Beans is a platform where you could consume and spread information and get compensated for it. With money. No, I’m not kidding.
We are a startup. It’s a fundamental new concept that we are trying to build. Do you see how chat is becoming the next big platform? That’s because you have billions of users and their unutilized potential in terms of revenue. A wonderful world is possible within the medium of our individual chat boxes – whatsapp, messenger, slack and whatnot. We are trying to push the boundaries within platform development itself and approach things differently. While we want to utilize chat as a platform and appreciate it’s importance, it has led us into the quest of discovering what else is out there. What other ‘platforms’ could be created that would help advance humanity as a whole by using technology to create better, more integrated societies. Beans is a shot at trying to create a better digital ecosystem than the one we currently have access to. The world’s perspective changes when there are a few things that you can guarantee. The basic rights of a human being should be something that he should be able to ‘earn’ by virtue of him being a social being. And the internet is the most practical and efficient way to provide such a platform.
We are trying to craft a platform where every user is paid for his services for being a ‘customer’. If you can read and write, you are our customer. All one has to do is, be part of the ecosystem.
Okay. So let’s assume two players. A publisher. And a reader. You are the reader, because, you like to read online right? Well, who doesn’t? Alright then. So, That’s it. That’s the entire concept! You read what somebody else publishes. And other people read what you publish. And everybody gets paid for reading and charged for publishing, hence, creating an ecosystem, a market of sorts, if you will. We call it the Information Trading Platform, or ITP for short.
Confused? Let me explain. So, a publisher publishes some interesting content, say a blog or an article or a video maybe. He wants you to interact with it and he’s willing to pay for it! So, for about a few seconds to minutes of your attention where you read an article or watch a video, you get paid in real time.
Yes. And no. Say you read a bunch of articles and collect $77 in your account. Now, you can cash it out, but not right away. In fact, not for about a year or so, by when we’ll hopefully we able to reach our critical user mass and start enabling cash out. It’s a developmental priority and we are working to get it rolled out as soon as we hit our critical goal. Remember, we are a startup trying to create an ecosystem where people are compensated for their services for being themselves, a customer. A customer who buys and uses products to live everyday. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of companies trying to get your attention, barely for a fraction of a few seconds. Unbelievable? Well, here it is. I’ll let you be the judge of it. From the morning till evening, you use hundreds of commercial products. From a coffee to your car, everything is sold by companies who fight for your attention in the brief time they get to interact with you. TV Ads. Radio. Newspaper. And then the digital advertising such as on Facebook. Do you know how much the television ads cost? On average, over $300,000 for 30 seconds of your ‘attention’ during prime time. And that attention is disrupted by a million things going on in your life. Most of us approach advertising with a certain distaste, except the people working in it of course! They know what they’re doing and how important it is. But unfortunately, somehow we as a society collectively failed to achieve user interest and satisfaction while building these systems. Remember those superbowl ads? Of course you do. Everybody does. They’re fantastic, aren’t they? They come along once a year, and they’re a work of art. Inspiring, to be honest. Ever took a guess why they’re so good? Well, your guess probably would be right. It’s pretty obvious. It has a simple cause and effect relationship. A cycle, of sorts. You have an expectation that you’ll like them, which drives investors to pour in more money, which makes better content, which brings more viewers, more money, and the chain reaction takes off. Simply because so many people watch it, there isn’t a dearth of resources in that ecosystem since everyone knows how valuable that built up expectation and attention is around the Big Game.
And that is what we are trying to create, only on a more global scale. A way for companies, corporations, governments, publishers, bloggers – basically anybody – to get their word across to you. And for this service of a few seconds to minutes of your undivided attention, you get paid. Because at the end of the day, you will buy some products. And if you are more informed about better products, you’ll have a better experience and the companies will have a gala time because you’ll be their best customer, and a vastly more informed citizen who is an integral part of a global ecosystem. Seriously.
Anybody with an internet access. Whoever signs up, gets the ability to start reading articles and collecting dollars. However, you can only cash out once your bank information is verified, for security reasons of course.
Again, anybody! You don’t need to be a company to be able to publish. Bloggers can use this as a tool to get their content across. Teachers can use it to spread information. News publishers can use it to put out important coverage. And you. No matter who you are, what you do. There is always something you could share with the world. You could write about your life, your experiences. Your college, your job, your family, your hobby. You pick!
If you’re an individual user and not a company account, you can start using your dollars that you earned toward publishing articles, regardless of whether your account is verified or not. In fact, we encourage it. Like we said, we want you to be a part of an ecosystem. And this will be your contribution. If you want to be able to cash out the amount you’ve collected starting next year, help us reach our target user goal. Spread the word. Publish. Help your friends earn and encourage them to publish. You don’t have to spend a penny out of your pocket, if you don’t want to. Although, our experience so far suggests that once you start using the platform and be part of the ecosystem, you’ll love it so much that you’ll become a living, breathing, vital part of this beautiful new platform that we want to bring to the world. But like I said earlier, you do not need a bank account or a credit card to start reading and earning. You only need it to cash it out.
The thing is, how many platforms are there where an average user acts as a content generator? As in, a publisher. The answer is, very few. Consider this – most people post status updates and pictures on Facebook and Instagram frequently. That’s two products where they generate content. But everyday people don’t tweet as often as they post on Facebook. You’d have to be a celebrity to gain a decent traction on Twitter. Compare that to Quora. Medium. Or any publishing company. In fact, the ratios of people who act as content generators is a very small percentage of the entire user base for most companies, with extremely limited and few exceptions. The problem is that people often don’t have an environment or an incentive to publish frequently. The only exception to that is chat, where the entire ecosystem runs on the premise that whoever is using it has to be a content generator, by definition. Everybody is a publisher and a reader. Now that’s a platform that’s alive! We proudly take inspiration from this model that the chat platform enjoys, and aim to eliminate the divide between the publishers and the readers. We want to make publishing so easy for you that it’ll go with reading hand-in-hand and you’ll have a major incentive to do it. Our fundamental goal is the legendary 1:1 proportion of active readers to publishers.
Sure. You can publish anything you want. The fact that it’s paid publishing, as in you have to pay money to publish, takes care of quality control. Say, I’m a fashion blogger. Or an artist. And I want some people to see my work and see if they’ll be interested in buying it. Or maybe I just want approval. Regardless, I can spend a small amount, say, $20 and use it to publish some samples of my work towards a targeted audience, who then read your article or watch your video or see the images. You can even enable/disable comments, set a minimum amount of time that a reader has to spend on your page to earn the associated amount of money, get live traffic analysis, get completion alerts when your goal reaches, and a bunch of other big data value from it with just a touch. And if you’re an individual user and not a company account, you can even use the dollars you earned from reading toward publishing, without ever taking out your credit card. Simple as that.
For every dollar you spend, we use 50% of it to offset the cost of rendering that service to you. Remember, we are a startup. Which is why we need your help to scale it. The more people, the lower the costs, the more bang you get out of your buck. It’s a catch-22!
Actually, no. The cheapest advertising rates are $20 for 1000 impressions. That’s 1000 people just glancing at the ad. We are offering the same price. For example, if you spend $20, you get 1000 readers with the lowest incentive, that’s 1 cent per reader, upto a 1000 readers. That’s $10 in total, and we keep the other $10 out of the 20 to offset the cost of bringing that service to you. That’s the 50% service fee. See, in reality every article you post will shell out much bigger amounts, more likely in dollars-per-article rather than a few cents per article. But that's besides the point. Note that no other commercial service even lets you directly incentivize your customers or audience in any way, except maybe some lowly reward points or something that barely give you a discount, let alone become your supplemental income! Look at it this way. You actually get to potentially use almost 50% of your marketing budget (if you spend all of it on Beans!) to directly incentivize your customers or readers for interacting with your content by paying them in real time. The total amount, the readers, the price-per-reader – its all controlled directly by you. Now that’s unreal!
Remember, we are a startup. We are trying to give back to the world in our own way by creating a more accessible world, where anybody could go online and read and make some money. How much money depends upon the state of the economy. Beans as a company does not control the pricing. In fact, the publisher (individual or company) is in full control of that price distribution per user. The way we look at it, if the demand for higher priced articles rises, companies and individuals together will spend more and more to get their message across. The demand depends upon the economy since money is involved, but it never dies or dips under a certain level. Why? Well, it’s a built in protection, by design. It’s because there will always be somebody who wants you to buy their product or read their blog, even though the markets may be in recession. In fact, you’d be helping recover from such a suppositional recession by contributing back to the economy in such a direct way. And you can see this change with the growing revenue per-user-per-year figure that companies publish. Consider this. Facebook and Google are two of the largest, and most innovative companies that have ever dominated the planet Earth commercially. Both of their largest source of revenue is advertising. In hundreds of billions. And while recent advancements in native advertising have come a long way in making the experience better than before, it’s still not something that people want to interact with, given a choice. All of those billions of dollars coming in, and the average revenue per user per YEAR is about a meager $10.
That’s it, you ask? Yes! That’s what your entire year’s worth of time spent interacting with Facebook and all of it’s millions of ads is worth. $10.
That’s two questions! Well, here’s the deal. The values appear so ridiculously low despite company earning in billions because it’s the average of the company’s total revenue, most of which is ads, divided by all of their users. But does that mean that the average user’s time generates only about $10 worth of revenue? Absolutely not!
This is why we need your help. We want to bring this number up. That is our core mission. We want this number to be a reflection of our consumer based economy. Each of us buy and consume a lot of information every day and given an appropriate platform, the companies and people providing us with those things and information would love an opportunity to get their marketing dollars directly to you instead of on annoying ads all over the internet. We know what we are talking about, because we are a company ourselves! If we had access to a product like Beans (well then we wouldn’t have to create it!) we could have launched our product so much more efficiently by directly spending that budget on getting people to interact with my content rather than on ad agencies.
Good question! So far, the companies which have created real value in people’s lives globally, and there are just a handful, have created a new platform for information to flow on. They create new paradigms and verticals to outlet the genius of this humanity. The next big thing happening in the industry is expanding the messaging or chat as a platform and utilizing the power of one-on-one conversations with people to generate revenue and deliver value to the user. We do the same thing. But we do it with the mission of becoming as integral to your life as chat may be, if not more.
Speaking of annoying ads, will you have ads? Haha, good question again. And to that, I’ll say, what ads? What are ads after all? Just marketing content, right. So if you’re an advertiser, you could just create a post and publish your ‘ad’. There you go. Marketing! Now remember, it is quality controlled by design. After all, who likes to pay for content that they don’t like themselves? We are inventing an entire ecosystem around a platform, something that can become an integral part of your life, and let you interact with the businesses and services around you in a way that benefits you and let’s you have fun. The inherently involved incentive may even become your supplementary income to support yourself, if you wanted. Because like I said, you come with a certain set of skills by virtue of being a human who can read and write, and we would like your help and contribution as a reader and a publisher to make it a reality for you and for all of us. Remember, the more you read, the more you earn, the more you publish, and the bigger the ecosystem expands.