building in the open #3

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!

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.

Last week we outlined the following plan for the week:

We hit some speed bumps this week. So we're slowing down and assessing our direction.

This Monday, after taking the weekend off, we noticed a malicious user was able to steal about $8 worth of satoshis using a bug in the wallet functionality. Ooops! Looks like we rushed thing a bit. So we disabled the wallet features and did a little soul searching. Feeling pretty burned out after the amount of intense work we've put in up until now, we ended up taking the whole week off. It was much needed. Although it probably won't help our chances of making it through to round three of Top Builder, we decided not to force ourselves to work. We know the signs of burnout, and didn't wanna push it. Work should be fun, especially on a project like ours, and if it feels like a chore, somethings wrong.

Not great timing considering we now only have one week left for the second round of PlebLabs Top Builder, but it is what was needed. And taking the long view, we think it's for the best because it gave us some head-space to think about our roadmap and what's best for the product long term.

We've come to the conclusion that the core "reactions" dynamic in zap.meme not optimal. Why? Primarily because they're proprietary / closed source. By that we mean you can react using a custom emoji that's only useable and visible on our platform, with sats all being handled in a custodial manner. When we first built this functionality, it felt like a natural direction to go in. We had custom emojis, we had memes, let's use them to react and send zaps! An hey, that's how it works on WhatsApp / Telegram... And in some ways it is natural. Natural for a closed, centralized platform that is.

However, that's not what we want to be. So, after doing some soul searching and research, we've decided to shift things up in our roadmap. Last week, we had planned to bring some economic incentives to meme consumers. We had a pretty cool idea for this, but we're gunna scrap it because it only builds further on top of the closed foundations.

So, our new road map will lean even more heavily on Nostr than we have been doing so far. Our new "mission" could probably be best described as: "Open memes for everyone, powered by Nostr" and our goal is to become a fully fledged Nostr client for meme lords, but also an open and accessible way for content consumers who are new to Nostr, to dip their feet in without having to learn any of the Nostr specifics stuff.

Some key changes we'll be making to the app:

Custom emojis are hilarious and the let users express themselves in ways that legacy Emojis simply never will. Legacy unicode emojis are essentially boring, generic, corporate slime. They're created and maintained by big tech, are utterly PC, and are fundamentally limited.

We think that the custom emoji on zap.meme have a ton of potential, and that NIP30 can really bring them to life by opening them up to the world in a free and open standard. We see a future where anyone can create an emoji, and it'll thrive and be used and go viral of it's own merit, circumventing the Unicode consortium controlled by big tech companies.

Anyway, our little rant out of the way, we wanna bring custom emoji to Nostr using NIP30! Just look at them in all their glory... and this is just the tip of the ice burg!

The plan for next week:

Also, we're gunna aim to end our daily work session on a high, so we're excited to start again the following day. Instead of working crazy hours and burning out! Also, unless we get some funding to keep working on zap.meme, we're gunna have to work part time on it for now - most likely circa 4-6 hours per week day.

* approximate because analytics were added in the middle of the week ** approximate because we accidentally broke the analytics half way through the week