Hi everyone,
I’m Julian Fahrer, CEO and Co-Founder of Apollo. We’re a bitcoin-only startup that launched in October, and we’re building a marketplace for user reviews of bitcoin products and services.
Excited to be here and take your questions!
About Us
The founding team is:
Our background is a mix of tradfi and tech: I spent the last few years working in Silicon Valley; Sahil and Tom both have experience in institutional asset management and working in / building fintech startups.
Why we started Apollo
Our mission is to increase bitcoin adoption. Specifically, we’re focused on mitigating problems of bad information i.e. an industry polluted by ‘crypto’ deception, and a media landscape engineered to confuse and overwhelm new joiners to the network.
It’s getting harder to separate signal from noise. But we think high quality, reliable user reviews of products and services can help reverse this trend.
So we’re building a new kind of market for information, on Bitcoin and Lightning. A sats-based economy that incentivizes and rewards honest, reliable, and valuable P2P communication.
How Apollo works today - and where it’s going
We see three potential sides to the ‘market’ for product reviews: Readers, Reviewers, and Companies.
For Reviewers
Initially we’ve built for Reviewers, and tried to incentivize their engagement with the platform. We pay 1000 sats for every review we publish (i.e. which meets our Review Guidelines). For various reasons, we plan on reducing this upfront reward over time (more on that below).
For Readers
We also have a couple of features that are designed to incentivize ‘high quality’ reviews. That is, to reward Reviewers for writing reviews that Readers find helpful:
- Upvotes - by upvoting a review, you send 10 sats from your account to the review author. The better your review, the more likely it is to be upvoted, and the more sats you’ll earn.
- Bounties - We’ve also put 100 sat ‘Bounties’ on reviews we judge to be the ‘most helpful’. As a Reader, you can earn sats by voting on which you think are likely to have bounties i.e. which you yourself judge most helpful. You get a 100 sat reward for correctly guessing and upvoting a Bountied Review.
For Companies
The third side is Companies, i.e. those whose products and services we’ve listed. We don’t honestly know yet what the right model for partnering with them is. Right now we’re committed to not doing anything that undermines the integrity of the platform / anything which will obviously bias reviews. Which means:
- No ‘pay to play’ partnerships with companies, accepting payment for preferential listing, etc
- No affiliate links
- No ads
- No selling of user data to third parties
We’re excited about building a new sats-based economy, and nurturing this organic marketplace. Not clipping tickets.
What kind of business models can emerge from that? The honest answer is we don’t fully know yet.
What’s next
- Re-design: The website is very much an MVP, and we know it doesn’t look that pretty yet :)
- Experimenting with incentive models: we’ve got a few ideas about how to keep improving the experience for Readers and Reviewers. Lots of little experiments.
- Adding new products & categories: we field requests for new companies constantly. We’re trying to keep up, and add the ones that make sense!
As mentioned above, we’re trying to get the incentive structure right so that the Readers are sending sats to Reviewers as a reward for writing great reviews.
The plan is the Reviewers anticipate an ROI high enough, such that they would even be willing to pay a small cost in order to post a review. Allowing us to sunset (or at least incrementally reduce) the upfront reward we’re paying today.
TL;DR: Write great product reviews that help educate bitcoiners, and earn sats. AMA!
P.S. For a deeper dive, here’s my appearance on Kevin Rooke’s podcast