Vevue's inception and path towards helping build the incentive economy

I've long envisioned a society where everything can be completed through individual tasks. A light pole burnt out on your street, no problem, attach a bounty and someone will fix it. Ok, so obviously we're a long way from this reality, but we're on a path towards great possibilities. It goes back to my childhood days when my sister and I would wake to a chore list of tasks. Each task accompanied with a bounty; clean the downstairs bathroom: $.50. ; vacuum the living room: $.25; mow the backyard: $1.00. - you get the point. Naturally, sibling rivalry and competitiveness spurred races to complete our chore list and reap the benefits.

As I worked different jobs through my twenties, I began to realize the current career/salary model did not fit the way I wanted to work. No matter the job, whether tree trimming or cold calling potential clients as a stockbroker, I always strived to impress my superiors with my ambition. I was never left feeling satisfied. I would work for a year or two and become depressed thinking about how many years it would take to reach the top. It wasn't until my sister found a business model on eBay that everything changed. She had found a model where she would buy jewelry lots off eBay and resell the items individually, consistently making 500% gains. Not long after the 2008 crash I once again found myself looking for a new line of work. Although reluctant, I finally caved to my sister's enthusiasm of reselling jewelry on eBay. The business model worked and for the first time in my life the harder I worked the faster the business grew. Within three years I was the largest reseller of vintage costume jewelry on eBay, with sales in the millions. During my growth years, Kayweb Angels selected an idea of mine to streamline the eBay listing process. We created Minute List It (MLI), a mobile app saving 60 hours of work per every 1,000 eBay listings. Although MLI proved to be a little too niche for expansion I did try pivoting by adding video. To this day, it's still the only app that lets you post video listings on eBay.

The MLI journey is what eventually made me think of what we could accomplish with video. About the same time, Google had just released their first version of Google Glass. Having just moved into my new Santa Cruz apartment I was searching Yelp for a good place to eat. The written reviews were adequate, but it hit me, "why weren't there any video reviews?" It would be great to see a video of the inside of the restaurant or of the meal I want, or better yet, using Glass, see a live view.

With the Jobs Act (legalizing crowdfunding) just having past, I was excited about skipping the VC model and building my video idea from the ground up. I opened a Developer Campaign on Appsplit and found some willing developers. A year of work and Vevue was born. A series of funding and development tribulations led me to a necessary evolution. Vevue needed a way to incentivize the community.

It just so happened, 2013 was the year I bought my first Bitcoin. Bitcoin was the answer to creating micro-payments! So my search began for a blockchain developer. A series of serendipitous events led to me Xiangyu Meng, a.k.a. Codeeer. He quickly proved his skills and became Vevue’s Co-founder. As we all know by now, Bitcoin's high transaction fees and scalability issues create challenges. Enter tokens.

At the beginning of 2015, Swam.fund included Vevue in their second incubator class. Similar to Vevue, Swarm needed to scale via token rewards for task completion. Our solution then was to manually enter Google spreadsheets for tasks compounded by the intensive learning curve of distributing Counterparty Tokens. Ideas of a token distribution platform circled and through a round-about way we found ourselves partnering with newly founded CoMakery.

Finally, a platform for completing project tasks and earning tokens. The partnership was mutually beneficial to Vevue's and CoMakery's simultaneous development. Now both with working products, Vevue has begun issuing awards to contributors via the CoMakery platform. If you would like to give it a try, you can view our task list here.

Token distribution is emerging as a viable community practice. For the longest time, we felt alone in our push towards this direction. Yet we're beginning to see outstanding projects converting to tokens.

Brave, much like Vevue, originated with a focus on Bitcoin micro-payments to launch their software. But they switched, launching their own token, Basic Attention Token. A token to incentivize a new way to browse the internet. Get paid to browse. Their aim is huge: disrupt digital advertising.