Ninth month for gFam
Hi everyone!
Big month for us down in gFam HQ! We've launched a few new fun features, and well, it was a total push to get them in for March 1. It's always intense trying to meet a deadline, even if you totally put it on yourself.
Before we get into the new funness... lets track our month!
Here are our previous posts if you want to nerd out on some comparisons...
We want to include everything that's happening in the gFam world to stay as transparent as possible. If you have any questions, please contact us on Twitter.
Platform Stats
*Stats from 06/01/2020 to date (03/01/2021 12:30 pm PST):
*
Users: 195
Posts: 4497
Number of Tips: 5798
Total XRP Tipped: 31962.084 ( ~ $14035.86 USD)
This doesn't include all the micropayments flowing through gFam from Coil subscribers to Coil creators... because, ah, we still haven't figured out how to get those stats.
Project Update
February was a crazy month. We fired our 4th social media marketing company and will probably go it alone for the foreseeable future.
I think, honestly, we can't really “market” gFam to people because it's too different and people have no reason to trust us. Instead I think it come down to personally branding. I'll need to join communities, make friends, become established and only then share gFam.live as a means to solve people's monetization problems.
The people I've found on Instagram seemed excited to join and loved the concept of gFam... but it didn't quite stick because Instagram has so many eyeballs and gFam was a novelty for them, it wasn't solving a problem they were having. I think that's the secret...
I'm actually really excited to go down this path, as daunting as it is, because not only will I be making friends which is always fun, but I'll be solving real problems that people are struggling with.
The Grant for the Web actually ask about the communities you belong to in their questionnaire... and I thought it was a really clever question at the time, but only now I'm realising just how essential being part of a community is. The Coil, Cinnamon and XRP communities were great as a starting point, but they've died down somewhat so we're going to go searching for new friends and new problems to solve!
I'm going to spend my time and effort reintegrating myself with the communities I used to be a part of. I had been ignoring them as I spent time in the blockchain communities, but hopefully they'll have me back. The good news I'm about to get way fitter, stronger and wetter...
[[Source]](https://media.giphy.com/media/S5nvg5EKh8XJvrL3NR/giphy-downsized-large.gif)
From a non-marketing viewpoint, it's been a hectic month of pushing to get these features done... and then trying to solve all the weird little bugs that pop up. Our platform looks pretty simple, but there is a lot happening in the background with web monetization. The problem with pushing boundaries is that you have to figure everything out yourself. It's both really exciting and endlessly frustrating.
Progress on Objectives
Got a few things to announce...
Update #1 : New Home Page
Our new home page now has way more content to help new people understand the whole shebangabang. Thanks so much to Seth for all his help with this. There is a explainer video, some flowcharts, some smiley faces of our global family and hopefully some words to help people understand what we're trying to do.
Update #2 : User Profiles
Feedback that we've received a lot over the last 9 months is that people really love stats and data, and want to see their gFam stats.
We now have user profiles where everyone can include links to various social media accounts, include a little bio, update their avatar, include a website link, see stats on activities and follow their favourites.
Users will also be able to see how much XRP they've tipped and received, but for privacy reasons we've only allowed users to see their own stats. If people want to share that information, totally fine by us, but the privacy of our users is obviously super important to us.
We still need to work on the Following functionality. At the moment people can follow other people, but it doesn't actually do anything just yet.
If you click on the menu button and then choose Account you can add in all this new funness and choose a new avatar to give you a little more individuality.
In the Account screen you can also change your display name to be different from your user name. The user name must be unique and longer than 6 characters, but your display name can be whatever you like.
Update #3 : Gated Content
The main premise for gFam.live is to allow creators to easily monetize their content.
Most consumers will reward their favourite creators by spending time on their content and dripping micropayments via their Coil subscription or by tipping them to encourage the content they love.
Some creators though, will have built up such trust with their fans and audience that they can charge a little bit more of a premium for their content, and this function is for those creators.
We're expecting that creators like fitness instructors or bakers may want to provide a workout routine or dessert recipe to their audience, but only to those willing to pay the entry price.
When you create a post, you'll also have this option:
By turning Gated Content on, you'll have the option of setting the price that your audience will have to tip you to see your content... we've set the minimum to 5 XRP and the maximum to 50 XRP.
Once you submit the post it will be blurred out in both the feed and the post...
You can tell a post is gated when you see this symbol in the feed:
or this extra info in the post:
You'll see the message at the top with the amount required to unlock the post, again, an amount between 5 and 5 XRP.
Once the tip goes through, the post will be unlocked and you'll be able to see the image and read the post text and hopefully level you your skills and life with that juicy exclusive content.
Update #4 : No more wondering who tipped you
By hovering over the 'Tips Earned' text you'll be able to see a pop up with who tipped you and how much. Neat.
Update #5 : Most recent always at the top
This might be one of those changes that is more for me than for everyone else...
Previously the default sorting in the daily feed was Tips Total. What this meant was that the people with the most tips would rise to the top of the feed.
This was originally intended to show the most valuable posts first, but in practice it meant that new posts would get lost halfway down the feed... which was confusing, especially to new users.
Now today's feed is sorted by default to Most Recent:
Every other day is sorted by Tips Total, but for today, the most recent post will be at the top. Users can totally change the sorting views to whatever they like... but the default for the moment is Most Recent.
We're still finding the bugs, so please let us know on Twitter or Instagram if you find anything odd. Thanks!
gFam Analytics
You can totally see our analytics anytime by clicking on the Analytics hyperlink at the bottom of the main page panel.
In January we had 1000 unique site visits and 3.5k site views.
A touch fewer people but those people were spending more time on the site looking at more posts:
It's a pretty consistent analytics trend that we have here on gFam. There was an uptick on February the 17th because we partnered with @mgfitness_personaltrainer to hold a little competition where people would share their fitness stories to win free online training sessions:
In January we earned 9 XRP through Coil subscriber micropayments and our 259 XRP earnings to date were worth $104.03 USD. Obviously XRP is in the middle of some craziness at the moment, but we did earn 4 XRP in microtransactions in February.
Most popular post for the month was the aforementioned MGFitness and her competition...
Meghan received 41 views, 5 comments and no tips because she hadn't set up XUMM yet.
We know it says 17 views on the post... we turned on the view counts towards the end of the month.
Traffic sources are always interesting to us...
We're still very confused by the traffic from Facebook. We don't do anything there ourselves.
Nothing really interesting happening with devices...
Chrome still absolutely dominating the browser wars.
Almost identical order to last month, except Italy and Australia have swapped.
Our Twitter account had 422 tweets and 475 followers at the end of January, so we've been putting out a bunch more content and found ourselves growing slowly but surely...
In the January we created 7 Instagram posts and gained 11 followers and followed 88 more people... but in February we created 32 posts, gained 161 followers and followed 317 more people.
We've spent a lot of time on Instagram this month and it's honestly a scary place. There are so many groups just stuck in a feedback loop of trying to gain more followers and engagement and essentially gaming the system.
I'd love to see some data from brands that have boosted sales using microinfluencers because I'm absolutely not convinced at this point that influencers on Instagram have as much influence as people think they do.
We've put a lot more effort into our Pinterest account with a lot more content and now we're including videos... but we're still on a downward trend...
I do think Pinterest has a big of a lag... it takes a few days/weeks for today's content to really get around... or we're just terrible at Pinterest.
Please contact us on Twitter with any comments or questions!
Or reply to this tweet if that's easier:
https://twitter.com/globalfamilyapp/status/1367159103416541188
Thanks for reading!