Startup Jedi
We talk to startups and investors, you get the value.
Become an author
Settings
Sign Out
A true nightmare for a programmer can be described in one sentence: “Stack Overflow (a popular Questions & Answers system about programming — Startup Jedi) doesn’t work anymore”. Q&A resources are so important for work and routine processes that they are worth billions and attract enormous traffic. The main value is created by the users themselves by answering questions. Moreover, all power is in the hands of platform owners.
Startup Jedi
We talk to startups and investors, you get the value.
We are creating a platform that allows experts to transform their knowledge into money. I can compare us with eBay. There is a buyer, there is a seller, they meet on the platform, which earns from the commission of the transaction. However, we do not sell physical products, we sell knowledge in the form of answers to questions. Copyrights on the information, that is published on our resource, remains with the author.
Token-economy will become the basis of our community. For answering questions, users will get rewards in our cryptocurrency. So to say, first active users will get more than those who will come to the already popular platform.
Demand for tokens will be supported by the internal auction system. A user who urgently needs an answer to his question can assign a reward for the answer and the tokens will get the first to give a useful answer.
In general, we are working for technical experts and specialists from the industries, that constantly change. Also, we have a clear vision of the portrait of our first clients.
We won’t follow the individual users, I believe it is ineffective. We will follow communities of developers, blockchain projects are in the first place. They need convenient Q&A resources but today they only have group chats in Telegram and Discord. It is hard to find the answer there as the information is lost in the conversation. Many questions have to be answered twice.
For Stack Overflow these communities are way too small, and they do not have a proper Q&A platform. There is also no time to transfer information from chats to a centralized platform. We want to fill in the gap and become a convenient knowledge database for blockchain-projects creators.
...
For answering questions, experts will get our PEER-tokens from other users. We will earn on the commission from these payments. In perspective, when Peeranha becomes popular, we will launch advertising and paid placement of vacancies for technology companies. These money sources will bring additional rewards to users for answering the questions.
...
Today mass Q&A platforms, like Quora, shift from the quality to the number of user clicks. The content quality suffers from it. This is why we are interested in the industry of technical platforms, where quality is a priority. The segment leader is Stack Overflow.
I use it every single day, so do other programmers. I understand its value. I also understand that owners of this resource use their users to earn money. Yes, they are providing a convenient platform, nevertheless, the work is done by users themselves. Stack Overflow monetizes this work and users are left aside. For us, it is OK now. For the Internet, as it is now, it is OK. But I believe, that the blockchain will change this, and the Internet will become more valid.
If at any moment, this resource will disappear, a lot of information will be lost. And even if it can be restored, then the person’s rating, priority in search results — can’t. And it is the rating that has the main value for the experienced developers, as it can be used as an index of expertise. We save ratings in the blockchain, and it will not disappear, that’s for sure.
...
All blockchain platforms are young enough, and they have a lot of problems. Our goal is to create an application, which, for a simple user, would not be different from a centralized service. Without installing any plugins and paying for every transaction.
To achieve the common usability for users is one of our main challenges. With this, we wouldn’t want to sacrifice privacy for the sake of convenience and would be able to keep access to the blockchain account in the user’s hands.
So, in our case, a user can use the platform by authorizing with the help of login and password on any device. But the keys from the wallets are 100% visible only to the users. We cannot see them.
We achieved this by coding keys with passwords. In this form, they are transmitted to our server and stored there. After successful authorization, we transfer these encrypted keys back to the user on the client’s side, there, they are decrypted, and used to sign transactions. On our side, these keys are stored in encrypted form. We simply cannot decrypt them and somehow use them.
Another challenge is the maximum optimization of expenses. For us, it’s important that the confirmation of transactions takes place as soon as possible and that users do not have to pay for transactions. Based on these criteria, we have chosen the EOS blockchain.
But it has its difficulties. EOS transfers to developers the payment for the memory, consumed by the contract. Also, the payment is needed for each memory access. Now we are minimizing these costs.
For optimization, we came up with a combined data storage system. The amount of information will be enormous, so in the blockchain, we save the most important things — the logic and data about users. For texts and pictures, we use the IPFS file system, which exists in many copies distributed throughout the Internet.
The Alpha version of the product is almost ready. The launch will happen when everything is ready. We are not in a hurry to launch the product, as we have an inner culture of quality.
In our team, we have a desire to provide users with something that they will be happy to use. Starting from the design, ending with the overall impression of the application. Here is what the first version of Peeranha will be able to do:
the possibility to ask a question, answer and comment;
likes and upvotes for the best questions and answers;
a possibility to create communities;
user ratings and statuses, privileges on the website, depending on the user’s status;
authorization with the help of Scatter-wallet;
authorization with the help of our online wallet, using email and password, but at the same time keeping 100% of the user’s keys;
moderation of posts by the users;
indexation of content by major search engines and basic site search;
the PEER-token itself;
weekly PEER-token rewards for users.
The main aim after the launch lays in the platform development, development of communities, the attraction of new blockchain projects to our platform. And of course, the more, the better. As a peg, we set the goal of 100 communities. It would be a great result if we can manage to attract this many in a year after the launch.
...
I started working with the blockchain before the hype and considering the experience of communicating with other enthusiasts, I can say: for those, who are interested and believe in this technology, nothing has changed. I communicated with many people, who were interested in the blockchain during the hype. The difference between them is that the latter do not understand the blockchain. They see it as a place, where you can invest money and receive 10 or 100 times more in a short period of time.
Thus, from the point of view of experienced investors, the situation is improving. In other words, large VC-companies invest in the blockchain, the situation was different before the hype. So, I see only the positive change. A lot of serious projects and serious teams. Experienced professionals manage these projects. Everything looks optimistic.
Also, there is no trouble with employing developers. We didn’t strive to search for blockchain specialists, we just looked for talented people. And during some time we taught them the blockchain. Well, I can’t say we taught them. We just gave them the material to read, talked to them and held a few lectures. In 2–4 weeks, they were ready and able to solve our tasks.
In reality, the blockchain isn’t as complicated as technology, there is nothing special. Everything is pretty clear enough for the digital-savvy.
I, myself, became interested in blockchain more than ten years ago and for the last two years, I have been working on a project 120% of my time. Peeranha’s co-founder is a very experienced IT entrepreneur, creator of Forte Group — Steve Kreinin. He is like me, he sees a future in this direction.
...
To build up your own token-economy on the platform, you need to use the blockchain. For us, it is important to make the resource division transparent and clear for society. So the users will be really interested in the success of the platform. For them, the more popular the platform is, the higher the cost of their tokens and the reward for answering the questions are.
We could do the same thing but in a centralized mode. We could say that the major part of our income we give to the user. Firstly, it wouldn’t be transparent, as nobody knows what is the percent that we give off in real life.
Secondly, we face the problem: how to reward the first users? Because, when we launch, our income will be equal to zero. However, first users play an important function for the community. They develop the platform, they are the tip of the spear. They carry the greatest risks of all users. That’s why to mastermind a model how to fairly reward, what to give them today so they have something tomorrow if the platform becomes more popular — is a hard task to do. And the blockchain resolves it in a quite elegant way.
Today we are giving away the tokens, which they are earning for their contribution. If they help the community to grow in something bigger, then they receive a big reward. They become something like the first startup employees.
First of all, you have to ask yourself many times, whether the blockchain system is needed to solve the problem, that the startup is trying to solve. Take a view from different angles. This is the question that the founders will hear many times. From investors, from users, from people around.
And if they don’t have an answer, they for sure will hear a lot of critics from this very side. They need to understand for themselves, why the blockchain is really needed. There must be inner confidence. Like, it’s not just because it is blockchain.
A piece of advice from Startup Jedi: the necessity of using the blockchain in your project you can check with the help of the methodology developed by Rocket DAO experts: https://api.rocketdao.io/file/2991/view
Second tip: think about the user’s convenience. In those decentralized applications that I have seen personally, usability is just minimal. And we can’t talk about any mass adaptation of these applications yet: especially in cases where the user, for example, to complete registration, needs to understand what is blockchain, install a plugin, try to buy cryptocurrency or something else. The probability that this user will at least register is minimal. It seems to me that in this industry it is necessary to pay attention to usability.
Facebook: facebook.com/StartupJedi/
Telegram: t.me/Startup_Jedi
Twitter: twitter.com/startup_jedi
Comments