Make Money Socializing

Here’s a press release I’ve been working on. Awesome announcements from our startup ProductLayer!

Vienna, Austria – ProductLayer announces that today, April 1st, the share holders are signing the papers of incorporation for ProductLayer GmbH. Additionally a customer reward program is announced that changes everything you thought you knew about social networks and gamification.

Users on prod.ly, ProductLayer’s social network around physical everyday products earn points for activities which contribute value to the network: completing product information, uploading product photos, sharing opines and voting on products. Today the company announces that from now on all points will be convertible in cash.

ProductLayer’s Chief Developer Evangelist Oliver Drobnik says:

“Traditional gamification systems try to make users do something that is in their interest by creating a fake social pressure to use their systems. This essentially makes their users slaves to the cause.

We believe that by giving all points a real money value users will no longer feel cheated out of their share of earnings. Rather, we see our users as partners in our business. We need them to grow big and want to reward the users with money.”

ProductLayer’s Chief Executive Officer Roland Moser coined the phrase “Reverse Kickstarter” for the scheme:

“Traditional Kickstarter works that users pre-order a product, which gets made and having a product causes the kickstarting company to be funded because it is now worth something.

We are reversing the process: Users use our product prod.ly first. The more users we get the more valuable our product – and thus ProductLayer – will become. When we then get big funding we are going to distribute part of the venture capital according to point values earned by the users”.

Effective today the prod.ly iOS app has been updated to show the monetary amounts users have accrued so far.

Sign up for a free account via the iOS app and start making money by sharing your everyday product interactions with the world. Social networking has never been as lucrative before.

Update April 2nd: April Fools! ProductLayer GmbH was indeed incorporated today and prod.ly is for real, too. The only hoax was the display of money values instead of point scores.

Categories: Business