Thank you cards darudar - our way of monetization
A gift is a gift service, with the help of which any person can donate his service or thing to another. At the same time asking for something in exchange is prohibited by the rules of the community.
The question that we are asked all the time: where is the money, due to what do you live and develop? This question is acute for any startup, and for Daroudar it is especially difficult because of the fundamental “lack of money” of the project. The last few years we have been hard at work looking for our way of monetization. We invent and sort through a variety of ways.
And so, for the first time, it seems to us, we have found a way that not only fits organically into the ecosystem of our community, but also lays a solid foundation for the project’s self-financing. A week ago we launched a new service at Daroudara - thank you cards. We want to tell what it is, in what ways we came to this, on what other existing or existing services looked.
')
Monthly community members write each other thousands of thanks for the gift. Acknowledgments are very different: from the banal monosyllabic “thank you” to the real masterpieces of photography and literature . It is safe to say that a special genre of thank-you messages has been formed on Darudar.
And we decided to offer the community a new way of expressing our appreciation. As a sign of gratitude for the gift received, you can now not only publish the usual gratitude, but also send your unique gift card to your donor. This is a real postcard, which the person himself draws directly on the site, and we already know the address of the recipient, we print it in the printing house and send it.
Each such postcard always has its virtual counterpart: the online copy of the postcard is preserved, among other user thanks. You can also issue one virtual postcard, without mail, if you want.
Looks like a postcard like this:
An important role in the design of the card is played by the choice of the cover from our collection:
If simple thanks remain free, postcards are paid:
In fact, we are talking about the freemium model . An interesting story, as we came to the idea of ​​cards. It all seems so obvious and logical now. However, this was not always the case.
At some point in time, we found that some Durudar users no longer simply give away things that have become unnecessary to them, but specifically buy something to donate in the community. At the same time, they are guided by the fact that they are in the greatest demand and there are always many who want. And we got the idea: what if we open a special online store? In this store, it will be possible to buy items for gift-giving in search of someone who wants to, or to give directly to your friends as a gift for any significant occasion.
While we were considering the details and effort of a new service, we discovered a very young startup BeriDari , who offered very similar mechanics. People were asked to give each other "gifts to choose from." To do this, it was necessary to pay the amount that you are willing to spend on a gift to your friend or friend, and he further on his own, within this amount, chose from the store catalog what he liked. The trick was that the bestowed no price tags did not see, which radically distinguished the gift of choice from the gift certificate .
We immediately became friends with Sergey Maksimchuk, co-founder and project manager, I told him the idea of ​​our store and how we can help each other. And we decided to integrate as soon as BeriDari will acquire the necessary functionality and build its logistics.
As time went on, we waited for the version of the service that we like, at some point in time, I could not even stand it and got a job at BeriDari to help with its implementation and bringing it to mind. However, it so happened that investors decided to close this project, and we did not have time to try anything with Daroudar.
At the same time, I realized how complex such a project is in implementation. Logistics turned out to be the bottleneck: how to make the online store assortment be as extensive as possible and always correspond to real warehouse stocks? Another difficulty was in conveying to the people a new unusual practice of giving gifts without the traditional in-person meeting in such cases. In general, I realized that alone we would not pull out such a project without proper investments.
Being engaged in BeriDari, I discovered a very beautiful American project, Wantful , which offered its users the exact same service. Their know-how was that they offered to arrange a gift in the form of a catalog of things that you personally created on their website. The catalog was printed in the printing office on a beautiful design paper and sent by mail to the recipient, who could only choose from it the one that he most liked. It was no longer necessary to pay: everything, including postage, was paid in advance by the donor. Unfortunately, this project also closed, a couple of months after BeriDari.
At the same time, Facebook tried to launch something similar. However, as I understood, in the end he, too, abandoned the original idea and came to the usual gift certificates.
When I worked in Beri, a stranger called me and said that he had an idea how Daroudar could earn. So we met with Dmitry Lisin. Dmitry said that several years ago he had presented a children's toy on Darudar. And then somehow I went to the site to see what was there and how, and was amazed to find out that his toy, about which he had already forgotten, was reparsed several times to completely unfamiliar people and gave him a whole story of thanks.
So he came to his "currency of gratitude." The basic idea is to thank strangers for the kindness shown to you with real thank-you paper tickets. Each ticket has its own unique number and address of the service, at which it is possible to drive this number and find out from whom and to whom the ticket was transferred and for what reason. Produces and sells gratitude tickets "Bank of Good" .
The “Thank you” ticket differs from the Treasury ticket (money) we are used to in the way that you don’t pay them, but thank. And accordingly, it is more important for you not to save money, not to save up tickets, but rather to spend them as quickly as possible. Because only this way you create the history of good deeds, you are a conductor of positive energy, launched once and by someone long before you.
Actually, Dmitriy offered to sell thank-you tickets for Durudar and that is how to earn money. The idea seemed to me awesome, but soon the fairy tale is felt, but it is not done soon. Again, the question arose about the refinement of the new service to the finished work product. We tried to get involved in the process, but this time and energy was not enough at all. I really hope that we are still ahead, we will definitely integrate!
A long time ago we were friends in absentia with the postcrossing.org service, where people give each other real postcards. To whom you send your next postcard, the service itself decides using a random number generator. The person until the last moment, until he opens his mailbox, does not know from whom and from which country the next card will come to him.
We, at Dauradar, were also fascinated by the format of live postcards and already twice, in honor of the birthday of the service, produced small collectible copies of postcards on the theme “I give you”. Yes, all the postcard designs were painted by the community members themselves!
Inspired by the “currency of gratitude,” we thought about not just selling our postcards, but providing people with a whole service, with the help of which they can choose the card they like on the site, write their message and indicate the recipient. And we ourselves will enter their message in a postcard and send where they will tell. They began to think about how to produce postcards, how to write in a message, for what reasons people would be able to send them to each other. It was obvious to us that one of such important reasons should be a reason to thank.
By the way, we have long been, as soon as we realized the power of gratitude at Daroudara, thought about a separate service dedicated to the gratitude to each other. And once we even designed this idea for implementation within a large international company. Unfortunately, the matter did not go further than the description and discussion of the project.
We found several similar projects online. None of them worked properly. It only podzadorilo us. But once again, we are faced with the fact that it will take quite large forces to make the project a reality. And this project will be very indirectly connected with Darudar. In fact, it will be a completely different project, and we will just spray. Can try to start to send each other only virtual postcards?
For a long time, we have been haunted by the idea of ​​virtual gifts. Against the background of our real gifts given to each other in person, virtual gifts have always seemed to us to be something “blasphemous” (but in vain!). However, for example, the PR department of Odnoklassniki says directly that their "core business is virtual gifts." Yes, and in other publications it is repeatedly emphasized that, of all the revenue of this social network, a significant, if not most, part falls on virtual gifts.
Another popular source of income has recently become virtual stickers that users of various instant messengers (Path, Line, Facebook, WhatsUp) send to a friend, thus expressing their emotions.
Question: "Do you use stickers in your messengers?". It turns out that 40% of respondents use. True, most of them use free stickers, and only 20% buy paid sets. But still it is impressive, agree! (Source: siliconrus.com/2013/12/voynyi-messendzherov ).
As a result, it dawned on us: so after all, Durudar users can issue thank-you cards ! There is no need to invent a reason for such a release, within our community it always is - an expression of special gratitude for the gift you received. At the same time, any postcard you have issued is a contribution to the development of the project. Do you want to release a real postcard? You can release a virtual one! Let it be a kind of virtual gift, only in the context of the reality that Daroodar creates, in which people interact with each other using gifts.
More on the mechanics of the service, to better understand further
To get a gift, you need to tell why you need it. Whose story most will attract the donor, that he presents. Before that, he may additionally look at the profiles of those who want to know better what kind of people they have ever been given. For each gift received, it is customary to write a public thanks. Thus, material benefits are redistributed between community members with no money at all. And this is not utopia, this is the economy of donation. With the help of our service, more than 2 thousand gifts are donated daily, and in just 5 years of Daroudar’s existence, more than 2 million gifts have been donated.
Where's the money?
The question that we are asked all the time: where is the money, due to what do you live and develop? This question is acute for any startup, and for Daroudar it is especially difficult because of the fundamental “lack of money” of the project. The last few years we have been hard at work looking for our way of monetization. We invent and sort through a variety of ways.
And so, for the first time, it seems to us, we have found a way that not only fits organically into the ecosystem of our community, but also lays a solid foundation for the project’s self-financing. A week ago we launched a new service at Daroudara - thank you cards. We want to tell what it is, in what ways we came to this, on what other existing or existing services looked.
')
Thank you card
Monthly community members write each other thousands of thanks for the gift. Acknowledgments are very different: from the banal monosyllabic “thank you” to the real masterpieces of photography and literature . It is safe to say that a special genre of thank-you messages has been formed on Darudar.
And we decided to offer the community a new way of expressing our appreciation. As a sign of gratitude for the gift received, you can now not only publish the usual gratitude, but also send your unique gift card to your donor. This is a real postcard, which the person himself draws directly on the site, and we already know the address of the recipient, we print it in the printing house and send it.
Each such postcard always has its virtual counterpart: the online copy of the postcard is preserved, among other user thanks. You can also issue one virtual postcard, without mail, if you want.
Looks like a postcard like this:
An important role in the design of the card is played by the choice of the cover from our collection:
If simple thanks remain free, postcards are paid:
In fact, we are talking about the freemium model . An interesting story, as we came to the idea of ​​cards. It all seems so obvious and logical now. However, this was not always the case.
A gift to choose from
At some point in time, we found that some Durudar users no longer simply give away things that have become unnecessary to them, but specifically buy something to donate in the community. At the same time, they are guided by the fact that they are in the greatest demand and there are always many who want. And we got the idea: what if we open a special online store? In this store, it will be possible to buy items for gift-giving in search of someone who wants to, or to give directly to your friends as a gift for any significant occasion.
While we were considering the details and effort of a new service, we discovered a very young startup BeriDari , who offered very similar mechanics. People were asked to give each other "gifts to choose from." To do this, it was necessary to pay the amount that you are willing to spend on a gift to your friend or friend, and he further on his own, within this amount, chose from the store catalog what he liked. The trick was that the bestowed no price tags did not see, which radically distinguished the gift of choice from the gift certificate .
We immediately became friends with Sergey Maksimchuk, co-founder and project manager, I told him the idea of ​​our store and how we can help each other. And we decided to integrate as soon as BeriDari will acquire the necessary functionality and build its logistics.
As time went on, we waited for the version of the service that we like, at some point in time, I could not even stand it and got a job at BeriDari to help with its implementation and bringing it to mind. However, it so happened that investors decided to close this project, and we did not have time to try anything with Daroudar.
At the same time, I realized how complex such a project is in implementation. Logistics turned out to be the bottleneck: how to make the online store assortment be as extensive as possible and always correspond to real warehouse stocks? Another difficulty was in conveying to the people a new unusual practice of giving gifts without the traditional in-person meeting in such cases. In general, I realized that alone we would not pull out such a project without proper investments.
Being engaged in BeriDari, I discovered a very beautiful American project, Wantful , which offered its users the exact same service. Their know-how was that they offered to arrange a gift in the form of a catalog of things that you personally created on their website. The catalog was printed in the printing office on a beautiful design paper and sent by mail to the recipient, who could only choose from it the one that he most liked. It was no longer necessary to pay: everything, including postage, was paid in advance by the donor. Unfortunately, this project also closed, a couple of months after BeriDari.
At the same time, Facebook tried to launch something similar. However, as I understood, in the end he, too, abandoned the original idea and came to the usual gift certificates.
Tickets "Thank you"
When I worked in Beri, a stranger called me and said that he had an idea how Daroudar could earn. So we met with Dmitry Lisin. Dmitry said that several years ago he had presented a children's toy on Darudar. And then somehow I went to the site to see what was there and how, and was amazed to find out that his toy, about which he had already forgotten, was reparsed several times to completely unfamiliar people and gave him a whole story of thanks.
So he came to his "currency of gratitude." The basic idea is to thank strangers for the kindness shown to you with real thank-you paper tickets. Each ticket has its own unique number and address of the service, at which it is possible to drive this number and find out from whom and to whom the ticket was transferred and for what reason. Produces and sells gratitude tickets "Bank of Good" .
The “Thank you” ticket differs from the Treasury ticket (money) we are used to in the way that you don’t pay them, but thank. And accordingly, it is more important for you not to save money, not to save up tickets, but rather to spend them as quickly as possible. Because only this way you create the history of good deeds, you are a conductor of positive energy, launched once and by someone long before you.
Actually, Dmitriy offered to sell thank-you tickets for Durudar and that is how to earn money. The idea seemed to me awesome, but soon the fairy tale is felt, but it is not done soon. Again, the question arose about the refinement of the new service to the finished work product. We tried to get involved in the process, but this time and energy was not enough at all. I really hope that we are still ahead, we will definitely integrate!
Greeting card service
A long time ago we were friends in absentia with the postcrossing.org service, where people give each other real postcards. To whom you send your next postcard, the service itself decides using a random number generator. The person until the last moment, until he opens his mailbox, does not know from whom and from which country the next card will come to him.
We, at Dauradar, were also fascinated by the format of live postcards and already twice, in honor of the birthday of the service, produced small collectible copies of postcards on the theme “I give you”. Yes, all the postcard designs were painted by the community members themselves!
Inspired by the “currency of gratitude,” we thought about not just selling our postcards, but providing people with a whole service, with the help of which they can choose the card they like on the site, write their message and indicate the recipient. And we ourselves will enter their message in a postcard and send where they will tell. They began to think about how to produce postcards, how to write in a message, for what reasons people would be able to send them to each other. It was obvious to us that one of such important reasons should be a reason to thank.
By the way, we have long been, as soon as we realized the power of gratitude at Daroudara, thought about a separate service dedicated to the gratitude to each other. And once we even designed this idea for implementation within a large international company. Unfortunately, the matter did not go further than the description and discussion of the project.
We found several similar projects online. None of them worked properly. It only podzadorilo us. But once again, we are faced with the fact that it will take quite large forces to make the project a reality. And this project will be very indirectly connected with Darudar. In fact, it will be a completely different project, and we will just spray. Can try to start to send each other only virtual postcards?
Virtual Gifts
For a long time, we have been haunted by the idea of ​​virtual gifts. Against the background of our real gifts given to each other in person, virtual gifts have always seemed to us to be something “blasphemous” (but in vain!). However, for example, the PR department of Odnoklassniki says directly that their "core business is virtual gifts." Yes, and in other publications it is repeatedly emphasized that, of all the revenue of this social network, a significant, if not most, part falls on virtual gifts.
Another popular source of income has recently become virtual stickers that users of various instant messengers (Path, Line, Facebook, WhatsUp) send to a friend, thus expressing their emotions.
Question: "Do you use stickers in your messengers?". It turns out that 40% of respondents use. True, most of them use free stickers, and only 20% buy paid sets. But still it is impressive, agree! (Source: siliconrus.com/2013/12/voynyi-messendzherov ).
Getting back to the beginning
As a result, it dawned on us: so after all, Durudar users can issue thank-you cards ! There is no need to invent a reason for such a release, within our community it always is - an expression of special gratitude for the gift you received. At the same time, any postcard you have issued is a contribution to the development of the project. Do you want to release a real postcard? You can release a virtual one! Let it be a kind of virtual gift, only in the context of the reality that Daroodar creates, in which people interact with each other using gifts.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/226455/
All Articles