Dear Insights Network Community,

Insights Network is a new social platform and data exchange where people like you have complete control and transparency over your own information. As a member, you’ll get to choose what data is made available, who can access it, and earn digital currency (INSTAR) for participating in the network.

Invite your friends to earn INSTAR and help our community grow and prosper

Today, we’re excited to announce our refer a friend feature for both our Android and iOS apps. Refer a friend has been one of our most requested features from community members to date. Refer a friend will allow early community members to refer their friends and earn INSTAR tokens for doing so.

Objective

Our goal is to encourage incentivized sharing of the app. Users will get rewarded when their friends install the app and complete certain actions. We’ll tread the balance between making sharing easy and friction-free, while ensuring we only reward honest shares.

We’ll rollout this features in 2 stages:

  1. Stage 1 (Basic): users will receive a unique link they share with friends
  2. Stage 2 (Advanced): we’ll upload contacts and text friends on user’s behalf with the share link

Share screen will allow users to either:

a) Share with specific contacts that they hand-pick

b) Get rewarded for hitting the “Invite All” button

This post will focus on the implementation for Stage 1

User Flow

User-Facing Implementation

  1. Users will see a “Share” card at the top of the home feed
  2. Tapping it shows a screen that outlines the rules for the referral program
  3. They’ll get a unique URL that they can share with friends
  4. Should open the Share dialogue that promotes sharing with standard social apps

Design

Wireframes

High Res Design

Technical Implementation

Attributing Installs to Referrals

  1. We’ll use Branch.io to create unique links
  2. When new users install the app, we can figure out what link they clicked to see app store
  3. When new users signup, we’ll pass the referral link info alongside the user’s email in the /signup endpoint

Data Model Changes

The idea is to create a data model that is flexible. Current reward model is based on inviting friends that complete 3 activities, but we may change this over time: both the number of activities complete, or how we measure valuable installs.

Jumping off point for new Referrals table in the db:

  1. Modifications
  2. User table, new column:
  3. share_link
  4. varchar(50)
  5. eg. insights.branch.io/32l5kj2j443
  6. generated w branch.io
  7. unique to every user
  8. created at /signup`

Data Flow

Referral Completion

  1. The following must be completed for a user to complete a referral:
  2. Friend installed the app by using their unique link
  3. Friend went through KYC (implicit, pre-req for activities)
  4. Referrer went through KYC (implicit, must have gone through onboarding to get link)
  5. Upon Completion:
  6. Referrer gets a celebratory notification via mobile app
  7. Referrer also gets a celebratory email
  8. Reward gets added to the referrer’s token balance

The larger our community grows the more powerful we’ll become. Invite your friends with your custom link to help us grow and earn INSTAR!

Thanks to all Insights Network community members for your continued support. We look forward to sharing our next update with you soon.

Together we grow,

Team Insights