The myth of owning your own platform
Published: Tue, 06/23/20
One of which is this owning your own platform thing.
A mobile app like Learnistic is not a platform you own.
For one thing, it’s a “container” app.
What that means is, in order to see your app, someone has to download the official Learnistic app, and then follow the simple instructions to see your app contained within the Learnistic app. What you sacrifice in the ego-boost and visibility and rankings of having your own app in the app stores (which will cost you, at a bare minimum, $50k - $100k+, if it’s any good, plus thousands more per year to keep it maintained, updated, and compliant with Apple & Google), you make up for in having one small monthly price — about what your cable bill costs — and letting us worry about keeping it compliant, updated, and maintained behind the scenes for you, as well as countless new features you probably wouldn't even imagine adding yourself.
Thus you don’t own it any more than you can own an LLC here in the ’states:
You control it, but you don’t really own it.
If you think you do own your LLC or corporation, try not paying your corporation fees each year and watch what the state does to your entity.
In this case, Learnistic owns the platform and you pay us to use it.
But, only as far as we all follow the rules of the “state”, i.e., Apple & Google, it resides in.
But again, while you don’t own it, you do control it.
And whether or not you get to keep control of it is based on following the rules we set up, not doing anything that the powers-that-be at Apple & Google dislike, paying your monthly fees (which will be less than your cable bill when it opens back up), etc.
So to answer the question I have been asked numerous times:
Learnistic is not a 100% protection from being de-platformed.
For example:
If you start posting content that bothers or scares the suits at Google or Apple — especially now, while every brand on the planet is training hard to win the Gold Medal in the Virtue Signaling Olympics — I can virtually guarantee you will get booted. That’s why we have instituted certain rules & safeguards in the platform to protect you from yourself, as well as protect everyone else using the Learnistic platform. It’s also why I have had to tell certain friends not to use the platform for things that go against the big tech Narratives at Facebook, Twitter, etc. What I tell them is, if you talk about things that’d get you kicked off those sites, they will probably get you kicked off Apple and Google sooner or later.
The only difference is, you have a lot more control over who is in your app.
And, you can “gate keep” things better to reduce being de-platformed.
You won’t, for instance, have to worry about some stray cancel culture addict stumbling onto your app like they do on Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube and then whining to them to get you kicked off. You invite who you want, control what they see, and can regulate the user experience.
As for the super controversial stuff:
I’d save that for email or, even better, direct mail.
Especially since you can back up and connect email to your app.
And to my knowledge you can’t be de-platformed from direct mail.
In other words, be wiser than the serpent.
Use Learnistic to distribute content, bond & build a strong relationship with your audience, stay “omnipresent” in their lives (you are on their phones, after all…), and sell products inside it via in-app purchases, which you can set up to put those buyers in an email sequence to buy your higher priced offers, and so on.
And I’m not even getting creative here.
All right, those are just a few ways to clean up with Learnistic.
Not sure when we will be reopening for free test drives.
But if you can hop on the waiting list here, we’ll alert you when we do:
https://www.EmailPlayers.com/learnistic
Ben Settle