Introduction The chicken-and-egg paradox is a common problem for startups. A marketplace needs buyers to attract sellers and sellers to attract buyers. Much like how a young professional needs experience to get a job, but a job to gain experience. Successful tech startups, including Airbnb, Reddit, Facebook, and Amazon, have discovered a simple solution: curating […]
Claim Events Anyone can create an event in Plug.events, not just organisers, teachers and curators. Perhaps you didn’t realise this? This means that if you know of an event that is not on Plug.events, even if it isn’t yours, you can add it. This way you can promote events in your community helping it grow, […]
I live in beautiful South West France where I am renovating a house, creating a garden and generally enjoying life! I came here several years ago having spent more years than I care to remember as a business analyst for companies like Sainsbury’s, Pfizer and the NHS. Finally, I saw the light and decided to […]
There is a probably familiar quote that floats around the internet, attributed to ancient Chinese mystic Lau Tzu in the Tao Te Ching. It goes, “Watch your thoughts, they become your words; Watch your words, they become your actions; Watch your actions, they become habits; Watch your habits, they become your character; Watch your character, it […]
Building a system that puts communities in charge If you’re reading this and it sounds familiar, you might be right. We read Substack’s moderation policy and found that it is so aligned with our own views that we were inspired to use it as a basis for our own policy. Chris, Hamish, and Jairaj, we […]
I have been working on Plug, at least in spirit, for over 10 years. After university my main interests were at the intersection of community and environmentalism. I worked with my dad at home installing a wind turbine, solar panels and growing own food, and we organised meet ups through an organisation called GIY Ireland, […]
We recently chose a new name and wanted to tell you the story behind it. Plug is a descendent of many projects. Before we became a team, each of us worked on our own websites to solve essentially the same problem or some aspect of it. We will tell those stories later. The beginning of […]
Someone once said you gotta serve somebody. But who do social media apps serve? Users? Advertisers? Investors? Founders & Directors? Employees? The reality is a complex interplay of confluent and conflicting interests, balanced but perpetually unstable, requiring extraordinary amounts of money from advertising and investment capital to resist the sometimes orthogonal and sometimes opposing forces […]
Our core values are, in no particular order: Challenge; Authenticity; Care; Responsibility. We came to these values over a long time and a lot of thought and rigour. They are not simply preferences of ours. They are discovered, not invented. For us these are primary values, from which all other values emerge. Even our algorithm […]