Bryan Franklin

We Are Never Capable Of Realizing Our Dreams (In Advance)

11 years ago

January 17, 2013 Day Two

I’m feeling good about the progress so far. I confided in my friend LiYana that I’m excited about the birth of circletribe.com, but also scared that I won’t be able to do what it takes to make it successful. She said that it doesn’t matter if I can do what it takes to make it successful, what matters is to do what’s needed today. Good to remember. We are never capable of realizing our dreams (in advance). We become who we need to become through their realization.

Jay Abraham (Preeminent Marketing and Business Strategy Genuis) and Paul Sutter (founder of Orbital Data and Quantcast) are signed on as advisors.

Jay spoke to Jennifer and I about his enthusiasm and his concerns for the project. He doesn’t love the name “circletribe.com” because it sounds too fringe and doesn’t communicate the benefits of participating in a community that values contribution to the common entrepreneur.

His main concern is that the language we use to communicate what the site does and why people should use it is not easy to grasp for people who don’t already ‘get it’. He’s a master of articulation, so it pains him to see a project that he believes has tremendous value not be described in a way that clearly conveys that value to the potential user base.

We talked about the difference in aesthetic between Silicon Valley’s marketing and that of the internet marketing world. Silicon Valley: Start-ups should build products that market themselves. Internet Marketing: people wont do anything unless there is a clearly articulated benefit and a emotionally charged call to action compelling them to do so. Fascinating to stand at the intersection of these two mindsets.

Measuring And Scoring Contribution

We’ve settled on a measurement method for contribution. There are a few decisions that I think will determine the future of what circletribe.com can become, and this is one of them. We want to be able to show that someone has been a big contribution in the past over a long period of time, and we also want to reward active users. We want the number to be small enough to be meaningful and robust enough to account for multiple ways of making a contribution. We want the system to be extensible to off-site activity, and perhaps even usable as currency.
:: Contribution Points will be awarded for various activities
:: Someone saying “Thank You”
:: Someone indicating an article you’ve written is valuable
:: Reaching out to help someone
:: Them reporting that the help you gave was actually helpful
:: Contribution Points will be tallied on a logarithmic scale to generate the contribution score
:: Contribution Points will never expire, but their impact on Contribution Score will reach zero over time.
:: It will take 20,000 Contribution Points to achieve a Contribution Score of 100, but only 600 Contribution Points to achieve a Contribution Score of 10.

How Much To Reveal To The Public?

For now, we are going to be semi-transparent about the logic behind circletribe.com I am stopping short of sharing the actual formula here for converting actions into points and points into score, because we want the option to use opacity as a defense against those that would try to spam the system (in ways we currently cannot conceive) However, we want to make sure that users have all the information they need to maximize their contribution Score and retain the benefits.

January 18, 2013 :: Naming Day

Changing The Name

Wow. On a whim I looked up a domain that I had looked up before and, it’s available! Tributr.com. Jennifer’s immediate reaction was, “Oh yes, that’s it.” Love it when that happens. From now on, there will be no references to “circletribe.com”. Only “Tributr”. Note that “Scaletribe.com” was the original name, with Circletribe.com replacing it. This is one for the trivia books of the future, “What was the original name of the popular website Tributr.com?”

The company name and domain is now tributr.com

Deep into UX design today. How to make it simple, evocative, clean, powerful? Back and back again to the drawing board… The central problem seems to be, “how to let people know what to do, communicate the value of doing it, and reward them when they actually do it.” Every decision seems to be a natural tug of war between having a lot of options and having a cohesive procedure for the customer to follow.

After speaking about it with Michael Fishman and Michael Costuros, we’ve decided to publish this blog daily or weekly, rather than publish it en masse later.

Let’s start the dialog! Ask, advise, or comment below…

 

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