Connect Financial Weekly Update

Happy new week to everyone, the team is back with yet another set of updates for you all!

First though, I’d like to take a minute and give a little insight into the weekly updates, or even any update that we give. So consider this a little editorial comment -

The weekly updates are something that we committed to from the very beginning to keep the communities updated with our overall progress and information on processes/upgrades. Our general process is that by weeks end I have gathered up reports from each of the team leads either from actual required timed updates or from the more usual information I know from working daily with them.

Every weeks I pick two to four topics that either have a major development update, haven’t had an update in a while, or feel that the community would like to hear about. I realize that this may mean that sometimes a topic that you feel was vital I don’t touch on. That maybe because we feel it’ll be much better to update it the next week or in two weeks so we are saving that update for a more informative write up.

The development team works in two weeks sprints, which is to say they take any piece of development and break it down into more manageable objectives, then select a number of objectives that they can accomplish in a two week period. This makes some development updates less thrilling as they maybe the update mid-sprint, or even if it is at the end of a sprint it does not necessarily mean that anything was accomplished that can be meaningfully relayed to you.

It could have been that we had five days of planning sessions to map out logic flows, test out or review several different competitive items to determine which fills our needs now, can fill our needs in a year when we are live and are scaling up in users, or is in budget for the project and also combine in meetings on the corporate side, marketing, legal/compliance, and prospective partners. It is difficult to write “This week we had a lot of meetings”, so the update you do receive is not indicative of the hundreds of hours of things we do that aren’t exciting to put here.

We understand that these updates are generally your only source of information from the team and we want to make sure we get them out consistently. Just be a bit more patient if we say it will be a little delayed, we promise it’s coming and the delay was unavoidable.

Thats it, let’s get back to the real stuff here.

This past week the development team has been knee deep (at minimum) in logic reviews and testing. This can be a somewhat tedious process as we work through things that you may take for granted on a platform like ours. Things like what happens if a user closes their browser, or restarts their computer midway through a process. Should they be able to return to it, if the data is getting saved for their return how long do we leave it available/store it, and that is just one process, if we don’t need a user to wait for something to finish are we properly notifying them when it does finish.

The reviews here are the last pieces to check off before we begin inviting users to trial the site. The first users in will give us insightful feedback that can be hard to get from a team member, after all we built and designed it so there can’t be anything possibly wrong with it or any better way it should work..right.

Based on the last status of the portal we are looking at another one to two weeks before we invite the first external testers.

The marketing team recently got a major upgrade with us filling the Senior position this past week. We will do an official announcement at a future date after she settles in a bit more. If we look at the base marketing plan they’ve adopted three core items to approach first from within the overall vision to work on deployment:

• Organic reach including PR, ppc advertising, SEO and content marketing
• Strategic partnerships (e.g. Cardano)
• Industry leverage including influencers, interviews, AMAs and community events

These will be our first forays into having actual boots on the ground marketing happening beyond the random AMA or influencer that happened upon us.

The last update will be on the new landing site. We are extremely anxious to release it for everyone to see, but on the team run through on it we felt that the card tier grid needed a little refinement. This was quickly remodeled and is now back with the developer for integration. Overall, the initial design looked stunning and was very well thought out. It just was a little removed from the current “traditional” layout you find on most sites with a grid like this which made comparing it against peers a bit awkward.

I expect by next update we will have it completed and ready for launch. The site will never truly be completed, we will continue to iterate it with more information and more product based pages.

The Token portal will get a slight remodel after the landing site goes live so it stays consistent with our other sites.

As always we appreciate our community members and hope everyone is remaining safe and healthy.