Jodel Premium & Boosts

Dear Jodelers! 🧡

Recently, we have been working on a couple of features that include in-app purchases, features that are directly being paid for by our beloved Jodelers.

We like the concept, because the features are very native to Jodel and create value to users and the community while allowing us to pay our bills and hard working Jodel employees. As you can imagine, Corona hit our revenues due to advertising budgets being cut. So this form of monetization provides important security and risk diversification for our business. And, of course, we don’t have to put ads all over Jodel but can remain this on a lower and more qualitative level.

Which are these features that we recently built? Please note: some of those might not yet be available in your area yet.

Color change!

Already since a few weeks, you can color your Jodel in a fancy ultraviolet 💜 and a bold black 🏢. You can give a personalized touch to your Jodel and gift joy to everyone interacting within your post by purchasing a color pack. You can do this by tapping the color drop in the post creation screen.

Boost!

Boost is a feature that is already available on Jodel since a long time and used by advertisers but also users already occasionally. Now, it’s possible to boost any Jodel, meaning it will be shown in your local community in the 4th position in the feed, for very little money. You want to give more visibility to that funny post you saw or the hot Jodel the entire community is talking about right now? You want everybody in your community to be aware of the event that Jodelers discussed in a post? Or you want to give a boost to your offering in @buyandsell or to the post looking for help in @neighborhoodhelp? This is now possible. You can buy credits to boost a Jodel by tapping the little rocket in the top right of a post.

Jodel Premium! (Currently only on iOS, Android coming soon)

Currently, there is a public discussion around the pros and cons of advertising based models (thanks Netflix!). Although we never have and will never share any of your data with anyone else so most of the fear doesn’t apply to us, we understand that there is a concern for some people. Hence, with Jodel Premium we give you the complete power to disable any advertising on Jodel. Boosted posts can be enabled or disabled to be seen according to your preferences. Also, you will receive one free boost and one free color change every week that you can use on Jodel. You can subscribe to Jodel Premium in the me section.

**Super Thanks!
**Next to a normal thanks that OJs can already send to a great reply, with the super thanks feature everybody can send a super thanks to a replier for a very helpful or positive reply. With that, the reply will be highlighted with hearts and the Jodeler will be gifted a week of Jodel Premium for free - hence not seeing ads and receiving a boost and color credit for free.

Please note: To use most of these functionalities, you will have to update to the latest version of our app.

There are a few more ideas we are currently playing around with and we will be testing those in the future to make Jodel an even better place to exchange with likeminded people around. And don’t worry about too many paid features. We will probably build a handful of features and potentially take less relevant ones away again in case we find a better one. The most important basic features of Jodel will always be free to use to everyone of course.

Next to the making money part we are also working on some exciting new features that will be coming out soon, so stay tuned! :rocket:

Much love from Berlin, be nice to one another and stay safe.

Tim and the JodelHQ

Language Filter

Dearest Jodelers! 🧡

Today we want to announce the release of a new feature we have been building over the last few weeks: language filter 🌍

Globally, millions of Jodelers are already connecting to their local communities. We are especially proud that we are part of an international community that is spread across multiple countries, cultures and languages. With language filter we are trying to improve the following cases:

• Internationals are currently unable to use Jodel due to a lack of knowledge of the local language. However, also for them it’s very relevant to connect to fellow internationals and meet new people around.
• Local communities will be able to prosper even in frequently travelled places that currently are having a big amount of posts in international languages.
• Create more relevance in our global communities that consist of a diverse amount of people connecting in different languages.

You might have experienced one of these cases when travelling internationally.

How it works: In the top bar menu, where you access your hometown, you will be able to switch off languages you don’t understand. Please note that for the language detection we not only tag the post but also the device language of the user for very short posts and pictures. That way, a post is always reaching the relevant user base. We will also launch two new default channels:

• ✈️ Are you travelling in your current or to another country and want to know what are the best experiences around? In @Traveller you can engage with and meet fellow travellers. Let’s hope for a prompt Covid-19 recovery, so that this channel can start becoming useful.
• 🌍 You are living abroad and want to connect with fellow internationals nearby? You just moved to another city and want to get to know like minded people? @Expat is your community.

The filters will apply for all channels and replace the international feed. We will start adding more languages over time, especially for our friends from the Nordics, France and Italy.

Access the @traveller channel of your area: https://shared.jodel.com/8ZejpnpWh6

Access the @expat channel of your area: https://shared.jodel.com/8ZejpnpWh6

Spread the word, especially to your fellow international friends that can now also engage with relevant Jodelers around. Use #languagefilter for well, your feedback about this feature. And most important: stay safe!

From Berlin with love 🧡

Happy birthday, Jodel!

Hey Jodelers! 🙋 🙋‍♂️

Hard to believe, but today Jodel celebrates its 5th birthday!

We want to take this opportunity to say thank you to all of you:

• Thank you for all your loyal support over the years!
• Thank you for all your funny or sometimes sad experiences that you share with us and your communities every day!
• Thank you for all the help and support you give every day!
• Thank you for all the exciting or often controversial discussions!
• Thank you for all the friendships, relationships and even Jodel babies!
• Thanks for your feedback, no matter if praise or criticism!
• Thank you for being part of our community!

It’s thanks to you that Jodel has become what it is today. It’s hard to believe, when we think back, what problems we had to struggle with in the beginning and could only solve with a lot of improvisation, passion, maybe a little bit of luck and your great support.

But not only the shortage of money was a permanent threat for our servers. Because more and more Jodelers joined our communities, they had been running far over the limit for a long time. Our developers called the server the “Box of the Pandorra” because nobody knew if and how long it would last before it completely imploded. Even though we had to improvise a lot at times (Rest in peace, little potato server!), our developers took on the difficult task and managed to convert the server monster into a lightning fast system. It’s like converting an old, rickety Trabbi into a Porsche during full speed. Good job!

While everyone in the HQ was fighting with the server-beast, Alessio and Tim were on their way to find us suitable investors. Countless times the two crept secretly into VIP areas at fundraising events and were thrown out again and again. Until sometime the day came when they actually made it and got into conversation with some investors. Jodel was saved and could become what we know today.

We could tell you many crazy stories from the early days (the Jodel logo almost became a cow! 😱 ), but we’d rather save it for the next birthday.

Thanks for the last 5 years and we are already looking forward to the next 5 or 10 or preferably even longer. Celebrate with us in the most colorful yodeling feed of all times!

Manuel & the Jodel team

PS: We are often asked about the first Jodels in each country:

Germany / Austria / Switzerland / Finland / Sweden / Norway / Denmark / USA / Great Britain / The Netherlands / Ghana

New Feature: Polls

Hey Jodelers! 🙋‍♀️ 🙋‍♂️

We’ve been listening to your #feedback and today we’re releasing one of your most asked-for features: Polls on Jodel!

From now on you can poll your local community in real time. Ask a question and create up to 4 answer options to see what your community thinks on any topic.

How can I create a poll?

When creating a new Jodel you will find three buttons at the bottom:

• The flash to post a Jodel to the digital ad column
• The camera icon to take a picture
• The poll icon to create a new poll. After selecting the poll button, you can type the answer choices into the input boxes.

How long are polls active?

Polls always run 24 hours. After that, only the results are visible.

Where can I post polls?

To avoid spam and keep the polls topic-related, you can only post them in channels other than the @Main channel.

As always, give us your #Feedback on this new feature and have fun with it!

Manuel & the Jodel Team

The story of Jodel

Hey Jodelers!

I’m Alessio, 28, and I am the founder and CEO of Jodel. Whenever I meet Jodelers they always ask me very similar questions. What’s the story behind Jodel? Are you actually a user and if yes, how high is your Karma? What’s it like working for Jodel and what the hell are you guys doing all day?

As I feel these answers might be interesting for a lot of you I want to share them in today’s Community News.

About five years ago, during my studies, I spent a year abroad in the US. At that time I developed the idea of a messaging app for friends but without public profiles. The main social network at the time was Facebook (Instagram was just becoming mainstream in the US and Snap was just beginning to gain traction with early users ). Everyone used FB but almost none of my friends shared anything. I remember one friend who hadn’t posted a status in 3 years, despite logging in every single day. It was all about polishing your image rather than talking with each other publicly. I wanted to create something different. I wanted a place where everyone is sharing again. Where you immediately get a feeling of what’s really happening around you right now.

Together with a few friends we got to work and developed an app called tellM. tellM showed you posts from the contacts in your phone. But it didn’t show you who posted what. Since we took away profiles, we expected plenty of posts about all the random, funny, helpful and intimate things that we care about. We imagined people would finally be able to share again.

When we launched it in the colleges of California, people were super excited about the idea. They loved it! Unfortunately, they didn’t continue using tellM after just a few days. Most of our users simply had not enough friends using tellM in their phonebook. Their feed had almost no activity.

We used this opportunity to talk to many of our early users. In each interview one question dominated: Why do I have to have everyone’s phone number to see their posts? There are lots of people I kind-of-know that I don’t share phone numbers with! Why can’t I just see everyone in my area straight away?

Back in Germany, my co-founders decided to work on other projects or go back to University. We had almost no money left, but after receiving so much positive feedback, I was convinced we were on to something, even if the numbers didn’t show that yet. So I talked to our first main investor (shoutout to Christophe!) to support us to give it one last try.

With Alex (currently working on product), Niklas (currently working on community) and Tim (currently working on monetisation) I found a new team of friends ready to make things happen. Together, we set out to make our updated vision become reality: A super simple app which allows you to instantly connect with the people around you. We worked hard and spent a lot of nights improving ideas, features, launch-plans. Lots of sweat, blood and yum yum soup was involved until we launched our first version of the hyperlocal community app you all know as Jodel today.

Humbled from our first experiences launching a product, we expected a few posts per day for the first 30 days. Maybe a couple of hundred users. But this time it was different: Jodel quickly exceeded all expectations. After only a few days promoting on the campus of RWTH Aachen, Germany (Alex, Niklas and I studied here) it seemed like everyone had heard about Jodel or was already using it. When I saw a guy next to me in the bus casually checking Jodel for the first time I couldn’t believe my eyes…Wow!

From people telling us that Jodel is the craziest name and it can never succeed, from getting cloned and attacked left and right, from almost running out of cash countless times, it’s been an unbelievable journey thus far.

Today, Jodel is being used by millions of people in Europe and the Middle East. Countless travelers and active communities use it all around the world. Always staying loyal to our mission, we have evolved from a few friends, to a team that works hard together to win. Winning here is making sure our hyperlocal communities are as funny, helpful and interesting as possible to as many people as possible. Every day we are receiving so many amazing stories from our communities. Groups of friends meet on Jodel, relationships start here and even Jodel-Babies have been born! Tons of laughs and insider jokes are shared and create a unique feeling of belonging to our local communities. And all of this is done by you, our community.

Our vision is that in the next few years you can open Jodel at anytime and anywhere in the world, to easily talk to and connect with like-minded people right around you.

You will be able to fully explore the city you live in, listen in on all its vibrant communities and connect with your peers. No matter if it’s other pet lovers nearby or the local techno crowd: Jodel allows you to share memes and jokes, get news, ask questions and simply have fun. You can discuss everything from new hypes to modern-dating. Organize help for social causes. And by doing all that you might even get to know new amazing people in your area.

Jodel will be closing the gap to easily share a togetherness with all the people you see in the physical world. As this works in your hometown, so it does when moving somewhere else. Whenever you’re traveling, you can be certain there’s people around you that wonder about the same things. Is it still worth it to go to the FullMoon party here in Ko Pha-ngan or what are the best tricks for negotiations on the Marrakech Market? And maybe, one day, you think about moving to New York so you teleport to its local feed and explore……

We are fully aware that there’s still a lot to do. Jodel has evolved beyond students and some of you think it shouldn’t be this way. We know that sometimes people are not helpful, but rather the opposite. We hear you. But change is the only constant and we are here to make this change a great one. Jodel is the worlds’ hyperlocal community and hyper-local communities are for everyone. We believe that connecting you with your local community can only work with an open system, not a closed one.

We know that rules, systems and tools have to evolve with scale and everything comes with trade-offs. It’s on us to make sure you can have the best experience possible at any time. Communities are living organisms and living organisms have flaws. There’s a necessary discourse to help them evolve. We therefore invite you to share your comments on this article through using #jodelblog in your posts. I will read them all (English, German and Spanish are the languages of choice here 😙). Last, but not least, I can promise you that our team is fully committed to leaving no stone unturned to find out what’s best for helping our communities evolve.

One important piece in the puzzle to do all of the above is to become financially more independent. Right now we can only plan ahead in short periods. Yet executing our vision requires some long-term planning. Therefore we currently focus on making sure we can do so soon. As we are users ourselves you can rest assured: To generate cost-covering revenues we will not compromise on our values, or the quality of the user experience. And despite some people wrongly assuming it, we don’t sell data and we will never do so.

Even though Jodel is growing every day, we are still a company that calls `playful & friendly` one of its core values. We still love discussing and brainstorming about Jodel. After long party nights, a nice dinner with friends or after a football match of the legendary Jodel FC, ideas about how to improve the experience are always a topic. The Jodel team has grown and evolved in the past years. We are experiencing new adventures and learning from new challenges. Using our passion, we are working hard to make Jodel for everyone better every single day. 🧡

Despite Jodel being a ²⁴⁄₇ project, I still love to jodel myself, no matter if it’s here in Berlin, somewhere else in Germany or while traveling. Whenever I have some time I open Jodel and love to read your witty stories, join interesting discussions and get in touch with some local Jodelers. And sometimes I even drop a selfie too. If you have seen me somewhere, feel free to comment and we can have a chat ✌️

We, the Jodel team, created the platform and possibility for you to get in touch with others around you - but the true heart of Jodel is our community. You make Jodel to what it is today. So everyone of you is a member of the Jodel team as well. I’m really proud to see what we all created together. Jodel is such an amazing place and I can’t wait to shape the years to come together with all of you.

We’re just getting started.

Alessio

What happens to my #feedback ?

Hey Jodelers! 🙋‍♀️ 🙋‍♂️

We have a lot of statistics and numbers about your usage of Jodel, but they can never show us the complete picture. The most important part is how you experience Jodel every day. That’s why we try to collect as much feedback from you as possible: personal talks in real life, via mail on our support, surveys or directly via the hashtag #feedback. The most used way is #feedback, which is sent directly to our JodelHQ. In today’s Community News we will explain what happens to your #feedback.

Each post containing #feedback is sent to our communication tool in real time - 66.000 messages in the first 4 months of 2019. At least once a day a member of our community team is looking through them and is getting an overview of what’s on your mind. Single messages referring to new features, projects we work on or possible bugs are directly forwarded to our product teams. The rest of your feedback is roughly categorized and sorted by priority and frequency. Additionally, all employees of the JodelHQ have access to all of your feedback and can read them whenever they need. Like this, all developers, product teams as well as our CEO Alessio can always have an unfiltered impression of your feedback.

We try to read all of your #feedback, but due to the amount it is always possible that we miss single ones. If you have very important things on your mind we suggest to contact our support. Moreover we can’t answer all of your #feedback as this would take too much time. In special cases we might reply to your post to gather more information or if we feel it is necessary to reply directly.

During our meetings we always refer to your feedback; for example, if we analyze experiments we’ve run or discuss how we can improve existing features for you. Moreover your feedback is often bringing up new ideas heavily impacting our roadmaps. Please keep in mind that we need to refer to all of the feedback and combine them with our statistics. Our final prioritisations may be different from those of your local community or your personal point of view.

A perfect #feedback is following some simple rules:

• Feedback should always be as precise as possible, ideally provided with an example: “My Jodels are always outvoted even if they are just normal questions” is much more understandable for us than a common “Jodelers are becoming more and more negative”.
• Feedback doesn’t need to have solutions - it’s more important to have a clear description of the problem (finding a solution is part of our job 🤓) If you have own ideas for solutions we are happy if you share them with us as well of course!
• Tagging an existing thread with #feedback should contain a quick summary of what you are referring to. Especially in threads with a lot of replies it’s often difficult to understand what the feedback is about.
• Using #feedback is enough, other hashtags are not necessary (unless we state so in a blog post).
• If your feedback is referring to another post, please post it in the thread or we won’t be able to find out what it is about.
• It doesn’t matter if a feedback is still visible, outvoted, deleted or blocked. Everything will reach us.

We hope that these insights were helpful to understand a bit more how we deal with your #feedback. it doesn’t matter if it is positive or negative, complaints, ideas or anything else - we can only get better with your feedback. Thanks for your help and we are looking forward to your next #feedback!

Manuel and the Jodel team

We Improved our Guidelines

During the past months we talked to many of you about the current state of our moderation and our community as a whole. Thank you all for participating in the interviews, answering our surveys, and sharing your #feedback with us. We gathered a lot of super interesting insights!

One of the common themes we found is that our guidelines are often unclear. Most of us have a basic understanding of the do’s and don’ts on Jodel. So it surprised us that a big amount of issues came from simple misunderstandings of our rules. They were either too broad, outdated or even inconsistent among different places.

This is why we now updated our community guidelines to create a shared understanding of the rules, be more consistent and address frequent doubts and concerns. We also added examples and new rules that better fit the current dynamics on Jodel.

Of course, community guidelines can only be called as such if they come from the community. For this reason, we involved moderators and users from the very start. Together we explored what we need to change and how to make sure everyone can have a great time on Jodel.

The new guidelines should provide a solid framework for our interactions. Their goal is to enable us to have fun together and engage in open and respectful dialogue.

For some, this might feel like a lot of new rules. But in fact, most of these new additions were already used and common practice in our community. They were simply never specified properly. Overall we really loved one summary a Jodeler had for the rules:

“This is just a long and cumbersome way of saying ‘Be a good person and nice to each other’…” (We actually liked it so much, we included it in the introduction).

So keep this in mind when reading through the rules. Ultimately, what matters is the intention behind each post and its context. For this reason think about the guidelines as instances of general principles and not exact prescriptions that always apply word for word.

The ultimate purpose of these guidelines is never to limit our creativity or censor. They aim to make sure that all interactions on Jodel stay positive and civilized, to make everyone feel welcome and take part in our amazing community.

Some of the highlights of the new rules:

• easy way to navigate between the different sections🚀
• detailed explanations including examples 🔎
• guidelines for channels 🤓
• explanations to common issues 😻
• no more repost section ♻️ (just move the post to @repost)
• all flag reasons have a corresponding rule 🚩(besides reposts, working on that 😉)

The only constant in life is change, so this document will never be complete, never final. As the Jodel community grows and evolves, so do these rules. We keep what is working and adjust what is not. In the end, these guidelines are here to serve you and to make sure everyone of us has a great time on Jodel.

We invite you to be part of this ongoing discussion. Help us to improve the guidelines in the @guidelines channel. Here you can tell us what is missing, what you like and what you want to improve. All posts in this channel will get forwarded to our team and we will try to read all of them. We might not reply to every single one but we will address the most common points in periodical updates on our blog.

So without further delay, here are the new guidelines.

Let us know what you think and keep up the good jodling!

Niklas & the Jodel Team