Calling All Users: Our Marketplace Pilot Program is LIVE...

What will it entail? What does it mean for you? How can you help?

Photo by Higor Prestes on Unsplash

One step closer to compensation and control for our users.

This past week we officially launched our pilot program for our data marketplace. This program, capped at 100 businesses, will use anonymized data (from users who choose to opt-in) in order to generate hundreds of thousands of insights for our initial cohort to test and utilize.

We arrived at 100 businesses as a cap after learning from experience: when we initially released our beta app, tens of thousands of users signed up. It was too much to sustain for our small team, so we had to close it off. We’ve vowed to not make the same mistake twice, and a 100-business cap will be sustainable and ultimately more valuable than thousands of businesses that we don’t presently have the time or resources to accommodate appropriately.

Regardless, the wealth of information generated from email data is immense, and will only grow as we expand on our in-app features and integrations to platforms such as Facebook, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, etc. etc.

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves just yet. As mentioned in our previous blog, this is not the final version or vision for our business-facing data marketplace. We’re not quite ready to release at a global scale quite yet, so we’re making sure to “prime the pump” with email data and a limited pilot program cohort. All this really means is we need to prove out a useable product (with active users and businesses creating a working data marketplace) before we release it to the world.

As users, we’re looking to you to help us expedite this onboarding process. After all, you have a direct incentive to spread the word about this program to anyone you know or are connected to who might have interest in a revolutionary way of acquiring actionable business insights with only a few clicks.

The relationship between this program and eventual compensation of our users is direct and obvious. If we succeed in signing up 100 businesses by the end of March, then starting in April we will launch a 90-day pilot to businesses, and for the first time, your anonymized data will be in the spotlight to prove that our idea truly works.

Our initial mock-up for the data marketplace may look eerily similar to you. Full transparency: we were heavily influenced by various streaming services such as Spotify. One of the main objectives of the data marketplace is to ensure that the barrier of entry is low. We want to make the product familiar, and nearly everyone is familiar with the layout and features of Spotify. It’s a logical route to take given our inspiration directly came from streaming service models, particularly Spotify.

Each business user will have a customized home screen upon log-in with Spotify-like insight features available immediately at the click of a button. Insights derived from their own company will be available, as well as insights from competitors. Valuable information such as the most successful subject lines, newsletter performance, and customer demographics, locations, etc. showcase the power of TIKI insights generated from the anonymized data of our 30,000+ active beta app testers.

We will guide the initial cohort and teach them how to use the product and gather feedback from their testing. At the end of the 90 days, we will learn from the active businesses what worked, what didn’t, what can be improved upon, what should be added, removed, and so on. We may choose afterward to expand the pilot to even more businesses with the previous cohort’s feedback in mind. Or, if everything goes amazingly, we may be ready to release our marketplace to the world. At that point, user compensation is just over the horizon.

Take a peek at our sign-up page here and share to anyone you know who may be interested in taking part. These should be individuals from companies who understand this is a pilot program. They must be able to see our vision and help us make the correct changes and upgrades to the product that will allow for us to release it at a global scale with millions and billions of insights and multiple anonymized data sources from users when the time comes.

Onward and upward.

- The TIKI Team