The Point
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The Point in the future (short version)
This weekend, I received a tape in the mail — the return address was, “Me / The Future.”
I popped it in my VCR, and was surprised to find myself (with a bit less hair) in the year 2013, demonstrating The Point 2.0. “Future me” promised to send a longer version of the tape (hopefully with more context on what happens in the next five years) in the next few weeks, but until then, enjoy.
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The Point 1.0: A Sneak Peak (Part 2)
Later this month, The Point will release a major upgrade. This series of posts highlights a few of the exciting changes. Read part 1 in this series here.
The following video shows you how (and why) to start your own campaign on The Point. Enjoy!
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The Point 1.0: A Sneak Peak (Part 1)
Update: Part 2 is posted — a video preview of campaign creation (7/14/08)
This April, after six months in beta, we stopped and asked ourselves, “Knowing what we know now, if we started The Point today from scratch, what would it look like?” Later this month, we’re releasing a major upgrade that answers that question.
In brief, these changes make The Point simpler, more flexible, and easier to integrate as a tool for other online communities. We’ve also added a few new ideas, steps forward in our understanding of campaigns that yield powerful new applications.
This is the first in a series of posts that will showcase the changes in our upcoming release. Please let us know what you think!
Dangle a Carrot
The Point was designed to allow people with a shared problem to find each other, reach critical mass, and exercise their power – by boycott, strike, or some other collective action – to not merely ask for change, but force it. So instead of acting by yourself to stop a t-shirt company from using sweatshops, organize with other customers, and start a boycott only once enough join for the boycott to be a greater cost than legitimate labor.
Our users, however, observed another technique of persuasion: Instead of threatening to take business away, promise to bring it. Show that t-shirt company how many new customers they’d gain by changing policy. It’s a perfect compliment to The Point’s toolkit. Ultimatum campaigns are the “stick,” and this gives us the “carrot.”
We think of carrot campaigns as petitions evolved. By backing your demand with the promise of action, you’re not just asking for change, you’re showing how it can be in everyone’s best interest. Here are a few examples:
- We pledge to eat at Dave’s Diner if they offer more vegetarian choices.
- We promise to volunteer for the first Congressional candidate in Chicago to take the Change Congress pledge.
- We are raising a pot of money that can be collected by whoever unlocks the iPhone 3G. No one’s credit card is charged unless it happens.
- We will buy our shoes from the first major brand to move its manufacturing facilities back to US soil.
- We’re putting money in a pot for our friend Adam, who looks exactly like Big Boy, if he dresses like Big Boy this Halloween. No one’s credit card will be charged unless he does it.
- We will all buy bicycles from the first store to offer us a 20% discount.
- We are pledging money towards the purchase of a polka dot iPod, if Apple agrees to make one. The money will not be collected unless it happens.
- We will donate to Uwe Boll’s favorite charity, but only if he promises to never make another movie.
- We will move our business to the first eBay competitor that charges sellers less than 3% per transaction.
- We will help pay Hillary Clinton’s campaign debt if she pledges to neither seek nor accept the Vice Presidency.
Rounding off the model
It’s easy to cook up a carrot campaign for nearly any situation. They’re no more structurally complex than petitions, but far more powerful. This is in contrast to ultimatum campaigns, which often demand up-front research to determine a tipping point that satisfies the cost-benefit analysis.
And notably, carrot campaigns are a nice way to induce change. This is particularly useful for dealing with small businesses, where you want to engage your target in something that feels more like a conversation than an argument.
Carrot campaigns are a logical extension of The Point’s big idea: Create the conditions for collective action to be worthwhile, and people will participate.
Coming up in part 2, we’ll preview the new interface for starting campaigns.
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We’re Rich!
Hey, we raised a bunch of money! Specifically, $4.8 million from New Enterprise Associates.
NEA has a great track record of helping early stage companies with powerful ideas to grow and prosper. We’re gratified that they saw this in us, and look forward to working together.
I’m amazed, but not surprised, to see the plan I outlined on the back of a napkin over a year ago maturing so seamlessly.
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New Economic Models
Seth Godin explains that the Internet not only allows us to do things faster/better/cheaper, but enables new forms of interaction that were once too tedious to manage:
How about a simple system that lets you run a new kind of auction for an event with limited seating? Say you want 200 people to come to a networking event, the sort of thing that’s no fun if only a dozen or two show up… Instead of charging $50 a ticket, why not charge $1 for the first five tickets, $2 for the next five, and on to $500 for the last ten? You’ll earn just as much (if not more) but reward the brave who sign up early. (The folks who like to wait until the last minute ‘to be sure’ end up paying for the privilege). It’s easy to imagine a simple interface to set up whatever graduated pricing model you’d like.
Over the last few decades, expensive physical goods have been replaced by with software counterparts that, while expensive to initially develop, cost next to nothing to disperse to the masses. With marginal production costs out of the way, we can take a more honest look at what determines value. Ideally, shouldn’t a product’s price be at least somewhat dependent on its worth to each individual? Photoshop, for example, is probably worth tens of thousands to a professional photographer. But a teenager who wants to see what he looks like with a mustache might pay $10.
The question is now, as it’s always been, is their a system that credibly determines individual worth? Guess what? There is, and conveniently, it’s The Point!
Say I’m a software developer who is considering building Widget X. It will take $50,000 to make the project worth my time. So I start a campaign on The Point, agreeing to produce the software, but only if people commit a total of $50,000. People see the campaign, and some of them say, “Widget X is the answer to all my problems — I’ll pay $1,000!” Others say, “I’d kind of like to see that happen… I’ll pitch in a dollar.” People pay what it’s worth to them, because if they don’t, it won’t get built. There’s no chance to free ride.
To Seth’s example, the same model could be applied to an event. The fixed values are the seating and the desired profit. The variable is the ticket price. You need X dollars to put on a show, and people pay whatever the show is worth to them. The show only happens if enough money is raised. Rewarding punctuality, as Seth proposes, is just another imperfect pricing model. Price should be a function of cost to the manufacturer and benefit to the consumer.1
Back to the software example. A big reason that people pirate software and music is that it’s priced higher than what it’s worth to them. This model would eliminate that problem and a primary incentive for piracy.
This is a bit different from how our economy normally works, i.e. you risk failure for the potential of great reward. But what if you aren’t interested in taking the risk, and you just want to be sure you’re going to end up OK? The Point provides such a model.
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When scarcity comes into play, i.e. demand exceeds supply, it could be considered as well. Consider: an event campaign tips, meaning, the required money has been raised and all tickets have been sold. But what if there are more people who would like to attend the event? The tickets that sold at the lowest price could be automatically auctioned — anyone willing to pay more gains control of the ticket. A combination of The Point and eBay. With software, however, scarcity is never an issue, because supply is virtually infinite. ↩
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What’s The Point? – A Video Introduction
The Point is a big — and at times abstract — idea. It can take a few minutes to explain how organizing around a tipping point fundamentally changes what we can achieve via group action.
Since everyone knows that reading is lame, I put together this video “pitch” of The Point. Thanks to Lilli Carre for the darling illustrations.
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Our Favorite Super Bowl Ad
We all sat around with our mouths open while this one played…
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Thinking Big
Have you ever been in a class where the teacher says something that you don’t understand but you don’t want to say anything because you think everyone else understands and you’re just stupid and then someone else asks a question and it quickly becomes apparent that no one understood?
Ever wonder how many times no one worked up the courage to ask that first question, and everyone left the room perplexed?
That, to me, is a big part of what The Point is about — creating a better way to break the ice, abandon pretense, and say what we feel. It’s a way for people to dream big about what would make the world a cooler place, and a lot of times, find that everyone else thinks it would be cooler that way too.
And most importantly, it’s a way for those people to come together and actually make it happen.
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Happy Birthday, The Point!
A year ago yesterday, I dropped out of my Master’s program. A year ago today was my first day in the office working on The Point.
Today, on The Point’s first birthday, we’ve grown to ten full-time employees: four developers, three community organizers, a PR director, a COO, and me. If you’ll allow me to indulge for a moment, it’s been unbelievably cool to watch a team develop around what started as an innocent, reflexive response to a frustrating problem (an inability to cancel my cellphone contract).
So what’s happened since last December?
- Spent most of the first month by myself writing a business plan
- Our lead developer joined in the end of January and decided to write The Point in Ruby on Rails
- In March, we completed a basic prototype
- In April, we started rebuilding The Point from the ground up to allow for some of the more complex functionality, for example, conditional user identity revelation
- Our original target launch date was July 1 — that didn’t happen
- We released The Point to the public on September
- Press outreach began in mid November
Thanks to everyone who’s given us support and guidance along the way. We’ve got some great stuff coming up in year two!
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