“Pay Your Heroes”
A month ago I laid out a framework for thinking about growing Gratipay:
- Breadth (active users) through generous people.
- Depth (dollar volume) through open companies.
Then a week later I introduced “blog-post driven development,” or PDD (BPDD? BDD is already taken). What’s the blog post we want to write? What do we have to do in order to get there?
The Post
Here’s the sort of blog post I want to write for Phase 1:
Pay Your Hero
Who inspires you? Stop and think. Who is your personal hero? Who would you give money to if you could, “just because”? Just because you want to see what they do with it. Just because you know they’ll do something awesome. You believe in them. You trust them. You love what they do and you want them to do more of it. You don’t need a sticker. You don’t need a thank you in the liner notes. They make the world better, and if there were any justice in the world, they’d be rich.
Gratipay lets you send a small weekly payment to your hero. Here’s how it works:
1. Visit Gratipay.com.
2. Sign in with your email, Facebook or Twitter.
3. We’ll help you search your contacts for the person you’re thinking of.
4. Set up a small weekly payment to them—as little as 25¢ a week.
5. We’ll notify them. You’ll stay anonymous, though you can include a note telling them why you appreciate them so much.Gratipay’s mission is to enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love, and it starts with you giving 25¢ per week to your personal hero.
We also support voluntary payments to companies you respect, and that’s how we fund Gratipay: with your voluntary payments made through Gratipay itself. We don’t skim off the top, because we believe in our mission! Follow Gratipay on email, Facebook and Twitter for updates as we grow a new economy together. Thank you!
Getting There
What do we need to do to get there? Well, step one is already implemented, so we’re 20% of the way there! :-) Though: what about mobile?
We’ve got sign-up with Facebook and Twitter. We need pledging to email accounts. We need sign-up with email, which means we need verification of email, as well as password authentication and password recovery.
We need contact/friend search for email, Facebook and Twitter. Note that the model presented above calls for search, not browse. Over in “Onboard!” we were looking at browse, based on the principle, “recognition is easier than recall.” But, recall only gets hard after the first three or four items in a list (Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 132). We only need one. To find one person out of hundreds, search is the appropriate functionality. The main email providers have APIs for contacts: Gmail, Yahoo, Live. Facebook has invitable friends, and Twitter has friends. We need a UI for fetching and then searching contacts/friends from any of these sources. As a fallback, we should allow the user to manually enter an email address.
The key premise here is that most people will have someone that springs to mind quickly when this question is put to them: “Who inspires you? If you could give a dollar a week to someone else, who would you give it to?” We should test this premise with real people.
We have a basic implementation of step four, setting up the payment, but it’s leaky. We should tighten it up. If the user signed up with Facebook or Twitter then we should require their email address before finalizing the payment. We should ask for email permissions at this point: “How often should we email you? [x] Every week [ ] Every time you bill my card [ ] Never.”
That brings us to notifications. Email should be relatively straightforward. Facebook will require some hacks to preserve anonymity. For Twitter, we’ll have to resort to a bot. We need to build the “note” functionality. We need to be smart about how frequently we notify people, and allowing them to trivially opt-out if we’re going to notify them more than once. There’s pressure to notify more than once, because what about the second person who wants to pledge to someone? They have picked Someone as their hero! Their one person who is the answer to the question, “Who inspires you?”! It’s a let-down to then get dumped off the wagon after step four.
Then What?
After a user responds to the notification and claims their Gratipay account, I suppose we prompt them to go through the same flow: “Who inspires you?” Or do we prompt them to fill out their profile further? Prompting to fill out a profile could/should be the follow-on for payors as well, after they’ve gone through the flow above. It probably makes sense to include the search functionality inline on the “Giving” page. Users who have gone through the flow once might also be excited about a browse UI at this point: “This is great! I want to give to all my friends!”
We want to email a report to everyone on Gratipay every week. Above the fold is how much they received and/or paid this week, and how much they were charged or withdrew. Below the fold is any Gratipay news. The opt-out for this came when the user first attached their email.
This is a lot of work, and much of it is already ticketed. Hopefully this gives us a way to organize it all by focusing on a concrete goal: publishing a blog post inviting people to pay their hero on Gratipay.
