As a listener, you can choose to send any tokens that you may have in your wallet to
podcasts. And the podcasters who make those shows receive those tokens, then they can
choose to either use those tokens to support other podcasts, or they can actually withdraw
those funds to their bank account, meaning the listener can actually financially support
their favourite podcasters.
Welcome to Fanzone, your bite-size guide to getting the most out of the TrueFans podcast
app. In each episode, we'll discuss an aspect of the app and hopefully answer any questions
you may have about it. Plus, when you listen to Fanzone in TrueFans, you can earn as
you listen and use your earnings to support your favourite podcasters. I'm Claire Waite Brown,
independent podcaster and all-round podcast enthusiast.
And I'm Sam Sethi, the CEO and founder of TrueFans.
Okay, let's talk a bit more about our TrueFans wallet. When I joined TrueFans, see
episode three, I was given a digital wallet. Why, Sam, was I given that wallet?
Your digital wallet stores your tokens. The tokens are monetary tokens that you can give
to your favourite creators, podcasters. So it has to be stored somewhere and that's all
the digital wallet is.
So as a listener, you can choose to send any tokens that you may have in your wallet to
podcasts. And we're going to talk in the future about the various different ways that you
can do that. And the podcasters who make those shows receive those tokens, then they can
choose to either use those tokens to support other podcasts, or they can actually withdraw
those funds to their bank account. Meaning the listener can actually financially support
their favourite podcasters, which sounds fabulous.
It is. And once you've got used to giving your favourite podcasters some tokens, it becomes
quite addictive actually, because you then want to find more and more people you can
give tokens to.
Brilliant. You're a big fan of gamification, Sam, and you set up ways in the TrueFans
app that people can earn some of these tokens to get them started. Tell me more about some
of these.
So when you join, you get given your wallet. And when you complete certain tasks, which
we've used to help you understand TrueFans. So when you've done your first comment, or
when you've done your first super comment, or when you've streamed your first show, so
you've paid to listen to a show, you will actually earn more tokens from us, because
we want you to learn how to use TrueFans by actually giving you tokens back as a reward.
So that's the first part of the gamification. The second part of the gamification is you
will go to trailers and you'll be able to see there's a whole host of trailers from
a variety of podcasts. And it'll say you can earn while listening. And you go, oh, so you
give yourself three minutes, maybe some of them are one minute, some are two minutes.
So if you give us your time and attention, or you give those creators your time and attention,
you will see the amount of tokens you can earn in your wallet. And then later on, we've
built in three other elements of gamification. So the first one's being a super fan. As you
listen to shows, as you comment on shows, you share episodes, create clips, maybe do
other things for that podcaster, you will earn points towards becoming a super fan.
And then there are leaderboards or individual podcasts and a leaderboard for the overall
super fan for TrueFans as well. So you can see how you can earn and get yourself up the
leaderboards and those will eventually result in exclusive things that you can do. Maybe
the creator will give you early access to an episode, maybe they'll give you first refusal
on tickets to their live show, or maybe in the merchandise store, you'll get a discount
on a T-shirt. So there's many different ways being a super fan can reward you. But one
way is when you are the super fan of a show, you get 1% of any payments from other users
that they receive. So you can earn more money by being the super fan into your wallet from
other people paying your favorite creator. Of course, you can lose being a super fan
if you become inactive. So it's worth you remaining active with your favorite podcasts.
And finally, we will be issuing out good old badges. There'll be badges for when you join,
when you listen to so many episodes, when you've done certain tasks and reached certain
milestones within the system. So you have the ability to be a super fan, get on leaderboards,
earn badges and earn tokens. So that's all about gamification.
Brilliant.
Sam has just mentioned a couple of things that we will be covering in more detail in
future episodes. But if you want to get ahead, click on the avatar at top right of the TrueFans
screen and a sidebar of delightful options will appear. This is where you can find the
trailers Sam talked about and listen to a few to begin adding tokens to your wallet.
You can also click on super fans to see who is currently topping the leaderboard for the
app in general. We'll look at how to find leaderboards for specific shows a bit further
down the line.
Skip back to episode one to be reminded of how you can also earn tokens in your wallet
by listening to episodes of Fanzone.
So the gamification is all about helping you discover more podcasts, helping you interact
through your activity and earn through monetization. So discovery, interactivity and monetization
are elements that gamification enables us to do.
Yeah, thank you. I can go into my settings where I can manage my wallet. Can you start
by just giving me a brief description of how I go to my settings and get to my wallet?
And then when I'm there, what things might I want to do with my wallet settings, please?
Okay, so first of all, in the top right hand corner, you'll see your avatar. If you've
uploaded your picture, you'll see it or it'll be a picture of the true fans logo. When you
click on that, the first thing you'll see is how many tokens you currently have in your
wallet. So that's a very quick visual indicator. Then you can scroll down to settings. And
when you go into there, you'll get a new dashboard scroll down on the left hand side to wallet,
and then it'll take you to the section in your settings just specifically for wallets.
The first thing again is you'll see how much is in your wallet. Now, if your wallet is
running low, the first thing you might want to do is top up your wallet. And we've made
that super simple. You click one button, you say how much you want to top it up with. So
in your local currency, 10 pounds, $10, 10 euros, we will tell you how many tokens that
is equivalent to you then press purchase. And we use Stripe to make that payment. So
it will come from your Stripe account. And if you haven't got one, you quickly set up
one but then the next time you go back, you will just have one click access. You can do
this on your mobile phone with Apple Pay or Google Pay or PayPal. And it's very simple
therefore to top up your wallet. So that's step one. The next thing you'll see is a subscribe
button. And what does that mean? It means that you don't want to have to manually top
up your wallet all the time. You can set a monthly subscription. So you click on subscribe,
you choose the amount 3, 5, 10 or more that you would like to have auto top up every month.
And each month we will then charge your credit card or bank account and then top up your
wallet for you. You can also pause those subscriptions if you want, or you can go back
in and manage your subscription and change the amount higher or lower. So that makes
it very easy to run a wallet with a auto top up facility.
Underneath that, I've got something that says budget limit. What does that mean?
One of the things that you can do in TrueFans is you can stream tokens to your favourite
creator. So you can say I would like to pay 5 tokens, 10 tokens, 50 tokens a minute to
my favourite creator, and that will come out of your wallet. Or you can switch that to
support. And what support means is I would like to pay in advance for the full length
of the next episode that is published by my creator. So with stream, you're only paying
for what you listen to. So if you listen to 5, 10 or 15 minutes of an hour podcast, you
only pay for that amount. Of course, you don't have to pay anything if you want, you can
set that value to zero. But if you've chosen to make a small micro payment, then you only
pay for the amount you want when you stream. With support, you're saying I really would
like to support this creator. So whether I listen to 5, 10 or 15 minutes or the whole
episode, I want to pay for the whole episode. So we then work out what the value of that
whole episode is, which is the amount per minute times the total time of the episode
to give you a cost for that episode. And that's what we would take out of your wallet. But
we realised that there is a problem. You could empty your wallet and you wouldn't know about
it before you came back to your wallet. So now what you can do is you can put a budget
limit. So let's say your monthly top up is £10 a month, but you might want to put your
budget limit at £5. So I'll support my favourite shows that I'm a fan of. And when they produce
a new episode, I will give them whatever the value of that episode is, maybe £1.10 or
50 cents. It can be anything depending on the length of the episode. But when my budget
runs out, my budget limit, then don't make any more payments from my actual full wallet.
So it's a way of protecting you from having your wallet fully emptied by having a budget
limit on what you want in order to support your favourite creators.
Yeah, brilliant. I just wanted to re-clarify here that all of these payment options for
podcasts are completely optional. So we're not saying that because you listen, you will
be paying. You are in complete control. If you want to pay something to a podcast, then
you can do that. And we'll talk a little bit more about defaults in a moment as well. But
there's still just like any other podcast app, you can still listen to any show you
want without paying a penny, can't you, Sam?
Exactly. And just the same way as when you're not logged in, you can listen to any show
for free. When you are logged in, you could equally listen to any show for free.
Okay. So if you are interested in supporting podcasters, which is a lovely thing to do
and podcasters will be very, very grateful to you. There are two more things I wanted
to mention in the settings, in the wallet settings, because I'm looking at the screen
now, Sam. I've got here display currency and I've got a toggle for fiat and sats. What
does that mean?
Fiat currency is just your local currency. So dollars, pounds, euros, Aussie dollars,
Swiss francs, whatever it may be. Most people are very comfortable in seeing any payments
they make in their local currency. We understand 10p or 50 cents. That's where people are more
comfortable starting out using TrueFans. So we default it when we show any payments in
your local currency. But of course, as you get used to using Bitcoin micropayments,
sats, which are what we call tokens, then it's very simple for you to switch into that
model and then you'll see everything becomes 1000 sats or 1000 tokens. When you first join
TrueFans, we want it to be very comfortable for you to understand. And so we put everything
in your local currency. But as you get more aware of how you can use micro payments, you
may want to switch to using token sats.
Yeah. So it's a matter of choice. It's just a matter of preference, isn't it?
It is.
If you did want to start giving some payments, you also have an option in the wallet settings
to set up default payments. And we will talk more about how you can pay shows, for example,
with super comments. But this is just a place where you can set up something that will automatically
default pay a certain amount, isn't that right?
Correct. So the first way that you probably learn to pay your favorite creator was go
to an episode, click on the icon for your local currency, and it will then say how many
pennies, pounds, cents would you like to pay per minute for listening to this podcast?
Every time you go to a new episode, you would have to put in the amount you want to pay
for that episode. So one way that you can have that automated is to put a default amount
into your play button. So you can say every time I play an episode, I want it to default
to 10p or 30 cents or 100 sats. And so we will then look at your defaults and then make
you aware that that's the cost for each episode. It makes it easier once you're comfortable
with making those micro payments, because you don't have to manually update each episode
every time. We will just pick it up from your default settings.
Yeah. And to begin with, that is set at nothing.
Absolutely zero. Zilch, nothing at all.
Brilliant. As I mentioned, we will go into more detail about how you can stream and how
you can add super comments that involves using your tokens. And this episode will be the
one that you come back to just to get a grounding in all of that. So thank you so much for explaining
the wallet, Sam.
Pleasure, Claire. Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening. There are lots more episodes of Fan Zone for you to get stuck
into and that show you how to make the most of the fab features that this forward looking
podcast app has to offer podcast listeners and creators alike. We'd love to hear from
you. You can send us a comment on TrueFans, more about that in the Fanzone episode on
comments or email support at truefans.fm.