building in the open #2

zap.meme is a new meme platform where you can create and share memes and emojis, and earn Bitcoin! We're currently competing in the PlebLabs Top Builder competition.

this is our weekly progress update post! we'll be outlining what we've been up to this week, what we plan for next week, general strategy and product roadmap stuff, and other random ideas!

building in the open #1

Introductions

CTO - Jowo (@jowo) is a Full-stack web engineer with an indie game development background. He's been working in Bitcoin for one year and has had a keen interest since 2015.

CMO (Chief Meme Officer) - JD (@zapmeme) is a meme connoisseur and Bitcoiner. He's worked in people facing roles for over 10 years and is helping out with zap.meme doing testing and meme curation, as well as a myriad of other tasks that need attention. Once we have traction, he'll also be in charge of customer support and operating as a moderator.

This week

We'll start with some awesome news this week:

We made it through to the second round of PlebLab Top Builder!

We're super stoked, and now we have two weeks left until the final teams are announced for Round 3 of Top Builder.

The plan

Last week we outlined the following plan for the week:

Improve the core UX of the meme feed. We're not sure how we'll change it yet, but we'll be figuring this out next week. We have some creative ideas on this front, but need to make some tough decisions.
Bring economic incentives into the app for content consumers. Right now, only content creators have any real economic reason to sign up. We want to bring more value to our content consumers and encourage them to register. We have a few exciting ideas that we're planning on this front.
Some basic admin tools so our CMO (Chief Meme Officer) can more easily manage the 1000s of memes on the platform.
Nostr: we want more robust integrations with Nostr. we're gunna get Nostr sign in implemented in our app, and also experiment more with setting up a meme focused relay.

What actually happened

Here's what actually happened!

Nostr login! And some other Nostr related integrations under the hood.
Some basic admin tools for internal use (and also allowing users to show/hide their own memes)
Very basic alert system so you get notifications in the header if you've been zapped
Lots of support and talking to users / sharing the alpha with the world!
A bunch of UI tweaks as a result of user feedback.
Fix a few small bugs and one more serious bug with historic reactions.
We made it through to the second round of PlebLab Top Builder!
Featured in the top 5 SN posts of last week! Woo hoo, thanks everyone :)

https://www.loom.com/share/7adaffe777be4caeae5c3ede2dd2a1cc?sid=21f103aa-8d88-469b-ba7b-b6cd68d024e0

Admin tools demo

https://www.loom.com/share/e9873808e4c44a84b38d1fb4155080ff?sid=9bcbcdf1-4555-4157-a753-0e3104746620

Next week

Next week we'll be focusing on work that we didn't manage to complete last week. The priorities will be:

Improve the core UX of the meme feed. We're still not sure how we'll change it, but we'll be figuring this out tomorrow, and reaching out to some of the Top Builder mentors and early adopters to ask their opinions (Let us know here if you have any thoughts!!). We have some creative ideas on this front, but need to make some tough decisions and hash out the details.
Bring economic incentives into the app for content consumers. Right now, only content creators have any real economic reason to sign up. We want to bring more value to our content consumers and encourage them to register. We have a few exciting ideas that we're planning on this front.

Over the next two weeks we feel we really need to make some waves and get people excited about what we're building, in order to really boost our chances of making it through to the final round of Top Builder! The way we see it, we'll need to really make a splash in order to get into the last round. The competition is really tough!

Our plan is first to refine the product a little, improving the UX of the main meme and emoji feeds. That'll take us into the middle of the first week. Then we'll plan out some exciting things to bring economic incentives to content consumers and drum up some exciting hype around our product. Hopefully, early next week we'll have some announcements to make on that front!

Stats

	Week 1	Week 2
Weekly page views	400*	1688
Weekly Unique visitors	80*	325
Total registered users	34	83
Total reaction value	1940 sats	3810 sats
Total memes uploaded	8323	8491

* approximate because analytics were added in the middle of the week