The Hapramp Journey: Experiments and Risks
In the year 2018, we officially started the journey of building Hapramp from our hostel room. At that time, our current team members were working on several side-projects individually and in teams. To name a few, Collegare (social media for colleges), Anyaudio (online music streaming from videos), Xreach (publication), and Hapramp (platform for creators).
Between then and now, a lot has changed. We learned new things, met new people, started figuring out our values and what we stand for, kept shaping our vision and mission inside the team, shifted to remote work (at least for now), and made a consensus on “What is Art?” (almost).
This blog is a reflection on the journey so far and a fresh introduction to what we are building.
Step 0
Building new products requires you to run a lot of low-cost experiments and take a few high-cost risks. Cost, in our understanding, is time, talent, and capital.
We are lucky that we started early when we had relatively more time to experiment, make mistakes, and fail at several of them. We are grateful that the people we wanted to work with joined in. And all of us pulled-off several freelance jobs to afford the time and privilege to take risks.
But that is the precursor, the mandatory step-0 in order to take the next step and actually build something valuable.
Value is created by building something that solves a problem. Even better if you are facing that problem first hand, that makes you naturally empathetic. And best when a lot of people in the world are facing it and there’s a chance of building a scalable solution. In the process, you need to do experiments and take risks (that may payoff). The end result has a lot of elements to it that are accidental and circumstantial (you cannot predict and control everything).
Learnings From 1Ramp.io
We started from building 1Ramp.io (social media for creators) on Steem Blockchain. It was interesting/new, our users were earning cryptocurrency based on the upvotes on their content. It was an experiment with some risks (choosing a new tech infrastructure early on).
In a year, 1Ramp was among popular platforms built on Steem and our team presented it in two blockchain events so far (Poland and Thailand). While Steem was working, there were several challenges with user experience and it was limiting our ideas.
In that duration, we developed a better understanding of user data privacy, security, and content monetization. And it was then, in 2019, we initiated GoSocial App (a platform for creators) and Asteria Protocol (the tech that’ll eventually enable security, privacy, and monetization).
Initiating GoSocial
We believe that content creators are among those who create the highest value on the Internet. And the problem is, it is really hard for them to capture a fair fraction from that monetary value.
So instead of taking the functionalities from 1Ramp and building the other capabilities in the protocol, we started from step-0 again.
We envisioned a far bigger platform as our end goal in terms of who benefits from it and what problems it solves. But chose to start with a narrow focus on photographers (as of now, GoSocial is used by artists, writers, and photographers. We’ll expand to more domains in the future.).
We learned a lot from user research and conceptualized: Internet Age (how people use the Internet varies based on for how long they’ve been using it), Stages of a Creator’s Journey (discovery, learning, professional), self-challenges (something that creators do to learn and make creative ritual), and Importance of validation (for the budding artists).
User research has always been a core part of our design process. It allows room for running experiments with confidence and increases the chance of building something that is actually useful. We also realize that most of the time people don’t know what they want. But they do know what problems they face (but they don’t know if they are solvable).
With all the learnings, we started building an experience that helps budding creators in learning photography/art/writing in a social context (instead of classroom context) directly from expert creators. On GoSocial, expert creators host creative challenges (ideas to create) and the users take those challenges. We also built a concept of streaks. In which, you can take a challenge for a number of days and commit yourself to create daily, hence our motto, #CreateOnTheGo. This new use case enables content creation with purpose on the platform and is helpful for the creators.
We are gradually building tools for experts to monetize their expertise and content. There are several ideas and concepts at play here, vertical communities, P2P exchange of value, and a sense of personal growth. There is a lot more to come and we are excited to share those updates as we progress.
Building Asteria Protocol
“What is data privacy?” and “Who owns my data?” are hard questions. Every tech company has its own definition and parameters to define and ensure privacy. The technology to ensure data privacy varies from platform to platform. And most of us are clueless about it. It is a hard problem to solve. Even harder to know what happens to your data, who owns it, and what is its value.
Asteria Protocol is an experiment in its early stage. We are trying to build it in a way that the end-users have a choice on what happens with their data. It’ll be first integrated with GoSocial and those will be exciting times.
Step 1
In these two years, the Hapramp Studio has turned into a box full of experiments and new ideas for the future. That’s why today, we call it an idea lab.
Read more about it on Yourstory here.
A lot of work is still pending. We need to run more experiments, build a platform that scales globally to benefit all the artists and creators, take new risks, and make sure that our solutions work.
The problems that we aim to solve are not tiny and are certainly not in our capacity to solve on our own. That’s why we need talented and determined people to work with us.
We are looking for dreamers and doers to join us on this journey, write to us at hi@hapramp.com.
We are in the middle of a pandemic. These are extraordinarily hard times for everyone. Things are expected to get worse. But it is said that things get worse before they get better.
