Today, I’m chatting with well-known community stalwart and still Enjin Marketing advisor – Simon Kertonegoro. Recently, Simon took a step away from working for Enjin as VP of Marketing, to concentrate on Enjin adoption as CEO for the new platform – Beyond Horizon.
Beyond Horizon intends to democratize innovation by building a social network so entrepreneurial minds, who are searching for empowerment and prosperity, can share their knowledge and opportunities. Most importantly, they want to help you on your journey to create your own Enjin powered ideas.
Like most of us, I’ve known Simon for most my time of knowing about Enjin, so it’s a real buzz to have this opportunity to find out his solution for mass Enjin adoption. He’s always been up for a chat about Enjin progress, and I know he never stops thinking about how to improve overall Enjin adoption. Many know, he’s always been about supporting others in the community in that adoption quest too, and I’ve had the pleasure to see that first hand. So cheers for that and cheers for this interview – now let’s find out more!
….but first the giveaway! This time with Beyond Horizon not being a game in development, and with them being elbow deep getting ready for their upcoming launch of Reewardio (Reeward.io) and Kriptomat’s launch tomorrow of the Dragon Riders of Kriptomat (the first use case of Reewardio) – the giveaway will be a little different. As usual, the first 10 to follow, retweet and paste their ENJ/ETH Address will receive an egamers/Meltelbrot token, but this time I’ll give another 5 tokens of different varieties from my own collection to five randomly selected addresses after a week-ish (in place of the usual gaming items). Some will be gaming, others will be community. I think that’s in the spirit of what Beyond Horizon is all about 🙂
Thanks heaps for taking some time out to answer some q’s today Simon. I know how busy you must be, and it’s great to see you take time to share your thoughts. I’ve only known you to be insightful and succinct so this is a great chance for everyone to learn more!
As you know, the first thing I ask everyone is – What’s your background in gaming and / or game development?
Hey Meltoid, thanks for having me. I always love reading you work, thank you for everything you do for the Enjin movement.
I’ve been into games since I was a little kid, from Alex Kidd on Sega Master system and Tekken on PlayStation 1, to StarCraft on PC. I never thought I’d be working in the games industry professionally; instead, I gravitated towards website design. In high school I taught myself HTML and made a few gaming websites, the most successful one was for Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, I think it was called TiberianSummit.com, I remember making it to number 3 on MetaCrawler and being super excited. I also started a little web design business and sold a few websites.
Once I left school, I delved into business development, gravitating towards tech-based solutions that could help businesses thrive in the digital space. I found that sales can be an extremely rewarding challenge when you are representing a solution you truly believe in, and there’s nothing I believe in more than great technology, which is probably the main reason why I was so inspired by Enjin. Although, I did have that gamer’s perspective, so I understood the value they were creating for the games market, I always believed that the whole world would soon be digital, therefore, I thought ENJ would be the key to tokenizing the world, I still do.
Loved Tekken and Alex Kidd! Good ol days! So onto your new venture, Beyond Horizon, it seems to be a natural progression for you, and I’ve read up on it from the info out there, jumped onto the website, joined the forum, and it looks great! I need to get back on actually ha but for those that haven’t read much about it, can you tell us a little more, and what’s on offer for those that join?
So, Beyond Horizon ties into my vision of Enjin tokenizing the world. It’s essentially a development company on a mission to create the first killer-blockchain apps, and we plan to do so by exclusively using the Enjin Platform as our blockchain development ecosystem.
The first project we intend on rolling out is Reewardio, which is already the most robust out-of-the-box rewards program a business could ever use to boost their customer retention and ‘virality’. Business owners will be able to jump onto reeward.io, mint blockchain assets, create discounts, and customize the user interface, then instantly offer their gamified rewards program to their customers.
Secondly, since joining the Enjin community in August of 2017, I was always impressed by the creativity and ingenuity of the people in the chat. We bounced ideas back and forth and brainstormed solutions on how to make all the amazing possibilities a reality, it was inspiring, and frankly, a lot of that inspiration disseminated into the Enjin project in direct and indirect ways. In this same spirit, we’ve created BeyondHorizon.io as a social network where entrepreneurially minded crypto collectors can share their ideas and opinions.
I know you’ve done much for Enjin, and it must have been a big decision to branch out. What inspired you to start building Beyond Horizon?
Yes, VP of Marketing for Enjin is, by far, the most rewarding and inspiring job I’ve ever had, which is probably why I feel I had such a positive impact. When you believe in something, you can’t stop thinking about it, working on it, dreaming about it. 8 hours work turns into 24 hours of inspiration. Among many things, working for Enjin taught me to follow my obsession. So, as the Enjin marketing team got stronger and stronger I was simply finding that I was personally making less impact, and I wanted to do more for what I saw as a movement at a pivotal point in history.
It was a decision I was wrestling with for about a month because, first-and-foremost, I wanted to do right by Enjin. Eventually, I told Maxim, Lilia, and Witek what I was thinking, and they were so supportive it nearly brought a tear to my eye, haha. They offered me a part-time job as Marketing Advisor and I created my first company—Parallel Planes Pty Ltd, an incubator that I will use to find new Enjin adopters and provide development, strategy, and marketing services.
When I told my friend Srdjan (CEO of Kriptomat) about my plans to branch out, we started talking about the opportunity to turn the Kriptomat Rewards Program into a template that any business could replicate, we eventually decided to turn it into a platform that business owners could use to pump out their own blockchain rewards program with ease, so we founded Beyond Horizon which would become home to this project. There are also some other use cases we’re interested in, like ticketing and authenticity tokens, so we decided to roll the MintPortal into Beyond Horizon as well, once we’ve launched Reewardio and we’re seeing it gain traction we will be able to focus on other Enjin use cases that we find exciting.
It’s nice to know your dream is aligned with others! Many hands make lighter work. On a personal note, it can sometimes be hard to change working environments, although in the virtual world you’re not seeing someone eat the same lunch everyday ha! But working for Enjin for the last year must have been awesome, what’s the one thing you’ll miss?
To be honest, it feels like nothing has changed, haha. I’m still online just as much, I still talk to the team every day. I’m very happy to see Skiznilly join the team, you’ve gotta get him on a call sometime, he has the best voice in the world, he’s possibly the happiest sounding human I’ve ever heard.
It’s great to see such enthused and competent peeps like Skiznilly get more involved. The way Enjin reaches out to its community for support is very refreshing. Now your collaboration with Kriptomat is exciting too, as they are well experienced utilising the Enjin blockchain solution. What’s it like working with such experienced team members?
The Kriptomat team function like a well-oiled machine. Srdjan, Robi, and I work together really well when it comes to forming the strategic vision, and as soon as they deliver the tasks we set to the devs, we see incredible progress on the platform every single day. Being able to go from concept to iteration so quickly is really powerful in this space. There are so many blockchain projects out there and Enjin is getting further-and-further ahead development-wise, but I think Beyond Horizon can help Enjin dominate the race for adoption on a whole new level.
That’s good to know! and Enjin needs something more than just another social network. Having created the possibility for others to build real world Enjin powered solutions – what’s the process for someone that has a great idea in your network and wants to realise their goals?
Yes, our core business model is as a business-to-business platform provider. They call it SaaS (Software as a Service), but I think of it more as “Innovation as a Service”. The digital world is hyper-competitive and the whole world will soon be digital. Conglomerates like Amazon are swallowing the retail world and smaller businesses don’t have the R&D budget, infrastructure, and human resources to compete on a technological level. We believe we can implement Enjin’s technology in novel ways that can help businesses leapfrog the incumbent giants of the industry.
So Reewardio will be our first offering, but we intend to provide many solutions that boost Enjin adoption in various ways. Some very simple applications are needed to boost adoption of this ecosystem, for example, we are in dire need of a plug-and-play Wordpress extension that enables non-developers to sell ERC-1155 tokens through their online stores. This is the kind of plugin we will be able to create with relative ease.
It’s a huge direction that you’ve taken in creating a solution that’s going to be suitable to the overall global retail market. As we know, retail is all about rewarding customers these days, there’s new promotions all the time. From chatting, I know your goal has always been about ‘gamification’ of this market. Titan Flight in a previous interview has also touched on this. And it’s definitely a natural area to delve into as I’ve seen it popping up everywhere lately, even at the latest Microsoft Inspire conference there was talk of ‘gamification’. So the time must be right! Can you tell us about your new innovative rewards system, and how it’ll change the way we shop?
Reewardio is looking incredible. As a business owner, you will be able to jump onto our web-wizard, customize the layout, mint your tokens, choose the discounts, and launch the most robust gamification experience your customers have ever seen.
As a customer, you will be able to buy things from a shop, receive blockchain-based reward points, use those points to play games, collect blockchain-based crafting ingredients from those games, use those ingredients to craft collectibles with reveal-code discounts attached, and then use those discount codes to save money buying more things from the shop.
It sounds like a lot, but once you see it in action, you’ll be amazed. It’s completely intuitive and very addictive, it’s going to blow people’s minds.
Intuitive – I need that ha! as will others I’m sure. Will we be able to use these rewards within our Enjin wallets, along with our other gaming assets?
Yes, every reward point, crafting ingredient, and collectible will be an ERC-1155 token created via the Enjin Platform and will have a home in the Enjin Wallet.
At one point Kriptomat were looking for funding via a STO (Secuirty Token Offering), but it’s not going ahead now due to their crowdfunding partner – DESICO – slowing down operations – an external factor that’s out of their control. Fortunately, there’s a multitude of other ways to gain funding, as having a war chest is super important I feel. Are you guys well-resourced to help with the development of Beyond Horizon, its own solutions, and its members’ ideas?
Yes, so, to be clear, Kriptomat is a completely different company to Beyond Horizon and I’m not technically a part of the Kriptomat team. So, the Kriptomat team and myself are investing our time and money into this new venture together, and absolutely, we have more than enough money to see us through development, launch, and marketing of Reewardio.
The great news is, the retail market is very profitable, our monetization models are clear as day. We will be able to offer a very affordable subscription-based service that be attractive to small businesses and entrepreneurs, while providing a platform that offers immense value to even the largest corporations you can imagine. This will allow us to generate enough revenue to continuously innovate and offer more services that further boost Enjin adoption.
Good to know you can move forward with financial confidence! Now it’s natural that all new projects take some time to understand and know what they can offer. There’s so many platforms / causes / solutions to get involved with these days. For those that are reading and have the right ideas, attitude and drive, and are wondering how to get involved with Beyond Horizon – what would you say to them?
To anyone, reading this, I would say, let us know if you have any feedback or suggestions around what we’re doing. We see the community as a massive brainstorming engine that can help formulate a vision far beyond what any individual can reach alone.
On the idea of brainstorming ideas etc and having chatted to a lot of different developers, I’ve noticed that sometimes people like to keep their ideas to themselves, as unsecured ideas can easily be replicated by those better resourced. It’s an unfortunate thing that happens in business land and is a risk. What guidance have you put in place so your members can feel safe to speak openly?
We’ve had the same concerns to be honest, there are a few key elements of our platform that are genius in their simplicity, but we’ve decided not to worry about people replicating them because, while ideas can be stolen, Srdjan, Robi, and I generate new ideas and solutions almost too easily. We literally have too many ideas and we’ve had to prioritize based on potential reach and profitability. The way we think of solutions for the problems people face is very systematic yet novel, I feel like you could point us at any industry, and we would find a market opportunity.
Also, in my opinion, protecting your ideas out of fear that someone will steal them puts you on the defensive, in a position of weakness. The stronger stance is to innovate and market so hard and fast that no one can catch you. Google wasn’t the first search engine, Facebook wasn’t the first social network, and Enjin wasn’t the first blockchain game development platform, it’s the clear vision, user focus, tenacious development, and aggressive marketing that sets these projects apart from the pack. I want to replicate the same stance in Beyond Horizon. While other projects watch and copy us, we will stay a hundred percent focussed on our customers, and in turn, our customers will see the results we deliver.
Yeah for sure, clear vision with positive momentum and the ability to develop will take you far! You’ve been on this journey of Enjin adoption from the beginning, and it seriously has been a marvel to see the Enjin community grow and grow. Having seen so much, what moments stand out for you so far on the journey through the Enjin multiverse?
Probably my favourite moment is when we decided to form the multiverse alongside the first 7 Enjin early adopters, simply by working out the logistic of creating and integrating shared inventory and agreeing to the terms. What resulted, was an epic amount of PR, an ongoing talking point that has grown legs and has a life of its own, and now we have real multiverse items like the EnjinCraft Wooden Sword that is playable in EnjinCraft, Forgotten Artifacts, and Containment Corps. This is the kind of resourcefulness that really makes me proud. There’s so much that can be done with the Enjin Platform, it just takes some out-of-the-box thinking and some world-class developers to make the impossible possible.
The multiverse certainly exploded the scene and interest in Enjin gaming assets! So what’s your favourite gaming asset out of all the ones currently available?
The Wooden Sword!
Looking ahead, what’s on the horizon…or should I say beyond the horizon;) for you and your team?
A lot of hard work ?
Ha ain’t that the truth, but if what you’ve done already is any indicator, I’m sure you’re up to the task! Finally, is there anything else you’d like to share with the readership today?
Yes, I’d like to thank each and every Enjin supporter for the loyalty and dedication you have shown the ENJ movement. In so many ways, this is the most promising blockchain project in the world. You saw that from the beginning, you reinforced my belief, and, together, we built a movement that could change the world. It’s always a pleasure chatting with you. Your positivity has inspired us to create Beyond Horizon and your belief continues to strengthen the Enjin project in measurable and immeasurable ways. Hit me up for a chat in https://t.me/BeyondHorizonIO—I’ll see you in Telegram!
It’s only the beginning I reckon, and been a pleasure to see it all form and know the kind hearts behind it. Best of luck with the launch on 12 August. A bit of history in the making, and I’m sure everyone is behind it!! For more details and to be informed of the coming launch of Reewardio, please follow the links below.