20 sats \ 1 reply \ @julian OP 7 Dec 2022 \ parent \ on: Hey SN - I’m Julian Fahrer, CEO at Apollo. AMA! meta
Good question. We could address it (or users can), in a couple of ways.
First, every can be commented on i.e. is essentially the start of a discussion thread. So anyone can add to, correct, or clarify what they read in a review. Those comments can then be upvoted (so that commenters can be rewarded).
If a review is simply outdated, then I think this is the best response.
When companies are playing more of an active role, then they can respond to reviews themselves, and so anyone reading will be able to see the company POV too.
If reviews are flat out wrong, it kind of depends why. Are they obviously misleading? Spamming? Off topic? If so, then hopefully we've caught them before publishing anyway - as they'd be contrary to our review guidelines.
But the short version is: we want the 'market' to take care of it
Hey Muteness!
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This depends on how quickly we can engineer the right incentives and see them get adopted by the userbase. Short answer is, 'as soon as we can'. Right now we're still unknown and trying to bootstrap initial engagement. But the faster we can get Reviewers earning meaningful sats from other users, the faster they'll see the ROI, and be willing to write reviews for smaller and smaller (and eventually zero, and then negative!) upfront amounts.
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I've spoken about content in another answer in the thread, but we want to be careful with it. It's not clear for example what value a review has for podcasts - do people want to see individual episodes reviewed, or an entire show?
I agree, sky is the limit though. The process is just to submit companies to us, and if we see a lot of submissions in a certain category we don't have, we'll basically add it in response to the demand
We already have 'crypto' products, where they overlap with bitcoin (e.g. Ledger, Coinbase - now Casa).
Generally I'd say we consider things on a case by case basis. Is the 'Bankless' newsletter 'crypto'? In one sense yes. But reading bitcoiners' reviews of it can be helpful to bitcoiners, and so in that sense, relevant for us.
But we're philosophically bitcoin-only, and always will be. Everything rolls up to the mission of helping bitcoiners and bitcoin adoption.
We're thinking about it for sure. 'Content' as a category (or categories) has a few peculiarities. We need to think the right ways to index content (e.g. Podcasts by episode, or by Show?).
But generally, yes we want to include content and planning a few things for it :)
There are three parts to the vision right now.
First, we want to be one of the most trusted voices helping to onboard the "next 100m bitcoiners", next bull run. When people are learning about exchanges, wallets etc for the first time, we want to be one of the first stops on that journey.
Second, the we think the underlying sats-based economic model has broader application that just bitcoin products. If we can get the incentives right, then it's a model that can apply to 'reviewing' all kinds of other products and services.
Third (and most speculative), like many others we see a looming 'post-Google' world. 'Search' is increasingly up for grabs. Max Webster has a great post about this (https://hivemind.vc/howtodisruptgoogle/). (Full disclosure - Max is an investor of ours).
I see many different players entering this space and succeeding where Google is increasingly failing (including Stacker News! :) ).
If we can build a new type of incentive model for valuable p2p exchange of information - we think we can contribute here as well.
You can reach me at julian@heyapollo.com (or one of the team on twitter - links in the OP).
Not sure about the email confirmation, but we'll look into it for sure
In the early days, we are paying Sats to bootstrap the review 'marketplace'. This is just to get the initial activity going.
Our plan is for Reviewers to earn enough sats from other users (if the reviews are good enough), such that they'll see a potential ROI worth posting a fee of their own. So, we plan on removing the initial bonus at some point.
This fee will be part of our eventual revenue model. But also like I mentioned in the OP, we're not entirely sure what the path to profitability is yet!
Hey @k00b! When we were starting the company, we had a pretty broad mission in mind of helping bitcoin adoption in some way.
The first thing we thought of was probably the most obvious - building another on-ramp to help onboard the next wave of bitcoiners.
(This was also a natural fit for us given the background of the team - with fintech / asset mgmt experience).
For a few reasons we didn't end up going too far down that path. The main one was that when we actually went out and starting talking to 'pre-coiners' and trying to spread the bitcoin gospel a bit, we realized we didn't really have all the tools necessary to have those conversations well.
Specifically, people would ask us to help them compare exchanges, media sources, etc - all the stuff you think about when you're new. And while we could answer individual questions, we felt we needed something more scalable. And something that was less reliant on our own personal preferences.
That got us thinking about this idea of a 'vertical search engine' for Bitcoin
I was working at a venture capital firm in the Bay Area. Tom and Sahil were both working in fintech startups.
The three of us decided individually and collectively in 2021 that we needed to spend all our time on bitcoin, and started making that happen at the start of this year :)
Thanks @Roman! Automating withdrawals is definitely on the road map for us but it's not something we're looking to prioritize in the short term. We still need to do a bit more work to get comfortable with spam detection, and users seems to be pretty happy getting their sats within a day or so of requesting them.
We think that the market will give us a good amount of signal about the LTV of a quality reviewer on the site - other users will upvote and send sats to the reviews (and reviewer).
Features like reviewers having their own profile page on the site, interacting with readers to answer questions will help accelerate this discovery process.
With a Sats based economy, we see reviewers capturing much of this LTV as opposed to the platform like youtube - where youtube gets the signal from advertisers and content views and then gets to decide the split.
But we haven't quantified anything yet
Thanks! Yeah, that's really the most important question. There are a couple of answers.
Longer term, we're hoping that the best / most helpful / most genuine reviews are discovered and promoted by market forces on the platform, including:
- Upvotes
- Comments from other users
In the short term, we have our own moderation processes (and will be building more):
- Automating plagiarism detection
- Manually checking each review to make sure it meets our review guidelines (and will push this as far as it scales)
There are other technical solutions too that punish / disincentive spam and bad actors. For example the 'Web of Trust' system that Stacker News has implemented here!
In short, I think there's a whole host of things we need to be doing
Probably how much people value sats! We've had some super engaged users, really invested in when / how / under what circumstances the rewards work. Which we love. But at the same time, it's not for amounts worth much in 'fiat' terms.
Another one would be how supportive the bitcoin/lightning community is. We've been overwhelmed with how much goodwill has come our way. Makes us very bullish!
Hey @stackmack, most likely yes - we want to give companies some way of controlling the dialogue with their users. We see our role somewhat as facilitating that conversation the best we can.
That could look like companies 'claiming' their profile page - similar to other reviews sites like Glassdoor, G2, Trustpilot
We don't have any open roles right now, but probably will early next year!
If you're interested, definitely reach out to me on twitter or to julian@heyapollo.com
GENESIS