Expanding The Ponder Vision
Thoughts from Ponder’s Michael Egan
In one of our previous posts, we clearly established why and how dating sucks. If you feel like you need a bit of commiseration time, feel free to go back and read that.
We also described how we are changing this, how Ponder is solving the key misery-inducing aspects of the way people meet in today’s world. We believe we have created something unique and beneficial for the world and we’re psyched about it.
But as we rolled out our beta version and discovered how positively people were interacting, our vision for the product began to expand…dramatically.
We kept coming back to two key thoughts:
- Creating dating introductions is essentially the same as creating introductions in any other context and so our model of integrating human intuition and rewarding performance should be applied to these other areas.
- Built on a decentralized match-making model that utilizes rewards to incent positive behavior, it is clear that Ponder will benefit from blockchain technology and thus can perhaps be the first “killer app” that brings an intuitive, value-driven use of blockchain to the consumer market.
So let me dig into each of these and identify how it has sharpened our focus.
From App to Platform
There are numerous types of introductions out there. Dating is certainly a very popular one, but so too are friendships focused on particular interests, job candidate introductions, business relationships, service provider referrals, and on and on. Introductions are happening all the time, and the best ones are those created by trusted sources and developed with positive intentions in mind.
We firmly believe that the way we developed Ponder to incorporate humans into the matchmaking process, at scale, and to reward positive behavior, can and should be a model used in all of these types of interactions. As a company though, we can only bite off so many problems at a time. In fact, we actually are best served if we focus on one of them and nail it before we move on to any of the others.
This is the classic problem associated with individual companies with discrete sets of resources who are inherently limited in their scope of knowledge — they can’t take advantage of all the opportunities out there. How do you get around this?
For us, we had to first admit that we don’t have a monopoly on all the great ideas out there. As such, in order for the world to benefit from what we’ve created, we decided to evolve Ponder from a singular application to a platform that others can build upon to serve additional needs.
In taking this approach, we then needed to figure out how to best create an ecosystem of applications where both the Ponder platform and the various individual applications would benefit.
Incorporating Blockchain into Ponder
Ponder is based on a decentralized, democratized but incentive-driven approach to matchmaking, where anyone in the world can introduce others together with the aim to start a relationship. It is also based on a pseudo-contractual relationship wherein if you introduce two people together and if and only if they both agree to actually form a relationship, you get rewarded.
These two concepts — decentralized processes and smart contracts — are at the heart of current blockchain technology and so as the technology emerged it became readily apparent that Ponder could benefit by adopting it.
In addition however, as we decided to evolve from an app to a platform and needed a way to both monitor and ensure standards as outside developers began to build on the platform, it was clear that we needed our own form of a token to help manage this. And thus Ponder Gold was discovered!
Though Ponder clearly benefits by incorporating blockchain technology into it, there is also a potentially transformative benefit for blockchain itself.
Blockchain has caught the attention of mainstream media and thus the broader consumer base is aware of the term but struggles to understand its utility. This is because the vast majority of early applications run on it are either focused on relatively esoteric business-related problems (supply chain, financial transactions, issues of origin, etc.) or, let’s be honest, non-value driven consumer issues — kitty’s anyone?
We believe that by incorporating blockchain technology and our own token into an application like Ponder, which is highly intuitive and accepted by a broad range of consumers, that we can be the first widely adopted application for this revolutionary new technology — the first “killer app” if you will. We aim to bring blockchain to the common consumer in a way that they readily understand and intuitively value thus radically raising the profile and long-term stability of the technology itself.
Introducing Ponder Gold
Our expanded vision for Ponder, enabling it to become a platform where others can utilize our founding models to help additional types of relationships to form and incorporating blockchain technology to best serve these founding models led us to the creation of our own token — Ponder Gold — to help manage the utilization of Ponder itself.
We are extremely excited by this and plan to introduce Ponder Gold to the world through a token sale that will start on February 14th (Valentines Day!).
In upcoming posts we will detail both the benefits one can expect by holding Ponder Gold as well as how the token sale itself will work.
We hope you come along for the ride.
Michael Egan is Ponder’s Chairman of the Board
Michael has over 25 years of strategy, operational and board experience with a range of blue chip companies. Previously he was Chief Executive Officer and Board Director of Spark Networks (NYSE: LOV) the owner of two of the largest dating brands — ChristianMingle and JDate.
