Ever since signing up as an author on Publish0x, I have been impressed at the quality of many of the published articles on this site as well as the number of users. I went from 0 to 185 followers in just 14 days by posting content daily, earning almost $2 per post for my most recently published articles, a clear indication that many people are vitising and using Publish0x.
Since the announcement that Publish0x attracted over 100,000 registered users, I started to become more curious about who the founders were, what the story behind Publish0x was and how the platform worked. To that effect, I posed them a number of questions and asked the community if they had any questions of their own. The following is a result of that initiative.
Igor Tomic—who takes on a range of roles in the business as you will see below—is the one answering the questions.
What inspired you to create Publish0x?
Dan is the founder of Publish0x, and he's not keen about being in the spotlight. Well, none of our team are really. Dan did however publish one post about Publish0x and his open heart surgery near the start of our project that will shine more light on this question.
How many people are on the Publish0x team and what are their backgrounds and their roles?
There's a core team of 6 of us, and then more people help out too. As you might imagine with a team that small, not all of the roles are super defined; but they are to a point, as we have:
- CTO / developer
- Full time developer
- Designer
- Content curator
- Content/news writer
The roles that I and Dan have overlap somewhat. We take care of marketing, communicating with the users, and being the go-between the users and the Publish0x team.
My role is more oriented towards day-to-day operations than Dan's though. My background is mostly in marketing, especially in SEO.
What made you choose to create a centralised platform as opposed to a decentralised one?
Mmmm just our skillset really. Developing websites / APPs vs DApps require different skills, especially from our devs. Our team mostly knew each other before Publish0x, and we have all worked together to varying degrees on other projects too.
I know that "decentralization" is a big buzzword in the blockchain space, but when you dig a bit deeper, it turns out that most of it isn't that decentralized unfrotunately (think Steemit).
What do you see as the greatest strengths of Publish0x compared to other social media or publication platforms such as Hive or Medium? How did you manage to attract 100,000 users to register on the platform?
The way I see it, our main advantage over Hive or Steemit or similar platforms is that we are crypto-agnostic, we don't have our own token, so we can use other tokens like we do with BAT, DAI, and LRC right now.
This means that we don't favor any project in particular as a platform. We all have personal prefferences of course, but that's another matter.
Then, specifically compared to Steemit and Hive, articles can earn funds as long as they stay online, not just for a week. This incentivizes users to post high quality timeless content which they can get paid for long after the date of publication.
Compared to Medium, on Publish0x, both authors and readers can earn crypto. In addition, content is free to read, there's no paywall after you've read a certain amount of articles.
How did you manage to attract 100,000 users to register on the platform?
We achieved that through a long process covering one and a half years. There's no magic pill here. In my mind, being consistent in paying out users each week is what is most important.
What are your top priorities for the development of Publish0x moving forward?
There's so much to develop. 😋
Some of the main things include:
- Ability to pay to feature your post.
- Complete notifications system overhaul.
- Adding a way to bookmark articles you like directly with your Publish0x account.
- Ability to send bigger rewards to authors from your wallet.
- etc... 😊
I discussed these topics and others in our "2019 - Year in Review" post.
What have been your biggest learning experiences during your journey of creating and running Publish0x?
Anything I can think of to say here would be wishy-washy tbh.
How has COVID-19 affected your operations?
A few of us were working together in Vietnam and the plan was to stay together for at least another month. COVID-19 disrupted those plans.
Other than that, it's business as usuall. We all work remote and don't even have a physical office anyways.
What are your greatest challenges that you are currently trying to overcome?
These are the same challenges which we have had since the creation of Publish0x
1. Making the platform as easy to use as possible.
2. Taking care of our users.
3. Onboarding new users.
If you get an explosion of users, say you get to 500k within a month, would you have to reduce size of the base tip to afford paying for everyone to tip every day?
No. We are prepared for a large influx of users and the size of the base tip would not decrease. We have been thinking long term since the beginning and are prepared for a rapid increase in users.
What % of the tips given out during the past 3 months are covered by revenues from sponsors or advertising?
Almost all of the tips are covered by advertising and sponsors and Loopring cover the full amount of tips given in LRC. Note that we don't rush into any deals. We have refused offers which were either scammy tokens or even good projects which simply did not have enough trading volume which would make it difficult for our users to cash out their earnings.
Did you receive any outside investment? What % of the investment was made by the creators of the Publish0x?
Nope, no outside investments into Publish0x at all, plus we didn't do an ICO or anything similar, so there's no one to answer to but to ourselves in that regard.
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