Lennard Arand is the CEO of Devla, a company that specializes in web development. Devla created our partner’s metaverse MILC. In this interview, we chat with Lennard about how his company went about creating MILC and the challenges associated with it.
Hi Lennard, can you tell us about yourself and how you got involved with MILC?
“My name is Lennard Arand. I’m 21 years old from Germany. I started development with Blockchain development at the age of 11. I began by trading Bitcoin.”
“I was a trader, and I was more into technology. I was not into earning money. So yeah, I’m coming from a development background. We are doing a lot of blockchain development, methods development.”
“We have a lot of projects in the metaverse market, but also in, let’s say, the more normal blockchain market, basically, for example, providing service as smart contracts for swapping NFTs we’re doing and stuff like that.”
“We are based in Germany; we have two or three offices go for offices in total, one in Stuttgart, one in Frankfurt. One is in one of the biggest cities in Croatia and one in Visoko, near Sarajevo, the main city of Bosnia. That is our, let’s say, our key points, and we will most likely open up an office in the Maldives or in Bangkok to have our designers there, our 3d artists.”
“So we are pre js and Babylon JS developers back end and front end. We started with software development and got into blockchain because of my interest in crypto.”
“We built MILC from scratch. So we first started in July 2021. The social media community is already live. I’m a technical person. I’m the only founder and CEO of the company and shareholder. So we are 100% self-funded; we have 75 developers.”
Why did you get involved with the MILC platform?
“I think what is very important to understand about MILC is, first of all, the idea behind it. So the MILC team knows how to market due to the platform’s background in media. So they know how to market, sell, and how-to, let’s say, distribute stuff.”
“They want a social network to have a marketplace for content distributors, with blockchain integration, and for b2b clients to have a social media community where they earn something.”
“When I met Hendrik the first time, the idea of what we have now was, like 5%, maybe two or 3% even, it was just okay.”
“He said, “I want to have concrete distribution. It needs to integrate with blockchain. That’s it.”
“Hendrik is a visualizer. It’s crazy. Sometimes he’s on the phone with me and coming up with one hundred ideas in five minutes.”
“The social community was born at dinner over five glasses of wine. He looked into my eyes and said we need a social community better than Facebook and Instagram, which gives the person something back.”
“And I think that’s why it makes it very interesting for us to do the project. Because he is not afraid of being the first at doing something, for example, The Sandbox and Decentraland, these metaverses are not comparable to our meta. They just sell land. Our metaverse has a real economy behind it. Our metaverse has a real thinking knowledge behind it, making it a Mark Twain free marketplace for all people, b2c, and b2b. And that makes it so interesting for us to work on.”
So how did you go about creating the platform?
“The important thing for all the projects is a good plan and structure. Because if you want to build a big project, you need to develop a different structure, begin small and then size it up. As I said, we started with a social community containing feed posts and chat. Now we have swipe function story function, coming up live function, webinar, function, interests, fee interest integrated into the feed groups for postings.”
“We started small, and then we got bigger and bigger. So that is what you need to do. It is a process to build a good platform. It’s not that you have an idea. And you build that idea in six months, and then you say the platform is ready, you need to be a giant, you need to have a small idea, which is doable, and start with one or two months of development time maximum.”
“And then you need to understand the market. Why is it necessary that people come to my platform? And that is very important to understand. We built the first layer of the social community in one and a half months. Instagram build its first version in two years. We did ours in one and a half months. And that is exactly what makes our platform successful. We hear our community. We have a feedback function integrated.”
“You cannot give Instagram feedback. Like they don’t care about you. We care about our users by implementing user feedback. And I think that is also what the people see in us. They see potential in us to have a platform where somebody is benefiting. And that makes us efficient. And also marketable. Because we don’t have the capacity of Instagram, we don’t have that, but we have the speed because we can do things way easier, way faster than everybody else.”
How does Babylon JS fit into this level of programming?
“Babylon Jas and free js are the frameworks that are the metaverse’s future right now. The problem with gaming engines is that they are somehow restricted. They are limited on the graphical side, especially on the loading side, just go to Decentraland or Sandbox and try to log in.”
“If you log in, it’s loading roughly 30 seconds, 30 seconds up to 50 seconds. The base idea of the metaverse is to give a person another world to serve. So basically, Google could be a metaverse, where you can then help and go into different sub metaverses.”
“So the aim is to have a good quality product and have a very, very good loading speed, and the only way to achieve that is through Babylon JS. Babylon. JS is a framework in the free dissection with which you can build a world out of a model.”
“So you’re building a world that has function behind the world; behind every building can be a different function; behind every working object is a function.”
What were the challenges that you faced when building MILC?
“It was a lot of trial and error. We were the first ones using Babylon js and three js. So basically, small things you could not even see took weeks for us to sort out because there is nothing else similar on the market.”
“If you don’t know something, you’re researching, finding some articles, or finding some introduction to the topic. There was nothing because we were in the first, making it tricky.”
How long do you think it will take people to catch on to what you are doing?
“It will take a long time for others to catch up to Babylon JS. They do not understand how to integrate the real business into a Metaverse.”
“If somebody is saying to you, the metaverse is a game; they just don’t know what they’re talking about. The metaverse is not a game. The metaverse is the future of surfing for giving a user experience that is metaverse.”
Will you eventually add VR experiences to MILC?
“Yes, eventually. It’s just a matter of rebuilding everything from scratch.”
“Milc will be one platform where we’re using it. When we are ready with the townhouses walking into the city and the coaching methods, we will build a platform that uses VR because that is the future.”
“The future is that we are not now sitting here in a meeting that we are meeting in the metaverse and walking around, and I can show you some stuff. And we can see each other in the metaverse, that is, the future.”
Anything else you want our readers to know?
“You know, there’s not one company doing what we’re doing. And because of that, we have an outstanding evaluation because there is no one out there who’s doing it. We are the only ones. And we are the only ones who can help you; we also have a 100% uptake rate.”
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