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Zapchain — Create your own reddit-like community, powered by Bitcoin
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@rrhoover What we've found is that most people aren't using ZapChain because they can earn a living, but because it feels so much darn better when an upvote is associated with money, even if only ten cents.
People are loving ZapChain because the interactions FEEL more meaningful. Most people don't cash out, they tip other users. It's karma, but it's money.
On the other hand we've seen multiple times where a blog post on ZapChain has received over $30 in tips from the community - we're also excited about this.
Really excited about this! Our Q&A on ZapChain led to a 40% growth in weekly usage. I'm interested to see how startups can use ZapChain to build our their own communities and incentivize discussion.
@mattprd, how do you think new products can best leverage ZapChain to find their early evangelists?
I believe that the first ten million people have got bitcoin by buying it, but the next hundred million people will get bitcoin by earning it. There's a lot less friction in doing a small task and earning bitcoin than there is in adding your bank account information and buying it. Earning bitcoin also makes bitcoin accessible to anyone in the world, while buying bitcoin is generally restricted to people with bank accounts.
Zapchain is one of the best places on the web right now to earn bitcoin. @rrhoover I agree that right now the best communities are incentivized by other things, but I think we will see some really new and interesting types of global communities emerge when money is involved.
@ntmoney Most people earn dollars, it will eventually be the same way with bitcoin. Bitcoin isn't SUPER easy to buy for EVERYONE in the world but it will ALWAYS be super easy for anyone to receive.
I did a Q&A once at Zapchain to get feedback on my product and it went really great. I think its good incentive for a blogger to publish content if people are tipping it.
Sweet work by Matt and the team. I've been a Zapchain user from way back and appreciate the teams desire to constantly improve and refine the product. Really looking forward to seeing where they take it!
@adamkornfield You've been there forever now! Don't tell people what ZapChain used to look like... <3
Hey Product Hunt!
I am the CEO / co-founder of ZapChain. Previously I was employee #5 at Ustream where I lead all social products, YC alum, and Forbes 30 under 30 for helping the music industry go viral online (most notably helping Lil Wayne).
At ZapChain we have found that by combining content, and social interactions, with tiny amounts of money, you can increase engagement and quality of interaction. Instead of likes, or upvotes, people on ZapChain "tip" or "reward" each other with money. We have tested our community product for almost a year now with great success, with some communities getting over 100,000 people a month, and some members earning enough to buy school books and phone plans.
Now we are enabling everyone to use it. We believe there are a tremendous amount of people out there who can grow even more interesting communities than we can and we can't wait to see that happen.
ZapChain's payment platform is built using bitcoin and the blockchain. We've been working on this for a year and we are funded by Tim Draper & Boost VC.
p.s. Hip-hop artist Talib Kweli just launched a community and is selling his new album on ZapChain for bitcoin, check it out here: https://www.zapchain.com/buy/tal...#
@mattprd Looks amazing. Well done. What about other micropayments? Is it possible for a user to deposit regular currencies, even if the transaction is done in Bitcoin? Asking because not all communities are (yet) receptive to use a cryptocurrency. I created a community just to test this, and looks you just have the Coinbase integration. Any plans to add access to traditional currencies, or is this outside of your focus?
Zapchain looks really neat. Quick Q: Community leaders tend to be very selective regarding the platforms they use. It takes a long time to build a strong, active community, and it takes even longer to move it over to a brand new platform. A few important factors are ability to brand, ability to monetize and clear value proposition (for users that have to be lured from FB Groups, for instance). How are you addressing these issues?
@yoavanaki Totally. What we are noticing is that while most companies/content creators may have an audience, or customer base, they typically haven't converted those people into becoming a community. This is because they don't know what product to use, or how to convert people over.
We're here to help with that. In the beginning we'll work hand in hand with community creators, and over time we'll scale that process. We want to help you convert your audience to a community, and then your community members to evangelists for your product.
• You can fully brand your ZapChain community + you can change it at any time.
• When someone joins your community we don't recommend them to join other communities. We're building it so these communities can be self contained - maybe someone is in multiple, but it totally cool if they are only in one.
• In terms of monetization for the community manager: At the moment you can use a ZapChain community to convert your audience to a community and then your members to evangelists. We are looking into more direct monetization options, and we'd love to here what you would like to see.
And how would you differentiate yourself from platforms like Meteor/Telescope providing seemingly the same product? I know the bitcoin aspect is there, but it seems that capability would be most valuable as an add-on you can license/sell to the platforms already in the community-building space.
@beckerjs We're building ZapChain as not only a community building platform, but as a network of communities. The same way you can be in multiple slack chats, you can be in multiple ZapChain communities.
Long term maybe we create an API that let's people integrate our service on their product, but there's no better place to innovate than on a community platform that we have built ourselves.
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