One element I feel much become essential for any platform is a community, whether integrated or on another social platform, as this allows users to voice their opinion and its a place for people to support one another and help the platform help people.
For instance Webflow has a wishlist that allows them to gauge interest in new features. This would be especially helpful for our platform to understand what products people are after. giffgaff almost exclusively relied on its community for its technical support and it seems to work very well. Monzo includes link to their community in their twitter bio as the first point of action for more interest in the platform.
London based Citymapper uses a voting system to understand how much genuine demand there is from residents and tourists for each city. This is a very democratic system to gauge genuine demand rather than a loud minority. Our platform needs to integrate into communities to distribute the collection of algae, thus we adopted the same system.
On the left the store is divided into products users can buy to earn Algae Coin and the main products then can spend their algae coin on.
Each algae species, divided into micro and macro algae, is each used to product different products form juices to plastic alternatives. To meet the demand we can fluctuate the amount of Algae Coin a user earns for selling us the grown algae or as pictures here in orange, reduct the upfront cost to increase demand.
One surprising product is the number of biofuels that can be refined form algae. Traditional biofuel is harvested from corn, but algae biofuel grows 40x more per acre.
In algae cultivation we found three main structures algae was cultivated in. Tubes which enable lots of circulation/mixing, required for dense algae species. Photobioreactor aren’t very common and raceways are a cheaper and most popular method for most algae species but since they are an open system, there is a risk of contamination.
Similar to having a milkman or supplier, we though to include a recurring purchase feature it iterate the purchase of algae to be delivered in time for a pickup or your favourite food product when you earn Algae Coin.
