Comment by chejazi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chejazi | Hacker News Reader

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Hi YC partners,

Founder of https://credhot.com here. We're a link shortener that uses interstitial advertising to make money. We rev-share with people who share content using our shortener, so they get paid based on their traffic.

People know about us in the Bitcoin community because we pay our users in Bitcoin. Bitcoin has benefits when it comes to microtransactions, so it's not just a marketing strategy. We think that sharing content via our service can help bring Bitcoin to the masses. ChangeTip is already doing this via the tipping model; we want to drive adoption with advertising.

First talking point: From your perspective, does paying users in Bitcoin help or hurt the viability of the idea?

I think it's hard to say without knowing more. On the one hand, paying in btc probably restricts the number of people willing to use your product by virtue of there being not that many people who have btc accounts. On the other hand, it might make you more popular with a small group of people.

Most great products start with a core of really happy users, and then expand over time. Do you have users that love you and use your product every day? Many times a day?

We've had around 2.8k signups so far (launched in October). We have about 200 users active per day. I just checked and 89 of them have been active in all previous 5 days. We have a few outspoken believers in the concept (< 10). We just solicited feedback from our base and got only 20 responses, so probably could do better there.

Got it - is it growing? How quickly?

Just generated this graph:

http://imgur.com/iqnaGem

We had 38 signups yesterday, grew ~44% in the last 30 days.

EDIT, mathfail: grew 79% in the last 30 days.

Cool. Is your transaction volume growing at the same rate?

Here's a graph of the transaction volume:

http://imgur.com/ScNqb4I

The big spike in the beginning was before we implemented fraud checks (eg, users directing botnets at the shortlinks).

Since then, the transaction volume has been growing at a similar rate, at 70% growth in the past 30 days (compared to 79% user growth).

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