Problem #2: Engaging and retaining an audience under resource shortage conditions

Corporations already possess access to their audience, comprised of hundreds of millions of people, they have their points of contact with it, and can engage the audience in the new services they offer. Corporations are capable of investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the promotion of their products.

What can a startup set against that?

The keys to taking the lead under the conditions of an aggressive competitive environment are:

• Ensuring the intensive growth of the number of platform users and its daily audience

• Efficient audience retention – implementation of conditions under which users will remain loyal to a specific platform, and will be motivated to remain within its digital space.

Without the audience growth to tens of millions of people, there’s no way to successfully implement monetization models, to concentrate the specialists’ attention and resources, or to assume a global leadership position.

How can audience growth be induced?

It is apparent that the platform has to create a product (service), which will be both interesting and useful to the target audience, becoming the first driver of platform growth. The platform must create a product that will satisfy the daily needs of this user group. The main user product of the Spheroid Universe is the AR social network. For more details, please see the Product section.

How can audience be retained?

The Nobel Prize in 2017 was awarded to the American economist Richard Thaler, who demonstrated in his work how human characteristics systematically affect people's decisionmaking process and market results.

Economists have traditionally proceeded from the premise that people and organizations act rationally. Thaler has demonstrated the opposite: investor behavior is determined by “allegedly insignificant factors” linked to emotions and mood, far more so than they would like to admit. In his work Thaler had introduced more realistic assumptions regarding human behavior, limited rationality and social preferences.

One of the practical consequences of the experiments conducted by Thaler postulates that people value things that they possess more than the same things that they do not own.

In traditional corporate projects, it is the IT corporation that owns accounts and is the beneficiary of user activity.

What is the alternative offered by a decentralized platform?

Transfer accounts into user ownership. Give the users a significant share of the revenue obtained from their activity. Make the users perceive the project as their own. Actually make the project their property.

In order to implement this strategy, the concept of Spaces was developed.

• Space is the private property right to an augmented reality lot.

• Space is the power of private initiative. The power of the community that chooses how, where and on what terms it realizes its rights to the content it creates.

• Space is an instrument in the fight with corporations for global leadership.

• Spheroid Universe is a project for monetization of Spaces by platform participants.

• Spheroid Universe is the Space where developers from all over the world create apps and services for an integrated expanding project audience and earn money, while the users earn on the content they generate.

Corporations are unable to give the revenue from their operations to the user community while keeping their services free of charge. In this case, their business model will be destroyed. A decentralized system, on the other hand, is capable of doing just that. It is precisely the unique advantage that is fundamentally unavailable to corporations – the very possibility provided by blockchain.

How can we ensure quick audience growth to tens and hundreds of million users in the absence of required financial resources?

The platform cannot spend tens of millions of dollars on popularizing itself, yet it does possess a unique resource, which will, along with the platform expansion and emergence of life within it, be perceived as very valuable by an increasingly large number of its participants. We mean Space(s), which the platform will give to its users as payment for work aimed at its popularization and technological enhancement.

Thus, from the very outset, the platform has the resources for organizing a potentially unlimited number of people with the aim of self-development.

For more details on the resolution of this problem, please see the Community organization technology section.