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I have made wits.io/chat which I hope to be a crowdsourced platform as competitor for GoodReads (book reviews) and Blinkist (book summaries). The idea is to gamify reading and sharing what you learned everyday with the community. It had a feature similar to WIP where One earns a streak by sharing everyday and if one doesn't then you loose your streak. But removed it after some feedback from users that for sharing content there shouldnt be streaks or gamification. What do you think? And need brutal and honest feedback on the ui/ux, idea in general and the copy on the site and how to improve on
Hi there Zaheer,
The website looks neat!
Was working on an idea like this one sometime ago.
So, this is like a two-sided network where there are creators and readers. Creators are incentivised by streaks and readers will pay to read a summary. Like a crowdsourced summary?
As with a general marketplace, you tackle the supply (creators) first and then the readers. What you need to focus on is to get a critical mass of creators/books with summaries.
The quicker you get to critical mass the better.
I think you could so the following:
- Find out if creators want to write summaries (or any other similar MVP hypothesis) in the first place and what are the incentive that they're looking for because it's not just about completing todos (like in WIP), it is putting something out there that others will read (hence, demands more effort and their reputation, etc., is at stake).
- Basic questions that I would ask are around the idea: when there is a summary in front of a reader, how is a crowdsourced one better than a normal one in terms of quality (say a summary on Blinkist for example?)
- Find out how to get to critical mass the quickest (can you fake critical mass?). This means that there are enough summaries that people can access.
Hope this helps.
Hi Nikhil,
Thanks for helping me out here. I started as a very niche of Blinkist with only books that are recommended by founders/makers... It went fine and got around 110 paid signups.... Then got tired of writing the summaries, if hobby becomes a job then one loses interest, then I started thinking of crowdsourced medium style book summaries, where people who write summaries will be paid by the platform based on total subscriptions on the platform etc. The end goal is that, and in the meantime using wits.chat as a free platform for people to connect and share.
I tried to talk to people who are avid readers but they surely don't want write summaries, but they did like the idea of twitter/wip style of updates and getting streaks etc.
The end goal really is to turn away from book summaries in current style and to wits.io/chat and then have only chat/community and some sort of paid patreon or paid content around it.
I have follow up question, should I bring the streaks back as I removed them as some feedback I got from people that associating streaks with content platform is not a good idea. What are your thoughts on this?
So, if I get it right, you want to move away from this model? Can you elaborate on why you want to have a chat? How do you think a chat will add value to your userbase? What purpose will it serve?
See, streaks are a retention mechanism. It's like a notification added with the fact that you paid $20 and want to keep the streak going. Well it depends on the type of content (length) that is being created, the incentive and the ease of content creation and the way you're remunerating the creators (see image). In your specific case, based on the information I have, I don't see streaks making sense.
See my reply above