Table of Contents

Reinventing the Like beta 5 wrap-up and progress review

Table of Contents

beta 5 campaign has concluded. The past “beta” campaigns aim to verify product concepts. We believe in taking baby steps for improvement as our thoughts need to be verified by the community, in all aspects including product design, technical, operation, community growth and promotion strategy.


Let’s review our progress so far since Jul 2018. Let’s see how we got through all these, and what we have adjusted.


The 1st Campaign (Jul 6–31)

We had LikeWiget only at that time. Not available for giving Like, for Medium users only. The objective is to test out how the major target audiences — the content creators — perceiving LikeCoin.

We choose Medium as the initial startup community for several reasons:

  1. Easy integration as Medium supports embed.ly
  2. Medium has an active and passionate creators community that are interested in content monetisation. LikeCoin tackles the same concern.
  3. Medium has good exposure for spreading out LikeCoin quickly
  4. Need to test the altitude of this kind of content platforms such as Medium towards LikeCoin
  5. Observe the eagerness of readers to sponsor the creators
Reinventing the Like beta 5 wrap-up and progress review

Mining beta 1 (Aug 7–17)

  1. LikeButton launched, readers’ responses determine creators’ reward.
  2. Separate LikeButton and LikeWidget to two products to comply the policy of Medium.

We are most concerning about reader’s participation. The ultimate goal is to bridge creator’s reward with readers’ input, although the creators’ bonus is from the creativity pool in the early stage of LikeCoin project. We need to think about the path to convert the readers.

Reinventing the Like beta 5 wrap-up and progress review
LikeCoin 挖礦 beta 1

Mining beta 2 (Aug 27 — Sep 7)

LikeCoin WordPress plugin launched, making LikeButton to support highly fragmented content sources instead of a single platform.

There are around 1/3 of the websites are built on WordPress all over the world. We changed our promotion focus to the WordPress community in this campaign.

We discovered almost immediately that the community would easily mis-understand the word “mining” as a malware which steal computational power from client’s browsers. The mining concept by “Proof-of-creativity” was too complicated to be explained at that stage. We believed that the best product hides the technical details away from the front tier users, so we abandoned the word “mining” from our presentation and use “reinvent the like” as the keyword instead. The decision shapes our way in the subsequence promotion activity.

Reinventing the Like beta 5 wrap-up and progress review

Reinventing the Like beta 3 (Sep 17–Oct 12)

The LikeCoin/WordPress community has been formed after beta 2, so we decided to focus on the community growth in beta 3 campaign. The main site like.co revamped to shift the focus from explaining project details to displaying community information. The first meetup in Taipei and Hong Kong launched during the campaign.

The key was still reinforcing the linkage between creators and readers, so we added the “Liker report” in notification emails and let the authors know more about their fans’ behavior.

Reinventing the Like beta 5 wrap-up and progress review

Reinventing the Like beta 4 (Oct 22 — Nov 9)

We were planning the “Civic Liker” movement to let the readers supporting creativity by a monthly donation. We need to convert guest readers to advance supporter, step by step:

  1. Like as a guest
  2. Like as a registered user
  3. Sponsor by Liking (Civic Liker)
  4. Sponsor by direct transferring (Super Like)

The participation of authors is of vital importance for the conversion.

The main difference between beta 4 and the past campaign is that, readers must “like after login in” in order to let authors earning LikeCoin. This is the first conversion step. The registration process was much more difficult during beta 4 as readers needed to install a crypto-wallet during the process, therefore we provide LikeCoin incentive of registered readers — but no more in the future campaigns.

Reinventing the Like beta 5 wrap-up and progress review

Reinventing the Like beta 5 (Nov 19 — Dec 7)

The author who received the most LikeCoin (LIKE) in the campaign received a total of 144,724 LIKE (equivalent to USD 158.5), and the number of creators that participated in the campaign totaled 615, an increase of 8.85% compared to the previous campaign. The total number of users who have used the LikeButton were 872, increased by  47% to the previous campaign, and 617 of them are pure readers.  22% of the newly registered users are via mobile.

The key feature in beta 5:

  1. Readers can register a LikeCoin ID without installing a crypto-wallet, but with social media accounts.
  2. Can register LikeCoin ID on mobile without trust wallet

Above is a very important step to minimise the reader’s registration barrier. The readers still need to install a crypto-wallet to hold LikeCoin.

Reinventing the Like beta 5 wrap-up and progress review

Civic Liker is Coming Soon

We need a longer preparation time after beta 5 for the next big thing — the Civic Liker.

We will open for early-bird Civic Liker application next week. Participants can get the first-hand experience of being a Civic Likers for one-month free, and be responsible for the next-round LikeCoin bonus distribution.

What is Civic Liker? How about the campaign details? Please stay tuned.

Related links: Campaign beta5 | WordPress Plugin to turn Likes into income | 中文版