[Top Builder 2024]: zap.meme

[jowo-io]

🏗️ Top Builder 2024 Application Form to track progress through Round 1 - 3 ~ Currently in Round 2

📝 Instructions

1. Only complete this form if you have been chosen for Top Builder, by PlebLab.
2. Provide detailed information to assist the judges in evaluating your project.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 The Team

• Team Name: zap.meme
• Number of Founders: Two
• Team Background:
  • CTO - Jowo is a Full-stack web engineer with an indie game development background. He's been working in Bitcoin for one year and has had a keen interest since 2015.
  • CMO (Chief Meme Officer) - JD is a meme connoisseur and Bitcoiner. He's worked in people facing roles for over 10 years and is helping out with zap.meme doing testing and meme curation, as well as a myriad of other tasks that need attention. Once we have traction, he'll also be in charge of customer support and operating as a moderator.
• Bitcoin & Lightning Involvement: Lightning payments will power zap.meme at a fundamental level. Much like Stacker News, sats will flow seamlessly from content consumers to content creators. Nostr integration will follow in short order.
• Origin Story: The seed of the idea come from a past side-project which gained significant traction on Twitch, but I was forced to shut it down for personal reasons. zap.meme is it's rebirth, and it's coming back with the vengeance. The Trident of Poseidon will strike Lightning into this project.

💡 The Idea

• Project Overview: You can think of zap.meme as a Stacker News + Giphy mashup. We all know that Bitcoiners have the best memes. It's a fact. And it's time to electrify our memes with Lightning.

  • Content creators: zap.meme is a place for meme lords to share their dope memes, get feedback and praise, and of course: stack sats. zap.meme will be an incubator for the best memes, as well as a platform to create, curate and distribute them far and wide.
  • Content consumers: As a normal user you can see fresh memes daily, and zap them using a "reaction". This behaves much like when you react to a comment in WhatsApp using an emoji, except sats will flow to the creator, and you get to choose or create your own custom emoji.

• Website: prototype available here: https://zap.meme

• GitHub: Private

• Project Stage: Pre-alpha - an early prototype is live with essential features being added daily. It's starting to take form and is on track to hit an alpha release within 3 to 4 weeks.

• Supplementary Materials:

  • There's a prototype available here: https://zap.meme
  • Here's a demo video showing the prototype: https://www.loom.com/share/40997e10b6e942c4bdf3157abf69a4d3?sid=9109153b-ae02-4410-842d-4d23914f2a1f
  • Here's a demo with a quick overview of the codebase: https://www.loom.com/share/bed0152b4ea14fd09523bfc33e5016ae?sid=84b062b0-b637-4b09-ba5c-10df1d146976

📚 Additional Information

• Additional Links/Info:

📌 Submission Type

• [ ] Initial Project Creation

🚀 Current Project Progress

• Progress Made:
  • Planned the core mechanics and essential features
  • Thinking
  • Wire-framing
  • Tinkering
  • Digging out old project code
  • Write up a basic roadmap
  • Chosen appropriate development tools: since I'm a solo dev, speed is absolutely essential.
  • MySQL - A mature, battle hardened database. The data layer is absolutely critical, so no risks are being taken here.
  • Drizzle - A TypeScript ORM that makes interfacing with the database layer a dream. It also handles DB migrations effortlessly.
  • Next.js - The ultimate React Framework for the Web. I've been working with Next.js for over 5 years.
  • next-auth - A plug and play auth framework - no time wasted building custom auth flows.
  • next-auth-lightning-provider - A plug and play lightning auth provider, same as above - no time wasted.
  • Shadcn - Beautifully designed components that you can copy and paste into your apps - this speeds up UI development to an insane degree.
  • Google Cloud Vision AI - For scanning image content and generating tons of extremely valuable metadata.
  • Planetscale - For an infinitely scalable serverless database. Makes managing the database a lot easier.
  • Vercel - For serverless Next.js hosting. Makes CI/CD an absolute breeze
  • Two weeks of bootstrapping the prototype
  • Setup codebase and app architecture
  • Integrate authentication
  • Configure a basic component UI library with custom components
  • Added a meme feed, meme creator tools, and meme viewing page
  • Added an emoji feed, emoji creator tools, and emoji viewing page
  • Added "reaction" functionality to memes, so content consumers can search for, and react with, emojis.
  • Added an activity feed so users can see their activity history
• Challenges Faced:
  • Choosing the right tool. I've made plenty of mistakes on past projects choosing the wrong tools. All of my learning have culminated and come to a point this beautiful tech stack.
  • Re-booting a 2018 project that had significant code-rot, and getting a small part of it cleaned up and running for use in this app.
  • Focusing on what's essential for the alpha release, and not getting side tracked by exciting feature ideas that are not yet a priority.
• Future Roadmap of what's next:
  1. Integrating Lightning
     • Adding deposit and withdrawals and wallet pages
     • Wiring up the existing "reaction" functionality so that real satoshis are flowing
     • Adding a reward pool that distributes sats daily, just like Stacker News
     • Alert system, so users get alerts when they receive sats
  2. Building a basic profile page
     • Adding custom usernames/handles
     • Adding custom profile images
     • Adding public profiles
  3. Nostr integration
     • Setup a Nostr relay that broadcasts memes on the Nostr protocol.
     • Wire up Nostr zaps so they are interoperable with the zap.meme app
     • Add Nostr authentication
  4. Building content creator tools
     • Advanced meme creation tools
     • Creator chat, so meme creators can chat, share ideas, critique and give constructive feedback.
  5. Iterate on viral marketing approaches
     • Sticker packs for WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal etc
     • Build a public API so that memes and emojis can flow freely.
     • Integrate with Twitter and other social channels
     • MORE!

⏳ Round 1 Milestone

• Keep in mind that completion will need to be by February 10th, 2024.

• First-round milestone the team has set for themselves:

  Alpha launch!

  Alpha launch means finish building the core functionality (Bullet points 1. Integrating Lightning and 2. Building a basic profile page above), as well as various unfinished bits behind the scenes.

  As well as a lot of programming, it'll also involve:

  • Moving the app from the prototype Vercel domain onto a real domain name.
  • Designing some marketing assets, a little SEO, and prepping for launch.
  • Tidying, refactoring and a security review of the codebase.
  • Lots of small UI tweaks and other smaller features.
  • ~We're also toying with the idea of a rename. Although we like Zapmoji, we'll keep thinking on it. There's no better time to rename than pre-launch, and choosing the right name is really important.~ (NOTE - we renamed our app! Zapmoji was the old name, zap.meme is the new name)

📝 Submission Complete

• All required information has been provided above.

📅 Top Builder Program Structure

Registration Opens: Monday, December 18, 2023

• Application: Interested teams apply for Top Builder.
• Selection: Teams will be chosen based on their application. See FAQ for details.

Round 1: January 13 - February 10, 2024

• Workshops: PlebLab weekly workshops start, available live and online.
• Chat Access: Selected teams join the PlebLab internal chat.
• Mentorship: Begins for teams.
• Project Milestones: Teams are set and judged on their first-round milestones.

Round 2: February 10 - 24, 2024

• Team Reduction: PlebLab cuts half of the Top Builder teams. (Only half continued in Round 2.)
• Project Milestones: Teams are set and judged on their second-round milestones.
• Workshops: PlebLab weekly workshops continue.
• Mentorship: Continues.

Round 3: Starting February 24, 2024

• Team Reduction: PlebLab narrows down to 6 Top Builder teams. (All will be pitching in Austin.)
• Final Milestones: Teams set final project milestones for the last round.
• Preparation: Teams prepare their pitch in front of judges. Final teams are contacted to come to Austin for Startup Day.

Final Round at Startup Day: March 14, 2024

• Preparation: Teams work on their final pitches at PlebLab.
• Presentations: Final teams present before judges on Startup Day.
• Deliberation: Judges decide during a happy hour.
• Announcement: The winner of Top Builder is announced at Austin BitDevs.
• Celebration: After-party for Top Builder.

[jowo-io]

Progress update (26th Jan)

It's been a busy week! lots of building on our app, and a little strategy for next week. We've hit a bunch of the core Round 1 Milestone already!

Integrating Lightning

• ~Adding deposit and withdrawals and wallet pages~ this was a large piece of work. I had to build a bunch of UIs and API endpoints, integrate with ZBD and most importantly, do the work well and carefully so that no critical bugs slip in.
• ~Wiring up the existing "reaction" functionality so that real satoshis are flowing~ quite easy to do, since the reaction functionality was largely built last week it just needed a little tweaking for real sats to flow.
• Adding a reward pool that distributes sats daily, just like Stacker News Not yet started on this, we may hold off on it because it's a large feature and will take a big chunk of time. So we'll wait until we have some active users first and then assess our priorities.
• Alert system, so users get alerts when they receive sats Not yet started on this, this will be a feature that needs building next week.

Building a basic profile page

• ~ Adding custom usernames/handles~ We now have a profile edit page where users can change their username and the amount of sats per reaction
• Adding custom profile images Not yet started on this, it's quite a small feature to build, but we'll hold off building it until we have more users.
• ~Adding public profiles~ We now have a basic public profile page where you can see a username and avatar, later we'll add an activity feed to this page.

In addition to the the code, we've also settled on a new name for our app: Zapmoji is reborn as zap.meme, and can be found here: https://zap.meme

Over the weekend I'll be doing a bunch of small coding tasks: cleaning up the code in some places, doing some security audits and code reviewing, and also cleaning up the database entries so that all the data on the site is production ready (e.g. removing test data added during dev, ensuring no duplicate emojis are shown, removing old memes that didn't make it through our Chief Meme Officer's moderation).

[jowo-io]

Below is a quote of some text i wrote for the AMA on Jan 26thm, thought it'd be worth re-posting here too:

I was just day dreaming about some of growth strategy we'll be trying, so thought I'd outline some more of them here, as a more detailed response to your second question.

As I mentioned, we're gunna lean heavily on SN meme mondays for a few weeks. We still need to refine the product a fair bit, and getting some early alpha testers on board from SN would be ideal :) we'll work with them to refine our app and get a better feel for what sort of things we can build into the core product.

Also, our CMO (Chief Meme Officer) will be reaching out to active memers on Twitter, Nostr and SN etc. He'll be handling most of the user engagement and will be in the trenches talking to users and gathering feedback. Another thing we're really excited to experiment with is going to be 3rd party integrations. Think of how Giphy have integrated into WhatsApp.

Most likely, our first port of call for integrations will be Nostr. It's permissionless so no waiting around. There are loads of meme lords on Nostr. We'll implementing various Nostr related features, and be setting up a Nostr relay with the goal of reaching towards our 1,000 and 10,000 user marks. The Nostr integration will come with various other tools to help meme creators reach their potential. We have a bunch of other exciting back-of-the-napkin ideas on this front that still need hashing out, but should start to come into focus by the 2nd round of the contest.

Reaching 100,000 users will require us to branch out of the Bitcoin ecosystem. The goal would be to tap into a large platform and draw new users in from there. I'd say we'll do something like: 2 week sprints, build an MVP integration, see if hits, if it doesn't, then scrap it and go back to the drawing board and try a different angle. Rinse and repeat until we tap a rich vein of ore.

I tried this approach with a previous project and eventually got a big hit and millions of views: first, I built a Discord Extension, no one used it, then I tried an Android App, same thing, then I tried a Twitch extension... The Twitch extension blew up and racked up 3m views which converted into about 100k views on the website that accompanied the extension.

source: https://stacker.news/items/401783

[jowo-io]

This weekend and monday we've been hard at working prepping our alpha launch. There was soft-launched today on Stacker.news.

We imported all the historic memes that have been posted on Meme Monday's (1000+ memes) and we built all the SN user's a profile page that they can claim and the receive any sats that are earned on zap.meme

We've also arranged a sponsorship of Meme Monday for every Monday in February. It'll work something like this: We'll be giving away an extra 25k sats to the winner that SN chooses (so they get standard 25k from you and an additional 25k from zap.meme) and we get to choose 2 runners up too, 2nd place getting 25k and third getting 10k. We'll also be engaging with the community on those posts and get a small text in the thread description.

[jowo-io]

NOTE: this was also posted publicly on stacker.news here: https://stacker.news/items/413007

building in the open #1

---

This week

It's been a busy week on our side. We soft-launched our app during this week's Meme Monday on SN. It went well, we received some positive feedback and encouragement which is always nice. (If you guys have any critical feedback it'd be much appreciated too!)

Now that the app is out there in the hands of real users, the goal is to get feedback and grow our user-base. We've already made some adjustments to our strategy based on what we've seen and learned during the launch:

Strategy

See here for a previous outline of our strategy: https://stacker.news/items/401783

This week we've decided to shift our strategy a bit. We had planned to get as many meme creators signed up on our platform as possible and uploading memes directly into our app. However, we've come to understand that this presents a significant challenge and we believe it will slow us down a lot. Our goal right now is growth, we want users viewing and reacting to memes!

So, this week, we've built a bunch of tools and refactored our app so that content generation on zap.meme is automatic. We're able to easily pull in 1000s of memes from two sources. stacker.news and Nostr.

When these memes are pulled in, we generate a profile for the meme creator, which they can claim later when they sign up to zap.meme, along with any sats their memes have earned.

We think this is a really cool way of handling content creation. It allows us to skip the whole "chicken and egg" situation that user generated content platforms often have: they have no users making content, so they have no users viewing content, so they have no users making content, so they have no users viewing content... ♻️

we're avoiding this trap by sourcing the memes ourselves, making the content creators a profile, and waiting for the honey-pot of sats on the profile to build up and eventually get claimed by the creator!

And, content creation out of the way, we can now focus our efforts on getting content consumers using our site. The consumer strategy hasn't been fully planned out yet, but most likely it'll involve more than just dope memes.

Work

Big pieces of work done this week:

• Profiles - you can now claim profiles on zap.meme, this mechanism is designed so that zap.meme can be connected to various other platforms/protocols. E.g. A select few stacker.news users can now link their SN profile to their zap.meme account. And, any memes they post in SN's meme mondays will be automatically ported over onto zap.meme. This feature is also being rolled out for Nostr. So you can automatically link your zap.meme account to your Nostr account(s) and you memes will be cross-posted onto zap.meme.
• Building out scraping scripts. These scripts are used to cross-post SN and Nostr memes onto zap.meme. For now, they're running in local scripts that I run daily/weekly on my machine, but the next step will be to automate them and have them running in the cloud in a cron job / queue, or something like that.

Video demo showing the profiles functionality: https://www.loom.com/share/34e936dd800e42bba39938cb07265a3e

Next week

Next week is gunna be all focused on content consumers and growing our user base and increasing the amount of sats spent in app.

• Improve the core UX of the meme feed. We're not sure how we'll change it yet, but we'll be figuring this out next week. We have some creative ideas on this front, but need to make some tough decisions.
• Bring economic incentives into the app for content consumers. Right now, only content creators have any real economic reason to sign up. We want to bring more value to our content consumers and encourage them to register. We have a few exciting ideas that we're planning on this front.
• Some basic admin tools so our CMO (Chief Meme Officer) can more easily manage the 1000s of memes on the platform.
• Nostr: we want more robust integrations with Nostr. we're gunna get Nostr sign in implemented in our app, and also experiment more with setting up a meme focused relay.

P.S. We have something exciting lined up tomorrow's Meme Monday!

Stats

	Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Week 4	...
Weekly page views	400*
Weekly Unique visitors	80*
Total registered users	34
Total reaction value	1940 sats
Total memes uploaded	8323

* approximate because analytics were added in the middle of the week

[jowo-io]

Here's the first sponsored SN MM thread! https://stacker.news/items/413650

[jowo-io]

Final update before round 1 of Top Builder comes to and end!

This week so far we've added:

• Nostr signin!
• An alert system so users can see which activity is new in their account
• Some basic admin tools to the app so we can moderate content

Nostr login and activity demo

https://www.loom.com/share/7adaffe777be4caeae5c3ede2dd2a1cc?sid=21f103aa-8d88-469b-ba7b-b6cd68d024e0

Admin tools demo

https://www.loom.com/share/e9873808e4c44a84b38d1fb4155080ff?sid=9bcbcdf1-4555-4157-a753-0e3104746620

[jowo-io]

NOTE: this was also posted publicly on stacker.news here: https://stacker.news/items/430569

building in the open #3

This week

The plan

Last week we outlined the following plan for the week:

• Improve the core UX of the meme feed.
• Bring economic incentives into the app for content consumers.
• Plan some marketing and strategy for generating exciting hype around our product!

What actually happened

We hit some speed bumps this week. So we're slowing down and assessing our direction.

This Monday, after taking the weekend off, we noticed a malicious user was able to steal about $8 worth of satoshis using a bug in the wallet functionality. Ooops! Looks like we rushed thing a bit. So we disabled the wallet features and did a little soul searching. Feeling pretty burned out after the amount of intense work we've put in up until now, we ended up taking the whole week off. It was much needed. Although it probably won't help our chances of making it through to round three of Top Builder, we decided not to force ourselves to work. We know the signs of burnout, and didn't wanna push it. Work should be fun, especially on a project like ours, and if it feels like a chore, somethings wrong.

Not great timing considering we now only have one week left for the second round of PlebLabs Top Builder, but it is what was needed. And taking the long view, we think it's for the best because it gave us some head-space to think about our roadmap and what's best for the product long term.

We've come to the conclusion that the core "reactions" dynamic in zap.meme not optimal. Why? Primarily because they're proprietary / closed source. By that we mean you can react using a custom emoji that's only useable and visible on our platform, with sats all being handled in a custodial manner. When we first built this functionality, it felt like a natural direction to go in. We had custom emojis, we had memes, let's use them to react and send zaps! An hey, that's how it works on WhatsApp / Telegram... And in some ways it is natural. Natural for a closed, centralized platform that is.

However, that's not what we want to be. So, after doing some soul searching and research, we've decided to shift things up in our roadmap. Last week, we had planned to bring some economic incentives to meme consumers. We had a pretty cool idea for this, but we're gunna scrap it because it only builds further on top of the closed foundations.

So, our new road map will lean even more heavily on Nostr than we have been doing so far. Our new "mission" could probably be best described as: "Open memes for everyone, powered by Nostr" and our goal is to become a fully fledged Nostr client for meme lords, but also an open and accessible way for content consumers who are new to Nostr, to dip their feet in without having to learn any of the Nostr specifics stuff.

Some key changes we'll be making to the app:

• Removing the proprietary "reactions" within zap.meme and powering zaps with the NIP57 zaps
• Building Nostr tools so users can create and sign Nostr events and broadcast notes and memes via Nostr using zap.meme
• Allowing our custom emojis to be used in Nostr notes using NIP30 custom emojis. This will be a big one! See below for some more thoughts, including an API / other tools to allow other Nostr clients to integrate our custom Emojis.

NIP30 emojis

Custom emojis are hilarious and the let users express themselves in ways that legacy Emojis simply never will. Legacy unicode emojis are essentially boring, generic, corporate slime. They're created and maintained by big tech, are utterly PC, and are fundamentally limited.

We think that the custom emoji on zap.meme have a ton of potential, and that NIP30 can really bring them to life by opening them up to the world in a free and open standard. We see a future where anyone can create an emoji, and it'll thrive and be used and go viral of it's own merit, circumventing the Unicode consortium controlled by big tech companies.

Anyway, our little rant out of the way, we wanna bring custom emoji to Nostr using NIP30! Just look at them, they're glory... and this is just the tip of the ice burg!

Next week

The plan for next week:

• Research how we'll implement NIP30 and NIP57.
• Plan and design UX changes based on outcome of research above.
• Fix wallet functionality.
• Make some improvement to our Nostr integrations scripts and import more memes! We wanna get over 25,000 memes on the app by next week.
• Make a start on adding NIP57 zaps.

Also, we're gunna aim to end our daily work session on a high, so we're excited to start again the following day. Instead of working crazy hours and burning out! Also, unless we get some funding to keep working on zap.meme, we're gunna have to work part time on it for now - most likely circa 4-6 hours per week day.

Stats

	Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Week 4	...
Weekly page views	400*	1688	700 **
Weekly Unique visitors	80*	325	95 **
Total registered users	34	83	103
Total memes uploaded	8323	8491	8599

* approximate because analytics were added in the middle of the week ** approximate because we accidentally broke the analytics half way through the week

[jowo-io]

Here's the second sponsored SN MM thread! https://stacker.news/items/421915

[jowo-io]

NOTE: this was also posted publicly on stacker.news here: https://stacker.news/items/437087

building in the open #4

This week

The plan

Last week we outlined the following plan for the week:

• Research how we'll implement NIP-30 and NIP-57.
• Plan and design UX changes based on outcome of research above.
• Fix wallet functionality.
• Make some improvement to our Nostr integrations scripts and import more memes! We wanna get over 25,000 memes on the app by next week.
• Make a start on adding NIP57 zaps.

What actually happened

• discovered NIP-25 emoji reactions!!!! This is honestly huge for us. We were super stoked when we found this NIP. We already vaguely knew about reactions, but when we read the NIP we realized it allows for custom emojis! This is fantastic because it means we don't need to ditch reactions from our app as we had planned last week. All we need to do is modify them slightly and they'll work in a fully Nostr compatible manner.
• Made improvements to scripts that we currently use to integrate with Nostr - allows us to more easily and effectively trawl Nostr for dank memes.
• Various bits of research and tinkering around integrating Nostr zaps (NIP-57), reactions (NIP-25) & reposts (NIP-30).
• Added tons of new memer profiles & memes (added about 13,0000 new memes)
• Added meme categories so all the new memes are easier to navigate.
• Upgrades to the meme card's UI in preparation for the new Nostr features.
• Various small layout tweaks and some bug fixes.

Meme cards:

Here's the direction our meme cards are going in! We're adding a bunch of Nostr related features :)

• Smiley face - the reaction button: last week we thought we'd be removing this, but to our great joy we discovered NIP-25 custom emoji reactions! So we're gunna keep our custom emoji reactions but modify how they work. We'll probably decouple zaps from reactions (currently to react you have to pay sats, we'll make it free), and broadcast the reactions over Nostr!
• Thumbs up - the like button: As well as having custom emoji reactions, we'll also have a more generic + (like) button with a count next to it showing the amount of likes an emoji has received. This will be fully compatible with Nostr.
• Thumbs down - the dislike button: Same as above but for negative like.
• Lightning - the zap button: As we mentioned in the first point above, we'll be decoupling zaps from reactions. So, we're gunna add a zap button so users can send zaps over Nostr.
• Up arrow - the repost button: so users can repost a meme to their Nostr feed.

And on the right:

• the expand button: so you can see the meme in it's original size. will open in a lightbox/modal.
• the share button: will trigger a browser share dialog so users can fire the meme to friends easily.

Meme categories:

After adding even more memes to the platform, we realized we really need categories... So we've added some! Right now our categorization algorithm is primitive, but we wanna look into setting up some ML models for more accurate results.

Site nav:

Site navigation is simplified, no longer displays top and latest links, now it's just memes or emojis.

We've temporarily removed the "Top" filter, instead we just have a latest feed. Main reason being that content wasn't fresh on the Top filter, whereas the latest filter has new memes coming in daily. We'll look at bringing back the top filter once our Nostr integrations are more complete. Once we have all that Nostr data we'll be able to assign memes a ranking based on zaps, reactions and reposts.

Next week

The plan for next week:

• Integrate zaps (NIP-57)
• Integrate reactions (NIP-25)
• Fix wallet functionality. (We wanted to do this last week, but delayed it in order to tie it in with our zaps integration)

We really wanna do some more marketing and user acquisition work, but we'll probably hold off on any big pushes on this front for a few weeks until the dust has settled a little around our UX & product roadmap changes.

Stats

	Week 1	Week 2	Week 3	Week 4	...
Total registered users	34	83	103	110
Total memes uploaded	8,323	8,491	8,599	21,792