FOUNDED BY 200 ACADEMICIANS, white-collar workers, entrepreneurs and non-governmental organization (NGO) representatives, Ideflow is a new social media platform that aims to transform the concept of social media. These 200 people did not get together to form a company but to form a solution to the unfair practices in existing social media, Hasan Deniz Peksen, one of the founders, says.
Ideflow was created based on two principles. Generally, users create content on social media platforms but instead of profiting and benefiting from it, the very same users turn into marketing devices for the companies behind these platforms. The posts and interactions of users provide highly valuable data that show how companies and people act in different situations and these data are sold as metadata. “This was the first point that we objected to,” Peksen explains. “Our solution is to build a social media platform based on different income models where the commercial profit gained through our posts returns to us. With this in mind, the profit that’s gained through advertisement is returned to users who want to make a profit in Ideflow.”
ALGORITHM-FREE INTERACTION SPACE
Since its beginning, social media platforms have offered spaces where different people from around the world get together and make themselves heard. But now, due to commercialized algorithms, you can make yourself heard as long as you pay to make your posts stick out. Ideflow provides an algorithm-free interaction space through publications called hubs, according to Peksen. “On these terms, we established Ideflow in September 2019 and opened it to crowdfunding,” he said. “After the crowdfunding process, we established Ideflow as a company and began pilot broadcasting a year later. We have been officially offering the platform to all users since March 8.”
QUESTIONING THE LOGIC OF SOCIAL MEDIA
Although Ideflow has similar approaches to a general social media platform, it differs from others due to its user experience. The company’s first goal was to gain popularity in Turkey. Now that this is almost acheived, the company aims to go global in the long term. “We plan to go global in September,” Peksen says. “And we want to do it through target countries step by step. Since we will use the same technical infrastructure as a social media platform on a global scale, our first plan is to create a marketing infrastructure. With these two steps, we want to create a new model that will question and transform the concept of social media and become an effective platform. Of course, while doing all this, it is one of our goals to exit by exporting this model to one of the global companies.”
The company received investment through crowdfunding and did not seek any funding except for the initial capital but it will begin the search for the first round of investments, according to Peksen. The Ideflow’s system is based on the fees to be paid by the users and corporate customers who want to make a profit, the rental of private areas, special agreements and investment transfers (and financial transactions). Among these, the company has started to generate an income from the dues paid by the users and partially from financial transactions, according to Peksen.
