My name is Justus Verkerk, I’m one of the founders of FCCE.

We’re an international production and distribution company. On a yearly basis, we produce more than thousand of Hollywood and Entertainment-related content. It’s film, fashion, music, lifestyle and celebrity-related content. We produce more than 15 magazines every single week, and they are distributed to over a hundred countries all over the world.

Project’s background

The project that we connected to HYS was Entertainment Experience. It’s a project that we created in 2012 in the Netherlands. It’s a cross-media collaborative community platform that is supported by social media, TV, events, etc. There’s a lot of buzz around this project because it’s headed by a dream team.

The dream team connects through the platform with a mainstream audience and the talents that you want to develop, connect and engage at the platform. At that time, when we built the first generation platform, Instagram didn’t exist, so it was really different. Although we won an international digital Emmy Award at that time, we felt strongly the need to rebuild the second version. It was launched in China, but most applications that we used in China that time were not available in the rest of the world.

So when we wanted to launch the third generation, we reconnected with HYS to build a total up-to-date platform for Entertainment Experience.

Dutch-speaking management

When we started working with HYS to build a third generation of the Entertainment Experience Community platform, it was a great advantage that part of the Odessa management was Dutch, Dutch-speaking. They automatically understood where we come from, our culture, and how we work. At the same time, the Odessa team brings in a lot of know-how and expertise in building a system like this.

Clear estimates

They invited us to come over to Odessa, and within 3 or 4 days, we put together a total briefing.
They have a very specific way of working, and we really liked that. Because by going over of all the different facets and all the different elements that we needed for the community platform – automatically they understood what they had to build and we understood what they are going to deliver and when.

So the scope of the project for both sides was perfectly clear, including the budget that was perfectly clear at that time because we knew exactly what we are going to build and the timeframe was very clear.

Easy communication

In the process, we experienced that there is an easy way of communicating with them through Skype: really fast answers from both sides, commitment and feeling that you work as a team. We felt like one team, and I hope they felt it as well. But in the way they delivered, we think they did.

Flexibility 

When we finished the project, some of the specifications changed along the way because we discovered that something would be better in a different way. And what I really like, that gave as a team feeling, that there was no problem. That was not like “hey, that was not in the scope.” It was solved because they understood it’s a part of the project. It has to be done. And we didn’t see it, and they didn’t see it upfront.

Further development

And I think that is one of the best experiences we had so far with people who build things like this. We really felt it all came together in the end, in the final delivery. In the future, we plan to deploy the same community platform in multiple countries, it’s a bilingual platform. And we expect that we will work together again, not only for Entertainment Experience but also for other crowd-funding platforms we’re working on. For music, fashion and for other lifestyle-related items, because that’s what we do.

So I would definitely highly recommend them. If anybody wants to check with us how it actually worked, they always can give us a call.