Social media has made it possible for anyone and everyone round the globe to effectively communicate with one another without any hassles. However, the communication process only adheres to the people whom you might follow, or they might be following you back. While each of the social media platforms is trying to come out with something new, other budding companies are merging gamification with social media, and Waving is that company.
Waving is a company that brings users a social media platform where users can have traditional social media platforms but play games to earn coins. Well, these coins would help in unlocked surplus new and exciting features on the application itself. Targeted directly towards a gen-z demographic, increasing the number of coins you earn on the application will increase your range and garner popularity. Your feed is filled with random stories, and you can follow whom you like with further updates of publishing videos, contact access, location release, and such features coming soon. Venture Mirror had the opportunity of speaking with Gabriel Cantarin, the CEO & Founder of Waving, to learn more about the company. All the discussions that took place and illustrated in detail below.
What is the startup / product / venture about? Give us a brief description of it.
Waving is a gamified social network, targeted for gen-z, we have the coolest features of other traditional social media but we added some sparks of gamification!!!
Everything you do gives you coins and you can use these coins to unlock new features.
One of the things you can increase using your coins is your range. Your range is the number of people beyond your followers that will receive your content. Reaching more people you’ll have more engagement and get more followers that will give you more and more coins and you’ll grow your popularity.
How many co-founders are there? Please introduce them and their backgrounds.
Gabriel Cantarino – CEO
– 25 years old
– Brazilian
– Graduated in Technology
– Worked in many startups before
– Already have 2 startup exits
Paulo Cappa – CTO
– 21 years old
– Brazilian
– Graduated in Technology
– 1st experience as CTO
– 2nd experience working on a startup
How did you come up with the idea? What motivated you to do this?
I have played online games since I was a child and I can understand how those games have mechanisms to engage users, to retain users and to grow their base. Games have a clear objective and most of the time you are rewarded by your effort. Games are also growing like crazy with huge online communities.
I also could watch social networks, I was a heavy user of many of these networks, but I never could understand how to grow on them, how to become popular without being lucky or making videos doing some funny/crazy stuff. The algorithms change everyday and they don’t tell users how or why they decide to show or not show some content to people that choose to follow you.
Waving came up with the idea of making things more clear by putting together a mix of Social Network and Game, with the favorite features of young users. Such as the Snapchat magic of photos disappearing and reaching beyond followers from Tiktok, with the magic of tinder that allow interacting with people that you like and maybe flirting with them.
Who is your target market? Why do you think your product will appeal to them?
We believe people between 15-22 will be the majority of users. This new generation was born in a world where everyone is on social media.
Our nicest feature besides the gamification is the power of reaching people beyond your followers. It means your publishers are going to be seen by people all around the world. It means it will be even nicer for people when they have their content being seen by people from everywhere.
We have already developed our platform multi-language. Today it’s 100% done in Portuguese and English but many more languages are going to come in a near future.
Who are your competitors? How are you different from them?
Every other social network in the world is competing for users’ attention. Since most of them came years before us they have many more features to engage users but we are working hard to develop as fast as we can and create a really cool product to engage our users.
What are the future plans with the product/startup? Any new features you are planning on?
We are working on features to increase the retention of users, to make them come back as often as we can. That’s the goal to not be another social network that flies like a chicken 🐔, start growing them lose it all, start growing and lose it all.
We are also working on growth strategies, features that help us bring new users, for example creating an invitation system and some redeem codes of Waving Coins to give influencers to giveaway to their followers.