Hi! Another blog post. This one is for those interested in some of our plans for growing Jouzt.
Just a reminder that No AI is used in the writing of these posts – you’re hearing from us directly 😊
This is a big topic so I’ll try not to let it turn into a thesis or go much into marketing details. I’ll break it down into 2 sections: where we are and where we’re going.
Where we are
We have worked on Jouzt for about 2 years as a team, from concept to development, to now, all working in the hours we can outside of our day jobs. And only really made it available a few months ago.
Technically it’s in beta, but we decided not to market it that way.
You guys don’t know how meaningful you are to our journey just by being here and reading this. Since launching, your feedback and use of the platform and the engagement in the Discord have helped us to identify problems, prioritise features and start shaping our next steps.
You’ve also helped us prove some of the theories that we built the whole platform around, including:
▶️ That big-tech is investing in AI and they should be investing in people
▶️ That social media doesn’t have to be endless doom scrolling of addictive content and trends.
▶️ That there is fun to be had with collaborative features like Jouzt battles and collections.
▶️ That humans want to create new things, not just follow the crowd.
▶️ That the spirit of the early internet didn’t die, it just got lost in ads and AI.
So thank you for helping us get to this point. You may not know this, but as one of the first 10,000 users, you get the title of Jouzt “founder” – you will get a special founder cosmetic in the near future on the platform 😊
Where we’re going
In a previous post I talked about monetisation and explained the problem of costs. I won’t repeat the whole post but basically, we are hoping that boosted accounts (if we provide enough value and enough people want to support) will help us stabilise costs and be able to then focus more heavily on growth without worrying about bajillion dollar hosting bills. We will also be adding a donation option thanks to the influence of some very kind users 🙂
Organic growth is the best kind of growth (people referring friends, hearing about us from others etc) as it doesn’t cost anything and proves that the platform is worth sharing. But we expect that to be more prominent later if we do things right.
This is why we’re working so hard to add in features based on your feedback. We believe in our ability to provide a fun alternative to the “big corp” owned social platforms out there but before we go too hard spreading the word we want to ensure we’ve got it right.
As you may have heard, the next big release will include monetisation and cosmetics. Most cosmetics will be free and earned by supporting other users. We hope this becomes the missing piece that allows us to engage more with artists and have users engage more with each other. We want this to truly be a fun and safe space where people, not bots, can connect and create and share and be seen and learn and grow and have fun.
We are doing some marketing now (that’s likely how you found us), but we hope to kick it up a notch after this next release and get some momentum behind the Jouzt snowball.
In the future we’d also love to see users in new demographics start to form communities within Jouzt, like photography and music.
This already feels like such a refreshing community with only around 1000 users, and we’re pretty confident that if we can keep attracting more people like you all then we really could have a game changing platform.
TLDR: We have a few more features we’d like to get in, then we want to really focus on growing the platform while keeping it awesome.
Thanks for reading another post and following our Jouzt journey 🥰
