Official announcements and happiness!
Tips and Transparency
With nearly 20,000 members now, I'm very curious how much tipping is actually going on, and what those numbers have looked like over time. Has the rate of tipping grown, commensurate with the population of Imzy?
I'm just curious about it. But I'm also thinking about the future and about transparency as well.
For instance, I really, really like Buffer's transparency. I think it's what's needed to be done in business for a long time.
From the beginning of time, businesses have been built on deception. The boss never reveals how much profit is being made (or how much they're taking home), making it harder for employees to demand more pay for themselve when the boss says "we're really strapped for cash right now, sorry". And employees are deceived into believing that they're worth less than they are. They're essentially tricked into taking the lowest salary that the boss is willing to give them.
I find this at my workplace. Nobody knows how much anyone else makes, and many people who do the same job and have the same experience are not being compensated even remotely similarly.
For instance, there are two designers that I know from my previous company. They are both at the same level of experience, skill and knowledge, and both produce the same level of product at the end of the day.
They both applied for a position at my new company, and provided us with the pay rate they were receiving. My boss and I discovered that one of the two artist's rate was much higher than the other (essentially netting him $100 more per day than the other).
I said to myself, how could my former boss live with himself, knowing that he's shafting one of his artists like this?
And then I realized - that's business. Business is deception.
In any case, obviously I'm a transparency advocate.
Now, some of you may ask - if you're such a transparency advocate, then tell us how much YOU make! And to that, I'll say that I'm a Clinton-Style transparency advocate. I'll tell you when everyone else does. I'll show you mine if you show me yours, essentially (learned that one in kindergarten under the jungle gym).
Anyhow, that's my thought for the morning.




I'm so happy nobody ever asked me that under the jungle gym
Yeah, maybe that's why I've got some issues.
It was a whole thing though... the boys and girls (about five of us) would gather in this little alcove under the jungle gym (it was more like a playhouse kind of thing), and the girls would show us theirs and then put sand in their underwear for some reason (I think because it was nice and cool under there and in their underwear?) I have no idea how many infections resulted from that. Kind of scary to think about. And the guys would do the same for the girls. We never got caught, and I never had to show mine, because that's kind of how I roll. I get away with a lot of stuff. Not proud of it.
Childhood is so weird
Yes. It also makes me wonder if this was all just innocent behavior, or if one or some of the kids were abused and that's what led them to encouraging us to play with them in this way.
And I may have overshared here. Transparency though, right guys??
When you say transparency, that wasn't a reference to some clear PVC underwear you had on by the jungle gym? Maybe that was just my own personal experience?
I think many of us had similar experiences as it's pretty natural for a kid to be curious about their body.
To get back on topic. This tip thing is a decent idea and it's the first I have heard of it. Is the ability to tip global? Can I tip in £ for it to be converted to OPs local currency?
It is possible the abuse would come out in that way. I suppose some kids are just highly curious. They could also just be really repressed?
That's why it's best to always ask when there's a question about poor treatment!
Of course, not being an adult back then, you wouldn't have known.
In this world, I often am on the side of being too cautious but I think that's okay.
On topic, whaaa??
;)
Haha!
We believe that transparency leads to trust which leads to healthier, better communities, and we've made a serious effort as a company to be as transparent as possible. (For example, we've talked specifically about transparency here and much more recently here. We're also as transparent as we can be in soliciting feedback and input on future features and how/why/when we'll build something and what factors contribute to that, and explaining what changes we make and why, even on things like how we sort and recommend communities. We've also been open about our broader vision and goals here, in the links below, and lots of other places. )
That being said, we can't always share every single detail, because we're all just really busy trying to build and do as much as possible, and sharing that takes, frankly, a lot of time and effort. And we believe in DOING and giving you new features as much as quickly as possible, not just talking about them. We're also evolving so quickly that the data at this stage quickly becomes irrelevant a week later as we learn new things and change how stuff works, so there's not really a point to sharing it if we know it's meaningless. And sometimes it just isn't the right thing to do, for various reasons.
So, with that, I won't say right now how much money has been exchanged in tips, but what I will say is that it has grown as the number of users has grown, but that it's not as big as it could be, and that's on purpose right now. Most companies at our stage don't have any financial model at all yet and are purely focused on growth. We knew we wanted to include that concept from day one to set the right standard of how we wanted to grow Imzy and become a sustainable business rather than just a purely ads-based company, but it's not something we've really focused on at all. There's a huge amount of stuff we could do to optimize for this that we just haven't prioritized yet because it's not the most important or valuable thing we could be doing for our users or our own long-term viability yet.
First we needed to make sure we get a good community platform built with all the right basics in place (update on that here), and then we need to make sure we understand how to engage and retain and increase our users, since if we don't have any people who care about us, it doesn't matter what financial features we have, and we know the majority of people won't use any of those tools until they're fully immersed and committed to the platform. So those things are what we've been focusing on right now instead, and it doesn't make sense to focus on how much tipping is working until that is what is the most important thing; otherwise we'll get distracted and sidetracked working on the wrong things and hurt ourselves in the long run.
We're getting close to the point where we're ready to start really innovating, and a lot of that will include more of the payments features, but right now it's something we've intentionally de-emphasized to be able to focus on the right things first. We also don't expect tipping alone to ever be a viable business model by itself, or even make up the majority of our (and our users') revenue. We have a vision for a way more in-depth about our business/financial model that will include tons of other ways we're giving users and communities the opportunity to interact, and this was just the simplest and easiest and most obvious one to build first.
Also, we actually have right around 28,000 members right now. :)
And I remember when it was like 1k :)
Now excited to see 100K!!
Awesome. Thanks so much for the reply. You guys are doing this the right way, I think. Build it and they will come. :-)
congrats on the 20K milestone