building in the open #1
zap.meme is a brand new meme platform where you can create and share memes and emojis, and earn Bitcoin! We're currently competing in the PlebLabs Top Builder competition.
this is our weekly progress update post! we'll be outlining what we've been up to this week, what we plan for next week, general strategy and product roadmap stuff, and other random ideas!
Introductions
CTO - Jowo (@jowo) is a Full-stack web engineer with an indie game development background. He's been working in Bitcoin for one year and has had a keen interest since 2015.
CMO (Chief Meme Officer) - JD (@zapmeme) is a meme connoisseur and Bitcoiner. He's worked in people facing roles for over 10 years and is helping out with zap.meme doing testing and meme curation, as well as a myriad of other tasks that need attention. Once we have traction, he'll also be in charge of customer support and operating as a moderator.
Last month
During last month we've been working like crazy to get the bare bones MVP built. Now that we're there, it's time to get the app out there, get people using it, and pivot where necessary. So far we've built:
- a robust tech stack to work with so we can move quickly but maintain a high code quality.
- put together a basic wire-frame design
- integrated user profiles / login etc
- built all the pages for showing content: meme feed, the emoji feed, etc
- adding reaction functionality into the app so you can react to memes with custom emojis
- integrated a custodial Lightning wallet using ZBD
- decided on a name for our app and configured the domain
This week
It's been a busy week on our side. We soft-launched our app during this week's Meme Monday on SN. It went well, we received some positive feedback and encouragement which is always nice. (If you guys have any critical feedback it'd be much appreciated too!)
Now that the app is out there in the hands of real users, the goal is to get feedback and grow our user-base. We've already made some adjustments to our strategy based on what we've seen and learned during the launch:
Strategy
See here for a previous outline of our strategy: #401783
This week we've decided to shift our strategy a bit. We had planned to get as many meme creators signed up on our platform as possible and uploading memes directly into our app. However, we've come to understand that this presents a significant challenge and we believe it will slow us down a lot. Our goal right now is growth, we want users viewing and reacting to memes!
So, this week, we've built a bunch of tools and refactored our app so that content generation on zap.meme is automatic. We're able to easily pull in 1000s of memes from two sources. stacker.news and Nostr.
When these memes are pulled in, we generate a profile for the meme creator, which they can claim later when they sign up to zap.meme, along with any sats their memes have earned.
We think this is a really cool way of handling content creation. It allows us to skip the whole "chicken and egg" situation that user generated content platforms often have: they have no users making content, so they have no users viewing content, so they have no users making content, so they have no users viewing content... ♻️
we're avoiding this trap by sourcing the memes ourselves, making the content creators a profile, and waiting for the honey-pot of sats on the profile to build up and eventually get claimed by the creator!
And, content creation out of the way, we can now focus our efforts on getting content consumers using our site. The consumer strategy hasn't been fully planned out yet, but most likely it'll involve more than just dope memes.
Work
Big pieces of work done this week:
- Profiles - you can now claim profiles on zap.meme, this mechanism is designed so that zap.meme can be connected to various other platforms/protocols. E.g. A select few stacker.news users can now link their SN profile to their zap.meme account. And, any memes they post in SN's meme mondays will be automatically ported over onto zap.meme. This feature is also being rolled out for Nostr. So you can automatically link your zap.meme account to your Nostr account(s) and you memes will be cross-posted onto zap.meme.
- Building out scraping scripts. These scripts are used to cross-post SN and Nostr memes onto zap.meme. For now, they're running in local scripts that I run daily/weekly on my machine, but the next step will be to automate them and have them running in the cloud in a cron job / queue, or something like that.
Video demo showing the profiles functionality: https://www.loom.com/share/34e936dd800e42bba39938cb07265a3e
Next week
Next week is gunna be all focused on content consumers and growing our user base and increasing the amount of sats spent in app.
- Improve the core UX of the meme feed. We're not sure how we'll change it yet, but we'll be figuring this out next week. We have some creative ideas on this front, but need to make some tough decisions.
- Bring economic incentives into the app for content consumers. Right now, only content creators have any real economic reason to sign up. We want to bring more value to our content consumers and encourage them to register. We have a few exciting ideas that we're planning on this front.
- Some basic admin tools so our CMO (Chief Meme Officer) can more easily manage the 1000s of memes on the platform.
- Nostr: we want more robust integrations with Nostr. we're gunna get Nostr sign in implemented in our app, and also experiment more with setting up a meme focused relay.
P.S. We have something exciting lined up tomorrow's Meme Monday!
Stats
| Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | ... | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Weekly page views | 400* | ||||
| Weekly Unique visitors | 80* | ||||
| Total registered users | 34 | ||||
| Total reaction value | 1940 sats | ||||
| Total memes uploaded | 8323 |
* approximate because analytics were added in the middle of the week
Claim your account
Here's a shoutout to all those users with unclaimed profiles!
@0204ce6d9d https://zap.meme/p/sn/0204ce6d9d
@022e3cc87a https://zap.meme/p/sn/022e3cc87a
@02b7622c79 https://zap.meme/p/sn/02b7622c79
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@nikotsla https://zap.meme/p/sn/nikotsla
@nonym https://zap.meme/p/sn/nonym
@nullama https://zap.meme/p/sn/nullama
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@pacman https://zap.meme/p/sn/pacman
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@premitive1 https://zap.meme/p/sn/premitive1
@PrinterGoBrrr https://zap.meme/p/sn/PrinterGoBrrr
@Proofofwork https://zap.meme/p/sn/Proofofwork
@rafaelasprilla334 https://zap.meme/p/sn/rafaelasprilla334
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@rod https://zap.meme/p/sn/rod
@Roll https://zap.meme/p/sn/Roll
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