherwise, it can't handle the massive number of people that we want to be able to support without the support of a lot of people within the community.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: All right, cool.
Speaker: Well, that gives us, what, 50 seconds to go of this podcast today.
Speaker: Oh, no, I'm going to be cutting out all the ums and everything, so we've probably got another 20 minutes.
Speaker: 10, 20 minutes, good.
Speaker: Oh, that's good.
Speaker: Well, yeah, just cut out what I just said then.
Speaker: No worries.
Speaker: It is very exciting.
Speaker: I mean, there's been a lot of hard work done.
Speaker: I mean, you've had a lot of sweat and tears and
Speaker: No, I didn't have any tears.
Speaker: I didn't have any tears.
Speaker: No, seriously, it's been a joy.
Speaker: So it's a lot of work and we've got tons of work to do this year.
Speaker: Yes, I agree.
Speaker: You've got tons of work to do.
Speaker: And so we're hoping that it will be a successful year.
Speaker: That's 30 minutes.
Speaker: Yes, I believe so.
Speaker: Yes, right on.
Speaker: Thank you very much, everybody.
Speaker: Thanks for listening to the very first podcast.
Speaker: It's been Robert and Nick.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Thank you very much.
Speaker: Thanks, Robert.
Speaker: See you later, guys.
Speaker: Bye.
