Umm… who doesn’t?
The flaky pastry. The aroma to die for. The potatoes mashed to within an inch of their lives. The juices coating your tongue.
Anyone who’s currently in NYC and its immediate suburbs has my heartfelt envy. The Coney Island Knish is an eighth… well, maybe the ninth marvel of the world. I urge everyone and their grandmother to go sample the delight, or re-sample, as the case may be. And no, I am not currently affiliated with any Knish chefs, sellers, distributers, recipe publishers, or advertisers — though I would very much love to be. Looking at you, Ilia Papas and Matt Salzberg! Call me ;)
But edible knishes aside… Does WishKnish need a Knish (beyond the obvious benefit of rhyming?)
It is something investors and storeowners ask us with the sort of regularity that makes this a question very much worth adding to the official platform FAQs. And a topic definitely warranting a little trip back in time.
It was back in February of 2016 that we, as founders of 6-year-old indie publishing house, Curiosity Quills Press, have realized that pouring marketing money into making our products visible on Amazon and feeding its popularity-measuring algorithm is very much an exercise in futility. The moment you stop feeding the beast, it turns on you, pushes you down to the bottom of the totem pole — and doesn’t let you so much as to contact the readers you were actually the one to send into its ecosystem.
We wanted a way to have our marketing efforts accumulate. To get people talking to us. To give ourselves a chance to listen to their concerns about our endings or revel in them gushing about our covers. And, most importantly to us as marketers doing what we can to stand out on a limited budget, we need to find a way for them to spread the word — and not just track their efforts in doing so, but also incentivize them into actually wanting to bother.
Now, as book publishers, what could we offer our fans to want them to bug their social circles? To tell them about what Curiosity Quills Press is, and why they should give us a try?
Well, we could offer them free e-books. We could send them physical copies once they referred X number of people to register to our mailing list. We could have their favorite author put them in as minor characters into the story.
But how to make sure they are doing all they can and how can we make sure the books we are giving is what they need at any given time? What if they would like to be rewarded in… well, some other way.
So, here come the mind games. Successful video game companies have used BF Skinner’s work for years, and have nicely validated the need to bring conditioning — aka the effort / immediate reward system — within the scope of computer gaming.
Can the same be applied toward any other useful behavior? Well, considering the same is now being tried in schools to motivate kids into learning, the answer is obviously, yes.
Now, if you add the fact that those that have earned or otherwise amassed more “Knish”, our unit used to track social reward for the actions beneficial to each particular storefront and to the WishKnish platform as a whole, get more rank, visible flair — and the way to spend it on any product or service in the ecosystem, not just what each storefront is capable of offering — well, you get what we have finally articulated in our minds and implemented as a proof of concept during the 1st iteration of the WishKnish platform.
And then! Oh, then, the light dawned. We learned about blockchains beyond the obvious catchphrase of Bitcoin. And realized, as we say in Russian, that we’re “inventing the bike”.
A way to create, use, store, exchange, assign, and keep an immutable record of such a unit exists. And thus, the Knish was tokenized, as it was born to be— and the rest is blockchain history.
TL;DR: Of course we need the Knish! The Knish was there before we knew we needed the Knish. The Knish IS. Come try the Knish. Napkins are on us.
