Ear1: Pay Cash To Talk!
When I found out about Ear1 social and I saw LinkedIn + Onlyfans. I immediately thought to myself; what! I read it again and then it clicked and what came out was; wow!
Social media has transformed the way we communicate, it now even determines lifestyle and relationships. One of the most mentioned negatives about social media has been the fact that it’s seen as a waste of time, you can spend hours on the timeline or get distracted in a clubhouse space for hours when you have a deadline at work.
Connecting with people means sacrificing time and we all know that time is money. Due to the amount of time spent on social media, several existing platforms have been looking for ways to monetize the time and effort people spend on social media, we have seen verification and tip jars but I haven’t seen any product do what ear1 is doing.
It is estimated that people spend at least 2hrs daily on social media, that’s a lot of time if we assume the average person spends 8hrs a day working.
Before getting into ear1, let’s look at how some of our social media platforms work, we normally have social media platforms where the first feature or the most important feature is the one with Timelines. You post updates and they appear in the format that you want. Keeping track of other people’s content has evolved with people paying to view special content (Onlyfans).
Social media has developed so much today that we now have social media in different niche markets. There are socials media where professionals can connect(LinkedIn), there is the one where doctors can connect(ReferralMD), etc. The social media platforms are numerous but one feature is common and that is mostly about how DMs(Direct Messages) are usually a secondary feature.
One of the issues that we face with social media is how difficult it is for people to connect with celebrities, influencers and popular personalities.
I’ll give you an example: in 2019, I was part of a team organising an event and one of our aspirations was to have Banky W at the event, we could not pay a speaker’s fee because we were students but we knew he did this kind of events for free. We just had to get to him and ensure he was free to attend the event, we failed at getting him. We had been trying to get him via a contact who said they knew him but apparently the person didn’t.
Ear1 would have easily solved our problem because we would have to pay a small token to simply send Banky or other speakers a message.
The Gist About Ear1
So ear1 is basically LinkedIn + Onlyfans which means you can connect and message popular persons for just a small fee.
We all have persons that we’d be willing to pay to have a conversation with, ear1 is the product that makes you able to pay.
The beauty in ear1 for me is in a market that technology has not really focused on and that is consulting or consultation from experts.
Apart from reaching out to celebrities, a lot of persons want to reach out to subject matter experts for professional advice, mentorship, guidance and even regular content from their faves.
With ear1 anyone who wants to access an industry leader can actually pay to do that, meanwhile, this provides an opportunity for anyone that is an industry leader to actually give their time for a fee.
Ear1 is basically rolling on the vibe that time is money. Right now Ear1 is not open to the public which means that the product is still in the test phase. But the product excites me because I believe it will give me access to my faves, which regular social media platforms have not completely figured out.
The Future
I don’t work at Ear1 and that means that I don’t know their playbook but the product’s application excites me and as I have said before it’s the ability to digitize and expand the consulting market that interests me the most.
I’ll paint a scenario:
The Nigerian professional market especially in tech has been growing, several juniors want to access the more experienced pros in their field. Having ear1 social would help the most dedicated juniors pay a fee to interact with the industry leaders that they look up to.
Another scenario would be businesses that want to connect with subject matter experts to fix an aspect of their business. Considering these are businesses, they’d definitely be willing to pay a fee to get in touch with this person.
The plan here is to make anyone worth their onions build a consulting brand that is valuable enough to pay for.
As a product guy at Ear 1, I’d make the following moves:
- Engage micro-influencers in different industries and get them to engage a more committed audience on ear1.
- Make Ear1 links be the booking links for influencers.
- Engage the audience with video and audio call conversations.
- Open up verticals for influencers to sell subscription-based content.
- Make Ear1 the ultimate goal for anyone that is getting popular in their industry.
The goal would be to make ear1 the incubator for micro-influencers transforming them into consultants who receive value for the value they give.
Conclusion:
Everyone talks about the creator economy and how it’s a big deal, everyone also seems to talk about the influencer market and how it’s a valuable avenue for influencer marketing.
Ear1 aggregates these sectors, giving people relevant connections to influencers and enabling these influencers with a regular monetisation channel.
To access the future of connections, start here.
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