Hi Michael,
Apologies for the sluggishness in my responses. Between when we last emailed and now, my wife and I had our first child. All is good, mother and baby are healthy, but it’s been quite the whirlwind!
Regarding your question, I think it is a good one. Off the top of my head, here are the things that would make me more keen to begin working together. Some of them are not knophy-related but more just communicating my interests/motivations:
1. A commitment to using bitcoin’s lightning network for payments. This is because one of my goals is to have a simple lightning app (LApp) in production as soon as possible this year. Furthermore, the developments in bitcoin remain strong and aligned with (what I believe to be) most people’s deep-down-long-term values.
2. As with most tools/apps, it seems that the best ones are purpose built for a very specific purpose. This does not mean that they cannot appeal to a broad audience, but simply that they are self-contained and almost self-explanatory. As such, the simpler the better, as far as I’m concerned. Educational puzzles and games might be good examples of this, perhaps with a monetization twist like what we have been discussing. The point being that, while the underlying platform could be quite general, there would be a special case of it (educational puzzles in this example) that we focus 80% of our effort towards such that the user experience is absolutely fantastic in that arena.
3. In other words, “one size fits all fits nobody perfectly.” I would rather build something that is highly specialized for a particular use-case, build a LApp that does it, and then once that is doing well consider branching into other territory.
4. Lastly, as bizarre as it seems, I still wonder about the “simple ideas” such as taking project Gutenberg’s free out-of-print books (as a way to seed the system) and creating a site/app where learners can be directly paid for reading (and, importantly, completing!) books. They might also be paid more if they do various things like book reports (or something more critical-thought oriented) along the way. The money for the rewards would come from sponsors (individual or otherwise), and the site/app provides the platform to screen out learners who are simply trying to game the system. For example, while it’s been a long time since I read it, I think Gulliver’s travels is a fantastic and entertaining political/social commentary. I would consider “sponsoring a copy of GT” on the site. The site could let me select categories/qualifications of learners (age range, previous books already completed, etc) that I will allow to “check out” my copy of GT. While the book is checked out, they are the unique potential winner of the reward and can increase the odds of winning it simply by actually reading and understanding the book in a timely fashion (e.g. putting in the time!). Perhaps they put up a small “down payment” that will be sacrificed if they fail to complete it. I don’t know. The point I’m trying to communicate is that while “monetized reading” is a broad space, it still is more specialized than a truly grandiose vision and therefore, perhaps, has a chance of being implemented in a fashion that is extremely compelling yet still relatively unique.
TL;DR: basically something similar to Kiva (https://kiva.org) but for reading/writing/math
This isn’t to say that I’m not interested in big and extremely general ideas. I most certainly am, and I spend a lot of time in that arena on my own. However, you had asked what will most likely cause me to want to move forward working together, and when I really started thinking about it I realized that what we create needs to be a platform that I could see myself using, and has a clear end-to-end “business model” so to speak. To be clear, I have no idea whether the example above actually would work, it is simply something that I can see end-to-end, find interesting, and hence would be more comfortable spending the time/money/effort building out.
Hope this helps provide some clarity.
Sincerely,
Philbert
P.S. Sent from my phone so may have some inadvertent typos.
