GoSocial: The Passion Economy Stack For the Future of Work

What is GoSocial and how it is allowing creators to make a living off their expertise, content, and passion, with ease.

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Hapramp Studio

7 min readMar 15, 2021

Hapramp started with building 1Ramp.io, a Steem Blockchain-based social media that rewards its users in cryptocurrency based on the likes they get. We soon realized the limitations of building on top of a very restricted blockchain. And well understood the problems these creators are facing when they are trying to monetize their content.

With all the learnings from 1Ramp, we initiated the GoSocial app. A platform for creators to host fun and creative challenges in the art, writing, and photography domain. Budding creators take these challenges and commit to a streak to create daily. We’ve seen users maintaining streaks in challenges for over 100 days. Between June 2020 to December 2020, we crossed 500k+ users on GoSocial (the app for creative and fun challenges).

While collaborating with various influencers and content creators, we were also assessing their needs as a creator. And the challenges they are facing in engaging with their audience and in monetization. The product discovery led us to a new GoSocial, which still includes the fun and engaging element of challenges but provides value to the creators beyond engaging with their audience. It provides them to build the community of their fans and followers, engage with them, and monetize it. In this blog, I write in detail about What is the new GoSocial and what’s Hapramp’s idea behind it.

What is GoSocial?

GoSocial is for creators to build and monetize their community.

GoSocial enables creators to create an online community by inviting their true fans and followers to join it. The creator (community creator) and the members can then showcase their work, communicate, and host discussions. It also allows their fans/audience to connect with them beyond the broadcasting model.

On top of this, GoSocial provides a stack of tools that the creators can use to monetize their content and expertise. The creator stack (on GoSocial) gives them the freedom and ease to host various paid or free digital experiences. Which includes workshops, courses, membership for fans, premium content, newsletter, 1:1 mentoring, fun challenges to engage the community, and discussion forum.

The complete experience for a budding creator in the passion economy makes GoSocial a holistic platform to experiment with the offerings. It removes the hassle of switching between tools and platforms for a creator to achieve their goals.

As of now, creators use 3–6 different platforms to monetize their passion. Switching and setting up multiple profiles and tools creates friction for their audience, slows down the creator, and makes the conversion funnel lengthy for their fans. GoSocial aims to solve it by building the complete creator stack and providing freedom and ease to the creators.

What is Our Goal?

We are enabling creators to build highly engaged communities of their true fans and followers. Communities that align their passion and audience’s interest in a way that creators can monetize it. Our goal is to ultimately empower creators to earn money by selling digital experiences and

Who is a Creator?

A person who brings something into existence is a creator. For us, there’s no hard boundary between who is a creator and who is not. We believe that everyone who is sharing his/her work on the Internet, whether a writer, musician, developer, fitness coach, or online educator, they are all creators. Broadly, people who make use of their passion and skills in a digital setup to gain influence/audience and monetize it are creators.

In the passion economy (or creator economy), these individuals thrive by crafting their own niche, building a community or audience around it, and earn by charging a fee for digital experiences or by selling unique physical and digital products online.

Why Do Creators Need To Build an Online Community?

No Conversion funnel / Built-in Distribution

A dedicated online community gives creators direct access to their audience and brings them at 0-degree separation when they are offering services like courses, workshops, mentorships, newsletters, etc.

The major social media and video platforms decide the reach content based on algorithms. Which hampers the sale of their paid offerings and reduces the top-of-funnel. On the other hand, communities are built-in distribution for the creator’s offering. This means the creators can reach all the members with ease.

Creator Stack — Tools to monetize

Beyond the community-building capability, GoSocial has the creator stack to help them monetize their community without sending them to a third-party tool. Thus, reducing the friction. The suite of tools gives them the freedom to experiment with various offerings with ease.

Compounding Growth

When creators use third-party tools to host paid offerings and major social platforms to gain an audience, there remains a disconnect. The hustle to bring them to other platforms starts from zero with each new segment of offerings (workshop, course, newsletter, etc.). The participants in the previous offerings are lost and find it difficult to keep an eye on the new announcements by their favorite creators.

An online community, on the other hand, turns all the participants into community members. This sets up a retargeting channel for the creator and makes it easy for them to reach the previous participants again. With each new offerings/digital-experience or premium content, the community grows as new people register for these.

This social proof of the number of members makes a new participant trust the creator, and it helps onboard them. It also becomes a repository for the creator which has all his/her past offerings, discussions around them, and a community that is showcasing what they are learning and achieving together.

Ownership

The creators own their communities. It provides freedom and control to creators over their business. Instead of playing by the rules of algorithms and trends, the community allows them to be authentic.

Feedback & Ideas

For the creators and members, communities become a source of new ideas, feedback, and connections. Especially for the creator, because community allows them to communicate well with their fans, take ideas and feedback, and tweak their content and offerings according to the needs of their

Why Passion Economy is Called The Future of Work?

We can broadly classify the growth of online media into three phases: Foundational media platforms, monetization of influencers, and the latest, creator as a business. Let’s understand each of these phases in detail:

Stage 1: Democratized Broadcasting

The foundational media platforms i.e. the first handful of social media and online publishing platforms allowed almost anyone to become a content publisher. Be it text, audio, video, or images. We got dozens of platforms in each media format and industry (niche) with various features that allowed a vast section of Internet users to become content creators.

Stage 2: Growth of Influencers

Brands recognized the power of individual content creators and paid them to promote their products and services. This allowed the monetization of influencer reach. We witnessed the growth of influencer marketing in the last 5 years. The credit goes to Instagram and YouTube for enabling millions of creators to monetize their audience. Although, all creators do not go after the brands for monetization. Influencer marketing requires them to be massy and on-top-of the trends. Which has its own limitations. Now, let’s talk about the third stage or major wave where these individuals creators are becoming a business of one.

Stage 3: Individual Creators Turning into Businesses

50 million individuals identify themselves as creators globally. 31% of all US teenagers want to become creators/Youtubers/Artists when they grow up. Moreover, creators earned $11 Billion in direct earnings from their audience in 2019.

When millions of creators try to turn into businesses, they discover the challenges a business would face. The challenge of differentiating themselves, the challenge of building their marketing funnel, and the challenge of rightly pricing their offerings. This is also fundamentally different from becoming an influencer. As mentioned, influencers go after massy content and trends. While creators-as-business go after niches, market gaps, and underserved audiences.

This is where we stand today. Having developed a following on different social platforms, creators can now build a community (of their most relevant audience) and monetize it through a plethora of different tools which includes hosting workshops, courses, newsletters, membership, 1:1 mentorship, subscriber-only (premium) content, etc. This lets creators focus on delighting their most relevant audience and making unique niche content, rather than seeking the biggest possible audience and making more generic clickbaity content.

We are building GoSocial as a one-stop platform for creators to solve all their new needs of turning into a creator-business. Using GoSocial, creators can easily create and grow their community, host new (paid/free) offerings and experiences at their pace, and benefit from the compounding growth of a community.

Signup for the GoSocial Creator Stack here.