In a Melbourne car park, far removed from the buzzing blockchain tech hubs of Europe, US & Asia, lies the Flex Dapps office. A young entrepreneurial tech company making waves in the global blockchain industry.

In this article, we’ll dive into the origin of Flex Dapps, their decision to build a product on Substrate, and the challenges of running a blockchain technology business in Australia.

A Company is Born

Flex Dapps was founded in September 2017 by two young entrepreneurs, Alexander Ramsey & Tom Nash. They met at a co-working space in Melbourne and instantly hit it off, finding alignment in creating viable use cases for “magical internet coins.”

They held hackathons at Tom’s house to flesh out their ideas, with selling land on Mars as their first project. The one question they actively sought to answer was:

“How do we make something out of smart contracts that’s not a Ponzi scheme?”

As ICO money flowed into the space, Flex Dapps transitioned from executing their ideas, to building blockchain applications for companies with unique use cases. They quickly earned a solid reputation by never selling their integrity, never over-promising and always delivering.

“By being bold enough to say yes to projects and taking responsibility for the livelihoods of people, we ended up accidentally creating a real business.”

With demand for their services outstripping supply, they choose to work on projects that interest them.

“We’re pretty picky with who we work with. We make sure we work with people that know what they want.”

Flex Dapps is a blockchain technology services business, but they are returning to their roots to create a new product.

Hello Substrate!

Flex Dapps have primarily built solutions using Ethereum, and with their new product, they’ve selected the Polkadot & Substrate ecosystem to build on.

“We’ve been interested in getting into the Polkadot and Substrate ecosystem since 2018 when we saw Gav’s presentation at the Web3 summit. That was a moment that crystallised the potential value of this technology, from a developer perspective and ecosystem standpoint.”

Substrate is a next-generation framework for building custom blockchains. Polkadot is the protocol that connects Substrate chains and existing chains together.

Flex Dapps is building Gantree, a product that speeds up blockchain development for companies creating Substrate chains. Companies can focus on developing their custom blockchain logic and leave the node infrastructure management to Gantree.

“We’ve long aspired to give something back and build open-source tech. We’re trying to work out the business case, but as a useful developer tool, we’ve had fantastic product validation.”

6 weeks into development, Flex Dapps have a working demo. You select your desired cloud platform such as GCP or AWS, enter in some configuration options and it deploys!

Australian Blockchain Insights

What’s harder than building a successful blockchain startup? Building a successful blockchain startup in Australia. Tom explains:

“Running a tech services business in Australia is low leverage — the market size is 25 million people. Australia is the worst timezone for services, it’s inconvenient for our clients.”

The majority of Flex Dapps clients are outside of Australia, which limits their network. However, it is a testament to the quality of Flex Dapps services as their global clients are willing to endure the minimal timezone overlap.

“Generally if you are a services agency in the US or Europe, you have access to the markets of different countries. If I’m in London I can work for people in Spain or Italy or Belgium. If I’m in the US, I can work for people in Canada and potentially Europe. In Australia, if you don’t speak Mandarin, you don’t have access to the Chinese market.”

Moving Flex Dapps to another country is a proposition that both Alex and Tom are deeply considering.

“We’re constantly in conflict because Australia is a beautiful place to live. However, in terms of becoming much higher leverage and going long on your future, this is a pretty bad place to do that if you’re in tech.”

Whilst they haven’t come to a conclusion on relocation, this speaks to the broader problem of the state of the Australian blockchain industry. Blockchain is the #1 hard skill in demand in 2020 according to Linkedin, yet in Australia, it is near impossible to get a job in the industry.

Work-Life Balance

Tom & Alex laugh when I ask about their work-life balance. It’s 100% work and 0% life for the co-founders in an industry on the cutting edge of technology. Tom outlines his week:

“Go to work, go home. On the way home, eat Flames of India which is cheap Indian food, and then figure out how to fall asleep. On the weekend, come into work and DJ. We don’t work hard on the weekend, our office is like a fun lounge room.”

They‘ve recently conceded that working 7 days a week is unsustainable. The first step is realisation and the second step is recalibration. They’ve added leaving work at a reasonable time and finding other hobbies to their To-Do list.

Conclusion

Flex Dapps is the talented Aussie underdog in a globally competitive blockchain environment. As they funnel their blockchain expertise into creating a new product for Substrate, we’ll be cheering them on as they continue to represent Australia on the world stage.