
Apply HN: Qbix, Inc Aims to Do for Social What Bitcoin Did for Money - EGreg
Hi everyone. I&#x27;ve been posting on HN for the last 8 years (just checked). I&#x27;m also the CEO of Qbix, a startup which embodies a lot of the values that many of us here share, so when I heard about Apply HN, I got excited.<p>A few &quot;impressive&quot; stats first: our apps are already in stores &amp; have been downloaded over 4MM times. They&#x27;re used 3MM times a month! We&#x27;ve got users all around the world and most reviews are 5 stars. See http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qbix.com&#x2F;blog<p>We already make steady revenue. But we&#x27;ve poured it all into building an open source platform that will:<p>1) give every community a way to host &quot;its own facebook&quot;<p>2) give people a consistent experience across domains &amp; devices enabling unprecedented privacy, ease and control over their own data<p>3) give developers a stable, thoroughly tested platform on which they can build apps for communities, without reinventing the wheel on a thousand things (literally) that we take care of<p>You can see more here: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qbix.com&#x2F;platform<p>When Fred Wilson recently said this at Le Web, he was speaking about the platform we built: http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=R43OKYmGbhU&amp;t=24m0s<p>Email, the Web, Wordpress, Bitcoin, Git are all decentralized. Yet social networks are still centralized; it is a hard problem to solve.<p>What if there was a web-based platform that ran on every device, letting any community choose their own host and install apps which would all work harmoniously? What if it would reconstruct people&#x27;s social graphs across communities seamlessly and the apps would &quot;just work&quot;?<p>That&#x27;s what we built. We&#x27;re now working with several local communities that paid us to release apps for their members. After the beta, we will roll it out as a self-serve platform to all our 3MM users of Groups. We made several apps on top of this platform that we estimate will generate about $15&#x2F;user&#x2F;yr<p>The YC community can make a huge difference for us going forward would be happy to apply for YC!
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chaostheory
> When Fred Wilson recently said this at Le Web, he was speaking about the
> platform we built:
> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R43OKYmGbhU&t=24m0s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R43OKYmGbhU&t=24m0s)

So how does each separate qbix instance sync with each other in terms of
identity & social graphs? I may have missed it, but I didn't see it in the
docs.

What differentiates you from the Diaspora project?

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k1kingy
> Diaspora

I haven't heard them in ages... maybe that's the problem.

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EGreg
Sadly, they didn't achieve the dream.

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veb
Clickables:

[http://qbix.com/blog](http://qbix.com/blog)

[http://qbix.com/platform](http://qbix.com/platform)

> When Fred Wilson recently said this at Le Web, he was speaking about the
> platform we built:
> [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R43OKYmGbhU&t=24m0s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R43OKYmGbhU&t=24m0s)

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bobbylox
From an end-user perspective, what advantage do you feel decentralization
provides?

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zkhalique
Zak Khalique, cofounder here. Let me try to weigh in on this.

Right now, you don't have much power with FB. When they rolled out the
newsfeed, or instant personalization, or made site changes there were huge
outcries, but it didn't matter. If you want to customize your profile, or get
paid for your content, you can't.

If you're a company, you have to pay just to reach your own fans:
[http://readwrite.com/2012/11/13/mark-cuban-facebooks-
sponsor...](http://readwrite.com/2012/11/13/mark-cuban-facebooks-sponsored-
posts-are-driving-away-brands/)

If you're a developer, you live in fear that the platform can kick you off at
any time or compete with you: [http://mashable.com/2011/06/01/twitter-photo-
services/](http://mashable.com/2011/06/01/twitter-photo-services/)

There is a story trending on just how powerful FB is:
[http://blog.naytev.com/facebook-is-king/](http://blog.naytev.com/facebook-is-
king/) and it's bought Instagram and WhatsApp to consolidate even further.
More centralization means less power and choice for the end user. And if
you're an end-user in Africa or India or somewhere without a megabit
connection to the global internet, your community can't even connect with each
other. A local network would work much better.

~~~
k1kingy
This makes it sound like FB and so on are becoming the new 'Coca-Cola'
company. Coke's cheaper than water in some parts of the world, and soon it'll
be FB etc as the only "outlet".

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exolymph
I checked out your website but pricing still wasn't clear to me. How are you
going to make money?

~~~
EGreg
We already make money, through our consumer apps as well as our new market:
communities paying us to release apps for their members. But we will make a
lot more through apps which we build on our own platform and deploy to our
user base. We have around 4-5 different revenue streams planned.

