Hi all. I wanted to make a post talking about the “problem” of monetization and how it will, or won’t, influence the platform.

Just a reminder that No AI is used in the writing of these posts – you’re hearing from us directly 😊

What is monetization?

Simply, it’s how we can “make money” from Jouzt. Most platforms and businesses need to make money somehow in order to survive.

I’ll start with some figures:

Right now Jouzt has a bit over 1000 users. It costs about $1000-$3000 to run. This is paid for by me and it is a big burden, I’ve mentioned before I’m not rich lol. But it’s ok because I believe in what we’re building.

Our goal is to get to 50,000 users at some point in the future (growth strategy will be a separate post for those interested). At that point, Jouzt would cost around $10,000-$20000 per month to run.

These are basic figures that don’t include any big promotions we may want to run to get the word out, big prizes we’d love to give to users etc. It also doesn’t include wages as none of us get paid currently.

So, here’s the thing. If we snowball rapidly, and find ourselves with 50k users tomorrow, it would be WAY too expensive to run, eek. This has happened to other self-funded platforms when not planned for.

So, this is where monetization comes in – finding a way to at least cover some of our costs as we grow without making the platform bad.

👇

Options:

  1. Advertising. This is not something we are entertaining as it makes everything suck.
  2. “Pay to play” features like paying for extra votes and to be seen more etc. This is also something we are not entertaining as fairness and equality are key values of ours. We want to support everyone evenly as much as possible.
  3. Pay to use Jouzt, like Netflix. Also a no. We don’t want to “force” payment for our platform. You should be able to use the platform and all the core features for free ideally.
  4. Shared monetization. Something like Vgen or fiverr, where you can monetise your Jouzt account, and we provide you with services for commission delivery, product sales etc. This one is interesting but not something we are looking at as a first step into monetization. Mainly because:
    1. Most users are artists themselves on Jouzt, we can’t promise customers to you guys while we are still growing.
    2. We don’t want to compete with other platforms doing this until we have a clear difference to offer.
    3. This is a big development project that we’d want to do only if it’s worth it for you guys and we can get it rightDonations/kickstarter. This is nice and
  5. we’ve had some lovely offers of donation but we’d rather give you something than just ask for money. We may still put this somewhere but won’t rely on it for monetization – it would just be for super nice people who want to support extra but would never be expected 😊
  6. External investment. This is an option. But it’s something we prefer not to consider for now. When you give away equity you give away at least some control – sometimes a lot. Given the values that surround what we are trying to build, we want to keep control within our original team as much as possible, or at least until we can be pickier with who we take funding from to ensure our values align and the platform can remain awesome. We want to prioritise users, not shareholders.

  7. Boosted Accounts. This is what we’re currently looking to do. The reasons are:

    1. It won’t inhibit your free use of the platform. The only things “boosted” users will have access to will be purely cosmetic and quality of life stuff. Everything functional + most cosmetics, will be free.

    2. We won’t “take anything away”. Only add cool stuff for boosted users.

    3. This puts the onus on us to make boosted stuff worth it. We prefer this dynamic as our goal is always to create value.

    4. This will be introduced alongside cosmetics – mainly avatar frames. We’re a bit tired of the clinical feel of other social platforms and we love the idea of people using frames and other cosmetics to express themselves on Jouzt – kinda like the old days of MySpace and other platforms. Most will be free and earned by doing positive actions like giving out claps and interacting with each other’s stuff. And some will be for boosted users as a reward for supporting us.

    5. Boosted accounts shouldn’t need to be more than a few dollars a month for those who want to support us and get some extra stuff.

Going back to the “problem”:

We don’t expect everyone to boost, but with enough people supporting us through these accounts, which we will make as cheap as possible, we could scale indefinitely.

Additionally, we want to collaborate with artists to create cosmetics that can be bought by Jouzt users – this would give users cool options for jazzing up their avatars and profiles and also benefit the artists with exposure and hopefully revenue share. We are currently working this all out and will update in future.

There it is. That’s the thinking behind boosted accounts which are coming soon. We hope we can make it something worthwhile 😊

Thanks for reading another post and following the Jouzt journey!