Let’s begin by wishing everyone a wonderful New Year 2023 from the wowTalkies team! Here’s to taking web3 to new heights!

Looking back, wowTalkies has had an incredible 2022! 2022 was when we decided to bring to movie fans the new era of fan engagement on web 3.0- the wowTalkies way. The web 3.0 avatar of wowTalkies was born out of the inherent conviction that fan Engagement in the web 2.0 era has been underserved. Celebrities, artists, and production houses humor their fans in a manner that is a one-size-fits-all broadcast. They have a treasure trove of content but cannot capitalize on opportunities to personalize content piecemeal. Fans love to be close and personal to the celebrities, artists, and production houses they espouse; they wish to be recognized for their fandom, but they don’t have comprehensive digital means to do so. Centralized algorithms serve this sub-optimal fan engagement; hence, the Damocles sword of “algorithm giveth and taketh away.” Web 3.0 is disruptive at its core, even more so where there are multiple stakeholders and demand and supply side networks; fan engagement is right up the disruption alley, and therein lies the premise of wowTalkies.

2022 was a significant journey. We were convinced that we would persist and build through the overall crypto and web 3.0 sentiment was so-called “bearish and winterish”, and in retrospect, we wouldn’t have it any other way. Some of the highlights of our journey in 2022 are as follows:

• At the start of the year, we were selected for the PolygonLeap 2021 cohort. PolygonLeap 2021 is an accelerator program by the likes of Polygon, Lumos Labs, and Buidlers Tribe Incubation Ventures. 31 startups from across the globe were selected, newborn in web 3.0 as we were, it was a privilege to be a part of the cohort.
• We closed our first funding round in May. We were bootstrapped throughout, and investors on board gave us intellectual, strategic, and financial capital. A consortium of angel investors affiliated with TIE Ahmedabad made a sizable investment in our journey. The first round of funding was soon followed by an investment round by Tangentia Ventures in December. This twin funding coup highlighted investors’ confidence in wowTalkies and helped us significantly galvanize our growth trajectory.
• We were a motley band of 3 co-founders, we were jacks of all trades and plugged away merrily. With funding came the opportunity to expand the team. We were able to onboard and train talent in our engineering, quality, and marketing departments. With this expanded team, we have been able to take a more holistic approach to product development, community building, web 3.0 strategy, and go-to-market. Needless to say, the virtues of an expanded team are that we are together able to learn and problem-solve in a much more accelerated manner.
• An imperative for 2022 was community building, both around the product vision and within the broader web3 ecosystem. We relaunched our social media channels in May and gave our social reach-out community-building efforts a boost in November. We engaged with fan engagement and crypto enthusiasts across Crater.club and Twitter Spaces to evangelize web3 technology and spread awareness about our mission at wowTalkies.
• Partnerships in a startup journey are super crucial. A more strategic approach to partnerships starting in September, helped us build relationships with partners across technology, go-to-market, marketing and community building, and web 3.0 strategy spheres. Our partners have recognized names in blockchain, crypto, and web 3.0 and are ballast to our efforts
• Buidling our first versions of the wowTalkies web 3.0 product line was the main focus. We needed to buidl with a consistent user focus and with a mobile-first philosophy. We launched our web marketplace to beta on the testnet in October and followed up with the Android app to a limited beta on the testnet in November. As we speak, the marketplace goes live on the mainnet in early January 2023 and the app is ready for an invite-only launch, again in January 2023. Throughout the buidling journey, we have been conducting multiple user feedback sessions, receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from users.
• Our efforts toward partnerships with production houses, studios, and media agencies bore fruit in 2022. Our partnership with a wholly-owned subsidiary of a leading media house will result in a slew of launches in 2023. Among our partnerships with production houses, Rajyogi studios wil proudly be the first Gujarati studio/production house to launch NFTs with Lakiro, its proud production, in January 2023.

As we eagerly look forward to 2023, we do completely comprehend that 2023 will be crucial to our vision and journey to make wowTalkies THE fan engagement platform for movie fans. We endeavor to bring fans, production houses, celebrities, and artists together using the core ideas of web 3.0. Fans become super fans on the platform, form and engage with and in communities, and collect and customize collectibles along their fan journey. Likewise, production houses, celebrities, and artists offer collectibles, create content, cultivate the fan communities and aid the fans’ journey to become super fans

Coming soon in 2023 will be

• The web3 mobile app with the first-of-its-kind AI, AR, and ML-led tech utilities, both on Android and iOS
• A marketplace construct that enables wowTalkies to launch and sport multiple NFT collections, as an intrinsic part of its fan engagement proposition
• Building the fan engagement platform that enables the journey of a fan to a super fan in a construct that is community and gamification-led.
• Good tokenomics and token launch that helps us obviate the “cold start” problem intrinsic to a network effects-oriented business model such as we envision at wowTalkies
• More partners and investors as part of our bandwagon. A pre-seed investment round should be in the bag early part of 2023, concurrent with partnership announcements with crypto and web 3.0 marquee names.
• Emerging concepts in immersive experiences (metaverses are one such experience) that aid fans in showing off their fandom, in the first half of 2023

The year 2022 was paraphrased as the beginning of the crypto winter. wowTalkies proved its mettle by weathering the storm and “wowing” its users and its community. Taking all the learnings, experiences, and successes with us into 2023, we intend to make web3 and fan engagement more immersive for our users! Cheers!