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An Established and Proven Concept

Absinthe Points allows projects and businesses to effectively measure user effort. Traditional loyalty programs like Airline Miles and Credit Card points are meant to acquire and retain loyal and valuable users onto the platform. Similarly in many games and certain e-commerce platforms like Grubhub and Groupon, these numbers that represent the activity of a user function as a fungible store of value that can be used within the ecosystem for monetary purchases. One could even envision credits systems used by many SaaS services including OpenAI but also by many cloud providers like AWS and GCP to be a form of siloed currency, where the service selects certain valuable users who are more likely to be loyal customers in the future, and grants them a certain amount of “credits” that are only useful within the confines of the services offered by that application.

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What are points useful for

All the examples above are illustrations of different ways projects and businesses strive to intelligently measure user effort, in the hopes of:

  • Recognition - Identifying the contributions of hard working and high quality participants
  • Acquisition - Provide asymmetric value early on the in the customer life cycle to highlight product benefits
  • Retention - To build a moat against competitors by giving users selective benefits
  • Speculation - When used as an indirect representation of future value, points are a great tool to guide speculation