- Five billion people use social networks worldwide. On average, they spend 2.5 hours a day on them! At the same time, it seems that the most promising direction in this sphere is to create tools for monetizing subscribers. But that’s not the case!
- Let’s take Instagram, for example, where posts seem to be the easiest to create—take a photo, add a caption, and you’re done 😉 Instagram has 2.5 billion active users per month. But those with at least 1,000 followers—only 2.6%! And those with more than 10,000 followers—only 0.2%!
- Thus, the most promising direction is to provide an opportunity to earn for 97–99% of social media users who do not want or cannot monetize their followers. But how? Here’s a cool way:
Project Essence
Filtroo offers internet users the opportunity to monetize their activity on social networks.
Each action taken by a user on a social network can earn them points—when they like, comment, or share someone else’s post, when they publish their own post, and even when they listen to a song on Spotify.
Currently, points can only be earned for activity on TikTok, but in the next release, the founders promise to add the ability to earn points on Instagram, Spotify, and other social networks.
To start earning points, a person simply needs to download the Filtroo app and connect their social media accounts to it—after that, the service will automatically record the user’s activity and credit them with points.
Earned points can be exchanged for any of the “1 million rewards from 1 thousand brands,” selecting the desired reward from the app’s catalog. These could include discounts on purchases or coupons for something free, such as a trial period in a service or a free lesson on an educational platform.
The standard use mode of Filtroo has a limit on the maximum number of points that can be credited in one day. However, a user can pay for a “gold” account, which removes restrictions on the maximum number of points that can be credited daily and expands the catalog of goods and services that points can be exchanged for. Additionally, for “gold” users, the service holds special promotions and giveaways weekly.
Filtroo originates from Spain. The app was released in December 2023, and it has been downloaded by 50 thousand people. Currently, the startup has raised its first 1 million euros in investments.
What’s interesting
The number of social media users worldwide will exceed 5 billion people this year and continue to grow.
The average time these people spend on social media is 2 hours and 23 minutes. And that’s on average! This means that 1–2 billion people spend at least half of their working day on social media, which is 4 hours or more per day!
At the same time, it seems like they are all writing something, gaining followers, and therefore have the opportunity to earn something from them. Consequently, the most promising direction in the field of social media is the creation of tools for monetizing subscriber audiences.
But that’s not the case! Let’s look at Instagram as an example, where it seems easiest to create posts and build an audience—take a photo, add a caption, and you’re done.
There are currently about 2.5 billion active Instagram users per month.
However, only 64 million of them have at least 1,000 followers—which is only 2.6% of all active Instagram users. If we consider that the threshold for potential monetization is 10,000 followers, then there are only 0.2% of such users.
In other words, 97–99% of users do not have the opportunity to monetize their presence on social media—although there are billions of them, and they spend hours on them.
Therefore, it turns out that the most promising direction in the field of social media is to provide opportunities for earning money for those who are not, do not want to, or cannot become influencers to earn from their followers. This is what today’s Filtroo is set out to do.
Why do companies give discounts and coupons to these people? Because they are all potential buyers of something. And for companies, this is a way to gain a new channel for these people to want to buy something specifically from them.
It’s somewhat similar to handing out flyers with discounts and coupons on the street. Only there, people get it not only for free but just like that—and therefore don’t see any value in it. And when they get the same discounts and coupons for something, they feel like they “earned it themselves”—and they feel sorry to just throw it away or discard it, so they try to use it.
This psychological feature makes this marketing method more effective than just handing out discounts and coupons for free. And some startups already use this as a business model for their platforms.
A week ago, I wrote about the startup Paylode, which collected such coupons and discounts in a marketplace that completely unrelated businesses can use to reward their customers for whatever they want. This startup raised $5.5 million in investments.
Last year, I wrote about Salt Labs, which awards points to temporary employees for every hour they work—and these points can also be exchanged for coupons and discounts in their app. In addition, Salt Labs also takes money from companies that have decided to connect their employees to their rewards platform. This startup raised $18 million in investments.
The startup Miles, which I wrote about in the summer of 2021, rewards users simply for going somewhere, running, or driving. The number of points awarded depends on the method of transportation and the distance. This startup raised $19.9 million in investments.
However, mereat, a startup that offered rewards for visiting restaurants and ordering takeaway food from them, which I wrote about in the spring of 2023, has already closed. So, having a viable business model alone is not a guarantee of success 😉
Where to go
The model itself of rewarding people with coupons and discounts from third-party sellers for what people already do is cool. And most importantly, it works. At least for those who managed to wrap it in the right package and found the right way to attract an audience 😉
Today’s Filtroo has a very interesting offer for a very large potential audience. So, it’s quite strange that their app has only 50,000 downloads—although, perhaps it’s because they started in small Spain and are only now preparing for international expansion.
So, there’s every chance to take the same model and outperform them 😉 This could be the first direction of potential movement.
Moreover, one can consider in which other areas people or employees can be rewarded for what they already do—creating a new marketing channel that allows companies to boost the sales of their products and services. Who? For what? What types of products and services will be most attractive to these people?
About the company
Filtroo
Website: filtroo.co
Last round: €1M, 18.03.2024
Total investments: €1M, rounds: 1