LEO launched on July 3rd, 2019. This upcoming July will mark the 5th year that LEO has been live as a token, platform and ecosystem. If you go back to that time, you'll see just how remarkable this place has become. We look nothing like we did back in July 2019.
The progress is rapid. The pace of innovation is stunning. Our team is 10x larger. We continue to grow on all fronts.
With progress and growth comes breaking stuff. We move fast, break stuff. As the community has so famously coined: we do it live. When you look at any startup that has done anything worthwhile, there is some element of doing it live. You have to be willing to crack some eggs in order to make an omelette.
The INLEO UI has become quite a masterpiece. I am really proud of where it stands today. We have so much on the roadmap for 2024 and I couldn't be more excited to deliver on it. From AI integrations to just general stability and usability... there is more in store to come to the UI in 2024 than any of the previous 5 years of development.
LeoPremium
LEO Premium is something I have been excited about since the team and I first started discussing it. It addresses many needs simultaneously.
Firstly, a product.
You all know that LEO aims to be built on sound business principles. @taskmaster4450 has talked quite frequently about that. There is a lack of sound business building when it comes to the Crypto space.
Most people just want to launch token after token, NFT after NFT. Trust me, I get that. Been there, done that. Tried it all. It's enticing because it seems like it will work super well. Especially when all the big money maker projects are doing it.
But in the long-run, it doesn't work. I've seen it first hand in many different ways. I've always been obsessed with building sustainability but sustainability needs to happen in the right way.
Building a great business to me means building a great product.
I always thought of INLEO.io as the product of the LEO Ecosystem... and it is. But a Product also needs to be something you can sell and make money from... Especially if your goal is to build a sustainable, profitable business.
Since we are a tokenized ecosystem, a sustainable, profitable business means that we are earning revenue and that revenue is fed into the token (LEO). A Web3 ecosystem is one that is owned by the users.
Recently, I had a realization that LeoPremium is the product. Of course, the UI is still the main product we build... but LeoPremium is the monetized product. It's the one that the LEO Ecosystem sells and makes money from.
This is a first for our community and ecosystem. A true product to actually market to the world and sell. Building our revenue from this product should be a top priority that lives synergistically with continued development, innovation and of course: onboarding and monthly active user (MAU) growth.
Scaling Premium
As of right now, I believe we're somewhere in the ballpark of 150-200 monthly recurring Premium Subscribers. Let's just use 200 for round numbers.
Premium is $10 per month and the only payment rail is HBD. So we collect roughly $2,000 HBD per month from premium subscribers.
That's not bad to start!
I recently had a vision for a LeoPremium Flywheel on the LEO Token Economy. More on that later.
For that to take place, we need to see some massive growth on the Premium Subscriber front.
The goal with LEO Premium is that the value is tremendously higher than the cost. $10 per month is the cost and it's not hard for us to deliver 10x the value of that on a monthly basis to all of our Premium members.
Current Premium Feature Set
- Orange checkmark next to your username
- Priority in "For You" feeds
- Edit threads after you post them
- Add Bold, Italic and other "Markdown Styling" to your threads
- Publish longer threads
- Bookmark Folders & Organization
- Themes
Upcoming Premium Features
- LeoAI
- NFT PFP
- Auto-AI Summarize Blog Posts to Threadstorms
- Favorites Menu
- Pinned Threads
- Advanced User Dashboard
In addition to these features, Premium users also get increased upvotes by @leo.voter. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about this.
Premium users are signaling support not just for LEO but also for HIVE. Since 100% of Premium Subscriber revenue buys HIVE and LEO off the market, then pools it as liquidity, the subscribers are actively contributing buy pressure to both HIVE and LEO on a monthly basis.
So, we know that anyone who is premium is more likely than not a supporter of the two tokens and more likely to hold them than someone who is not. Again, not a perfect metric but definitely a signaling variable.
Eric and I had a meeting yesterday about my new vision forward for Premium and the overall productization of the LEO Token Economy.
One key aspect for me is surrounding @leo.voter curation. We've worked tirelessly on better curation models. We 100% manually curate with @leo.voter.
Right now, we have a curation model where we go through content on the https://inleo.io UI. We curate high quality content that meets certain quality standards that we've created.
I am making a big change to how this works.
Instead of upvoting any content we see that meets these standards, there will be new variables introduced:
- is the content posted from https://inleo.io? If not, then it's not eligible for curation. This will free up a lot of voting power to focus on natively posted content
- Is the user Premium? If yes, then curate with a significantly higher voting %. If no, then curate normally using our high-quality standards of content guidelines
Starting this morning - as we just talked about it as I'm writing this post - the new curation practices are in place.
Non-premium users who publish content from inleo.io will likely notice a bump in their curation received from @leo.voter. Naturally, since a lot of VP is freed up from point #1 above.
Premium users who publish content from inleo.io will notice a definitive increase in their curation received from @leo.voter.
If you are premium, you will likely make 2-5x the cost of premium back each month in upvotes on your content from @leo.voter's 2.4M HIVE POWER.*
*asterisk because your content needs to be posted from inleo.io and you also need to meet the minimum content quality guidelines. If you post a long-form blog post with a picture of a cat and 3 words, it won't get curated. We still have our standards in place for quality content. The frequency of blog posts matters too. You should try to post a minimum of 1x per week. If you don't post long-form blog posts at all in 1 month, then we obviously can't reach you with the curation.
We're going to add a user dashboard (currently being developed) and one new module I have an idea for is to track exactly how much $$$ you've received in the past month from @leo.voter upvotes. For example, if @leo.voter upvoted your content 4x in the past month for $18 each, then the user dashboard would show that you've been upvoted 4x by @leo.voter, totaling $72 in upvote value received.
This will make it abundantly clear.
LeoPremium Flywheel
The flywheel is what led me down this path originally. The vision for Premium is concrete in my mind now.
Currently, $2,000 per month is being earned by Premium subscriptions.
100% of the revenue buys HIVE and LEO off the market, then pools them as bHIVE-bLEO Permanent Liquidity.
The liquidity in this pool can never be removed. It's permanent.
Imagine if LeoPremium was earning $10k per month. That would be $10k per month added to the liquidity pool. We all know how valuable it is to have deep liquidity to facilitate trading. It also is very attractive to outsiders who want to get into a token.
The $5k per month in buying pressure would have a massively positive effect on LEO as a token. There is currently ~$9k per month in inflation of new LEO Tokens created for the Rewards Pool.
That would be more than half of all inflation for LEO getting purchased from the market and then locked in a liquidity pool permanently.
Over the course of a year, that's $60k in buying pressure each for LEO and for HIVE. $120k in total Liquidity Pooled per year.
And that's if we go from (current) 200 to 1,000 premium subs per month. I imagine we can grow quite far beyond that in the long-run. As I said, if you're premium AND create at least a few blog posts per month (let's say 4 minimum), you should easily make 2-5x the cost of premium back in HIVE/HBD Upvote rewards alone. Not including LEO rewards.
Premium that pays for itself.
The flywheel has other knock-on effects as well. If your content is posted from inleo.io, then you're eligible for Evergreen Rewards from the LeoAds contract along with more visibility in the community.
As liquidity deepens, trading activity increases. The permanent Liquidity Position still earns native swap fees (0.35% of each trade) as bLEO-bHIVE. Over time, that pool position will increase exponentially on itself.
How Do We Kickstart This Flywheel?
My target is 1,000 Premium recurring subs by the end of Q1, 2024. It's far past time to make this happen. Our community continues to grow in MAUs each month. We're at 1,700 MAUs right now.
So this means that half of our userbase needs to be premium in the next 2 months.
We are entirely capable of doing this. I have shifted a lot of the team's priorities to make this happen as I believe that getting this product into the hands of 1,000 people on a recurring monthly basis will be a step function change in the tokenomic future of LEO.
To help us with this, get premium. Once you're premium, make sure you make some blog posts each month and also engage on Threads.
Share your results as a Premium member. My goal is - like I said - to deliver 10x the value of premium to each premium user each month. At least half of that in the form of upvotes. The other half in the form of amazing features that only Premium users have access to. I talked about those features above and I am shifting a lot of dev resources to focus on the upcoming Premium features like LeoAI, Pinned Threads, User Dashboard, etc.
Let's carry this new vision in 2024 and make it happen.