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Banking on Status

How Neobanks Should Monetize Status Signaling

01 Intro

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you probably know by now that one of my favorite topics to think and write about is “status signaling”.

Signaling explains most of our everyday actions: what clothes we wear, which universities we pick and which religion we subscribe to. Everything has a hidden signaling component with which we communicate our desired tribal affiliation.

In Signaling-as-a-Service, I described the implications signaling has on the monetization of software businesses. For many traditional industries, monetizing the display of status is not a new concept. A Rolex watch, for example, is not better at telling the time than a cheap Casio watch. But a Rolex reveals something about its owners’ wealth and, thus, their status in society. It’s that status message that explains the difference in price.

Similarly, driving a Prius says something about your views on climate change. A Make America Great Again cap reveals something about your political affiliations. And Nike athletic wear signals a healthy, pro-active lifestyle.

Software is at a crucial disadvantage compared to these physical products because of its intangibility. A fitness app also signals a healthy, pro-active lifestyle, but no one can see it because it only lives on your phone. Everyone can see your Nike gear whenever you wear it in public. Software can’t offer the same benefit. It doesn’t have a signaling distribution channel.

This is why there is no software equivalent of a Rolex watch or a Louis Vuitton handbag. People aren’t willing to spend money on things other people can’t see they spent money on.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. As software is eating the world, the lines between physical and digital products are becoming increasingly blurry. As I have pointed out in my original essay, one way for software companies to solve the signaling distribution problem is to add a physical element to their software product.

In this post I want to explore this idea a little bit further. Specifically, we’ll look at neobanks – and their opportunity to monetize credit card signaling.

02 Neobanks

In the last couple of years we have witnessed the birth and rise of a new startup vertical: neobanks.

Neobanks differ from traditional banks in two ways:

1) Rather than relying on a physical branch network, the entire banking experience is managed via an app

2) Instead of the “how do you do, fellow kids”-cringiness that ad campaigns of traditional banks usually invoke when they try to appeal to a younger audience, neobanks are actually perceived as cool. In fact, many of them feel more like lifestyle brands than banks or tech companies.

Interestingly though, neobanks still use one very traditional banking element: physical cards.

At first glance, this might seem counterintuitive. If you are building a mobile-first bank, why not offer virtual cards and let users pay with their phone? Why go through the hassle of producing and shipping physical cards?

The answer is – you guessed it – signaling.

Think about it: Paying for things (offline) is a social activity. It’s an interaction between at least you and a cashier or waiter. But ideally, in a dinner scenario for example, you are surrounded by other people you want to impress: a date, a group of friends, or work colleagues.

This makes the moment you take out your card to pay the bill a great opportunity to make a statement and build social capital.

If you look at neobanks out there today, it’s pretty obvious that signaling is in fact one of the main benefits they offer – and almost the only thing they monetize (apart from interchange, of course):

  • The premium subscriptions neobanks offer usually don’t win on features but solely on nicer looking cards. The N26 or Revolut Metal plans, for example, don’t offer any additional features that really justify the ~€15 / month price tag. They do include a nice looking metal card though – that’s what people pay for.
  • Relatedly, it seems like most of the innovation in the industry is happening in card design. The actual banking products are more or less interchangeable, what differs is whether the card comes in titanium, wood, or glow-in-the-dark yellow.
  • You may have noticed that the credit card number has moved from the front to the back of the card. This makes it easier for users to share photos of their cards on social media as an additional signaling distribution channel.

Neobanks are popping up like mushrooms after the rain at the moment and it’s unlikely that this trend will end any time soon. Thanks to banking-as-a-service providers, we’ll likely see a lot of non-banking-companies add banking functionalities and cards to their product offering.

There’s an old Twitter joke that every app evolves until it eventually becomes a chat app. The 2020 version of that joke is that every app evolves until it eventually becomes a bank.

When I did some research on credit card designs recently, I was surprised by the sheer amount of different neobanks already in existance. And yet, even though almost all of them offer well-designed cards, it’s shocking how similar they all are. It seems like all of them are focusing on the same target audience instead of differentiating their signaling messages.

Let me explain.

03 In-Groups, Out-Groups and Artificial Scarcity

In every signaling scenario there are two possible target audiences: An in-group and an out-group.

The in-group is the tribe you want to join and signal your affiliation to. The out-group is everyone else – people you want to distance yourself from.

iMessage is a great illustration of this: the chat bubble colors clearly indicate who belongs to the in-group (blue = iOS) and who is part of the out-group (green = Android).

It’s important to note that signaling in iMessage is limited to the in-group since these color codes are only visible for iOS users – Android users can’t see who in the group is using which operating system.

Signaling, however, grows stronger the larger the out-group is – as long as the out-group knows about the in-group. This is why luxury car manufacturers deliberately extend their advertising campaigns to people who will never be able to afford their cars: they are increasing the size of the out-group by educating people about the in-group.

At the same time, brands need to control the size of the in-group. The more exclusive the in-group, the higher the signaling strength and, thus, the monetization potential of a customer.

The easiest control mechanism for the size of the in-group is price. If you set the price high enough, few people will be able to afford the product. Ironically, this, in turn, justifies the high price.

Alternatively, companies create artificial scarcity by setting a hard number on supply. Limited supply creates FOMO and hype which increases the size of the out-group and results in higher social status for members of the in-group. Artificial scarcity explains the price of Bitcoin, Pokémon trading cards and why people spend hours queuing in front of Supreme shops.

The problem with keeping the in-group small is that it also limits the number of potential customers and, thus, overall revenue potential. Companies need to walk a fine line between maximizing the number of customers while simultaneously maximizing the number of people they can (afford to) exclude.

04 What Neobanks Should Build

The problem with neobanks today is that they all focus on the same in-group. Here are the premium cards of some of the largest European challenger banks – notice any difference?

It seems like everyone is trying to become the Apple of Banking – including Apple itself. The signaling messages are all about displaying economic power.

But we are slowly seeing new banking apps that are focusing on different audiences. For example, there are now a handful of “green” neobanks that help users signal environmental altruism.

Or how about this Razer Card targeted at the gamer community?

The question for these companies and their investors is whether the in-group is big enough to justify building an entire bank around it. Making the unit economics of a bank work requires a certain amount of users, but as we discussed earlier, the signaling strength decreases as the size of in-group increases.

So how do you solve this problem?
By introducing multiple in-groups.

See, the current model looks like this:

(In fact, given how undifferentiated most of the offerings and cards are, there are actually multiple neobanks within the same small in-group bubble.)

But what if one bank would target multiple, different in-groups?

For example, what if N26 had dedicated cards for soccer fans, hip-hop enthusiasts and gamers? Instead of focusing on just one signaling audience, their total addressable market would massively increase.

The way they would target these audiences is via brand collaborations. N26 does not have the necessary reputation in any of the above-mentioned areas to build credible signaling messages. It would not be able to build attractive in-groups on its own – but other brands could lend N26 their social capital.

Apple has long worked with RED, IKEA recently teamed up with Virgil Abloh, and Nike partners with Headspace. Why wouldn’t this concept work for neobanks?

What would N26 x Manchester United look like?
Or Chime x Supreme?
Or Revolut x 100 Thieves?

Because of a bigger target audience overall, individual in-groups could be kept smaller. Cards could be released as limited edition drops transforming them into collectibles, which would justify a higher price tag per card.

It’s worth noting that different signaling audiences are not mutually exclusive. We don’t just subscribe to a single in-group – our identities are prismatic. This means that some users might purchase multiple cards to signal to different in- and out-groups resulting in even higher expected LTV per user.

A few neobanks have already started to experiment with brand collaborations and limited edition cards (see Cash App x Hood By Air or Point x Laura Berger). I expect there will be a lot more once neobanks realize what most of them really are: Signaling-as-a-Service companies.

05 A Closing Ask

What card designs and neobank collaborations would you like to see? Let me know in this Twitter thread – I’d love to hear your ideas!

And if you’re an (aspiring) 3D artist or designer: Would you like to bring some of these card ideas to life? There will be a follow-up post to this essay featuring the best card mock-ups. Send me a Twitter DM or email (hello at julianlehr dot com) if you want to learn more.

Thanks to Brandon Jacoby, Jan König, Mario Gabriele, Max Cutler and Zack Hargett for reading drafts of this post.

Dec 03, 2020  ×  Berlin, DE

Proof of X

01 Intro

Sparked by an interesting Twitter discussion, I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about different proof-of-work mechanisms.

When I say proof-of-work, I’m not talking about consensus algorithms like the ones that some crypto currencies use. I’m talking about social networks.

At their core, social networks are primarily about one thing: Building social capital through signaling. As I wrote in Signaling as a Service, signaling can be broken down into three different components:

  • Signaling Message
    A hidden status subtext you’re trying to convey about yourself
  • Signaling Distribution
    The channel through which you’re communicating your signaling message
  • Signaling Amplification
    Ways to boost your signaling message to compete against status rivals

For example: A Patagonia vest signals both a prosocial attitude (“I care about the environment“) as well as wealth (“I can afford to spend $500 on a jacket“). Depending on where you live, it might also signal something about your occupation.

In order to signal these messages to others and build actual social capital you need a signaling distribution channel. One option would be to wear the vest in public where others can see it – but there are obvious physical constraints to the size of the audience you’d be able to reach.

This is where social networks come in.

Their primary role is to distribute signaling messages at scale and transform them into quantifiable social capital (in the form of likes and followers).

As social networks grow, they increase the potential reach of your signaling messages – but they also get crowded with status rivals. This is why social networks typically provide you with a set of signaling amplification tools. These tools help you boost your signaling messages and stand out from the crowd.

In Signaling as a Service I compared signaling amplification to Eugene Wei’s idea of proof-of-work hurdles, which he describes as follows:

Almost every social network of note had an early signature proof of work hurdle. For Facebook it was posting some witty text-based status update. For Instagram, it was posting an interesting square photo. For Vine, an entertaining 6-second video. For Twitter, it was writing an amusing bit of text of 140 characters or fewer. Pinterest? Pinning a compelling photo. You can likely derive the proof of work for other networks like Quora and Reddit and Twitch and so on. Successful social networks don’t pose trick questions at the start, it’s usually clear what they want from you.

But the more I think about it, the less I like the comparison. I actually think that Eugene’s proof-of-work theory only scratches the surface of what social networks actually do.

Let me explain.

02 A closer look at proof mechanisms

Take a look at this very cliché Instagram picture. The photographer clearly put a lot of thought and effort into its composition and applied different filters and editing tools to make it look nicer.

Full disclosure: I actually took this picture from Unsplash. No influencers were harmed during the production of this blog post.

It’s a perfect example of Eugene’s definition of proof-of-work.
Proof-of-creative-work, to be more exact.

Editing your photo helps to amplify your signaling message and sets you apart within Instagram’s status arena (aka the newsfeed). It also adds additional signaling messages to your post: “Look how great a photographer I am” or “I’m a creative person”.

But those are not the main signaling messages you are communicating here. What you really want to tell your followers with this photo is something along the lines of “I’m a world-traveler” and “I’m in a happy relationship” (which in turn are also just signaling proxies for wealth and mating worthiness).

The photo and the location tag are your proof points.

If you look closely, you’ll notice additional hidden signaling messages in the form of Allbirds sneakers and what’s most likely a Patagonia vest → proof-of-ownership

Social networks are therefore not only signaling distribution (and amplification) networks – they also allow users to prove their signaling messages.

The creative proof-of-work is just pretext and helps to boost your post. What’s more important are the additional proof mechanisms that social networks provide. In the case of Instagram those are photos and location tags.

Instagram is essentially “pics or it didn’t happen”-as-a-service.

03 Implications for new social networks

When new social networks emerge they have to introduce new proof mechanisms to differentiate themselves from existing incumbents. These can either be novel proof-of-creative-work hurdles or completely new proof-of-x mechanisms.

TikTok is a good example for proof-of-creative-work innovation. The app provides creators with a powerful set of video editing tools that have opened a whole new level of creativity.

The cost to participate in TikTok’s status game is a lot higher than Instagram’s (compare a well-made dance choreography on TikTok to your median Instagram travel post) – but its powerful feed algorithms also make discovery easier and thus reward users faster and with more social capital.

TikTok doesn’t add any new proof points beyond its novel creative work hurdle though. You can signal and prove your creativity but you could achieve the same by uploading your video to Instagram.

Strava, on the other hand, introduced an entirely new proof mechanism: Proof-of-physical-activity. By using your phone’s GPS sensor (or a 3rd-party fitness tracker), users can actually prove how much and fast they ran or cycled. In contrast to Instagram photos, Strava’s proof mechanism is a lot harder to fake (though there are exceptions).

What’s great about Strava is that it reinforces a behavior that’s actually good for you: While the status game that initially got you into the app might be zero sum, the actual physical exercise you have to put in to compete has a very positive, compounding effect.

The question is: What other social networks should we build that could have similar positive feedback loops? And what are their proof mechanisms?

04 Strava for X

Let’s start with the two examples in this tweet.

I love the idea of a Strava for Cooking – but I’m very skeptical that it can be built. Why? Because the necessary proof mechanisms don’t exist.

The primary metric you optimize on when cooking is taste. But how would you measure or quantify taste? The closest proxy to taste that we have is optics: How good does the meal that you cooked look? This can easily be proved with a photo .. but that’s a proof-of-work mechanism that Instagram already offers (including filters to make your food look nicer). As long as no one comes up with a better proof mechanism for cooking, I think it’s unlikely that we will see a successful social network in the space.

I’m more optimistic about Strava for Learning.

While the activity of learning itself might be hard to quantify, you can measure the outcome of learning: knowledge. Has anyone built a multiplayer version of Anki yet? Flash cards would be a perfect proof-of-knowledge mechanism and could easily be turned into a game where you compete against friends.

Similar to physical activity in the Strava example, learning is not something that most people enjoy doing. As TikTok founder Alex Zhu points out, education goes a little against human nature. In combination with a strong enough signaling mechanism however, you can get users to participate. It’s kind of the opposite of Chris Dixon’s famous “Come for the tool, stay for the network” strategy. Come for the status, stay for the tool.

A related product I’d love to see is Strava for Reading. Imagine an eBook reader that not only tracks how much time you spend reading but also *what* you are reading. Based on these proof-of-(reading)-work mechanisms you could build streaks or GitHub-contributions-like visualizations that incentivize users to read more (and more regularly).

You could even build leaderboards for different topics based on the content of the books and articles you read. Or think about a score that indicated how balanced your reading behavior per topic was (to incentivize users to read takes on political topics from different perspectives).

Unfortunately, I think it’s unlikely that we will see a product like I described anytime soon. The world’s largest bookstore, most popular eBook reader, and biggest social network for books are all owned by a company that has very little competency in design and user-facing product innovation.

(Side note: Amazon’s monopoly on books might be the most underrated sub-optimal equilibrium in tech.)

Another app that would be interesting is a social investing app. Think “Robinhood but as a social network”. It seems like investing is already quite a social activity – just look at communities like r/wallstreetbets. As patio11 pointed out, Robinhood already feels more like a game than a finance app.

So why not build an investing app that opens with a feed of all your friends’ investments and their returns over time? Instead of sharing screenshots on Reddit and Instagram you could prove your investments right in the app.

Note that an app like this would not be about signaling wealth. It’s about signaling being right and the ability to prove it. This is probably an even stronger and more engaging mechanism than signaling wealth – and the reason why I’m still bullish on prediction markets.

Perhaps a well-designed, consumer-friendly prediction market app would be the ultimate proof-of-x social network. Strava for being right.

05 A Closing Ask

While we are on the topic of being right: Do you agree with my thoughts in this post? What other social networks and proof-of-x mechanisms would you like to see?

Please leave your comments here.

Thanks to Dan Romero, Des Traynor, Jan König, Max Cutler and Zack Hargett for reading drafts of this post.

Aug 06, 2020  ×  Berlin, DE

Signaling as a Service

01 Intro

One of the best books I have read in the last few years is The Elephant in the Brain by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler.

The book makes two main arguments:

a) Most of our everyday actions can be traced back to some form of signaling or status seeking

b) Our brains deliberately hide this fact from us and others (self deception)

So we think and say that we do something for a specific reason, but in reality, there’s a hidden, selfish motive: to show off and increase our social status.

You may have heard about a similar concept before called conspicuous consumption. Conspicuous consumption describes the practice of purchasing luxury goods (or services) for the sake of signaling the buyer’s wealth in order to attain or maintain a certain social status.

A classic example of this would be a luxury watch: A Rolex isn’t better at telling the time than a cheap Casio – but a Rolex signals something about its owner’s economic power and thus their social standing.

This is not a new theory, but Simler and Hanson argue that a lot more human behavior can be explained by signaling. Here are a few examples from the book:

  • Consumption
    Signaling does not only explain luxury purchases but also consumption of all sorts of other goods: “Green products” are more about signaling a prosocial attitude than actually helping the environment. Other consumption signals include loyalty to a specific subculture (e.g. band t-shirts), athleticism & health consciousness (athleisure clothing) or intelligence (e.g. Rubik’s Cube).

  • Charity
    There are several indicators that suggest that giving to charity isn’t really about improving the well-being of others: The lack of effective altruism demonstrates that we don’t care much about the actual outcome of our donations and studies show that our charitable behavior is heavily driven by visibility (hardly any donations are anonymous), peer pressure (95% of donations are solicited) and mating motives (donations are higher and more likely when observed by a member of the opposite sex). Charity is about appearing generous rather than actually doing good.

  • Education
    You would think that going to school is about learning and acquiring skills, but then why do students pay tens of thousands of dollars for Ivy League schools when all of the learning material is effectively available online for free? Why do we use grading systems when we know that students learn worse when being graded? The answer, again, is signaling: Education helps with credentialing and signaling to potential employers.

There are many more examples in the book (and I recommend reading the whole thing), the point the authors are trying to make is clear: Almost everything has a signaling component – we are just not aware of it. In fact, Hanson believes that “well over 90 percent” of human behavior can be explained by signaling.

Whether or not you agree with that exact number, I think it’s an interesting thought experiment to look at a specific behavior and think about what the hidden signaling subtext of that behavior might be.

Ever since finishing the book, the signaling behavior I’ve been thinking about the most is the adoption – and more importantly the monetization – of software products and services.

This is what this blog post is about.

02 Components of Signaling

Let’s take a closer look at signaling first.

The way I see it, signaling can be broken down into different components:

  • Signal Message
  • Signal Distribution
  • Signal Amplification

To better illustrate what I mean let’s take a pair of sneakers as an example.

The first component is what I call the signal message. This is whatever (hidden) subtext you are trying to convey. In the case of our sneakers this is probably something along the lines of “I can afford to spend $100 on a pair of shoes” and “I live an active, healthy lifestyle”.


In order to get your signal message across to other people you need some form of signal distribution. This is the second component of my signaling taxonomy.

So how are you going to distribute the signal message of your sneakers? You simply wear them where other people can see them. The obvious constraint here is that your signal distribution is limited to things you can display in public. This is why people are willing to spend hundreds of dollars on shoes but not on socks.

The third component is signal amplification: If everyone is wearing cool sneakers .. how do you make sure yours stand out? You could buy the pair with the most noticeable design or the one with the flashiest colors, for example. These signal amplifiers help you to better compete against status rivals.


Let’s recap: Signaling can be broken down into signal message, distribution and amplification. “Real world” products are great at visualising a signal message due to their physical nature. However, as a consequence there are also physical boundaries to distribution because there are only so many people you can signal to at once.

But what about software?

03 Software’s Signaling Limitations

Digital products have one crucial disadvantage over atom-based products and services: Intangibility. Apps live on your phone or computer. No one can see them except for you.

The signal message of a fitness app is the same as that of a gym membership or athletic wear (strength & fitness display), but the signal is much weaker because you can’t distribute it to anyone.

I believe that this is the main reason why consumer software companies have a harder time monetizing than their physical counterparts.

Here’s another example: eBooks have never caught up with paper books despite being more convenient. On the contrary, physical book sales have remained stable (and in some markets even increased) in recent years. Interestingly though, people spend less time reading them. Their value seems to stem from lying around the house to impress visitors (see also coffee table books) – a benefit digital books simply can’t offer.

Another point of evidence is the lack of luxury software products. People spend absurd amounts of money on jewellery, handbags and cars, but I can’t think of a piece of software with an even remotely similar price tag. Sure, people have tried to sell $999 apps but those never took off.

The app that comes closest to a luxury service that I can think of is Superhuman, which charges its users $30 a month for an email client (which you could also get for free by just using Gmail).

But there’s a difference to other software products: Superhuman has signal distribution built in. Every time you send an email via Superhuman, your recipient will notice a little “Sent via Superhuman” in your signature.

In a similar fashion, apps like Strava use their built in social networks as a signal distribution channel for their premium subscriptions. Users who have upgraded get a little premium badge and appear in exclusive premium leaderboards.

Another interesting way to solve the signal distribution problem is to add a physical product to a software’s premium offering, which allows signaling via casual contact (like fashion products).

Neobanks such as N26 or Revolut reward their premium users with a fancy metal card which doesn’t just look nice but is also noticeably heavier than normal credit cards. There aren’t a lot of other benefits that justify the hefty €17/month price tag these banks charge for their premium tiers – clear evidence that the primary monetization driver is in fact signaling.

04 Signal Distribution as a Service

While many digital products struggle to monetize as well as their real-word counterparts, the Internet has created a whole new kind of signaling utility: Distribution as a service.

Physical products are limited to the amount of people you see in public – but the Internet allows you to reach a virtually infinite number of people at once.

This is the primary value that social networks like Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram provide. These services don’t contain a hidden signal message. All they do is provide signal distribution at scale. Want to increase the number of people who can see your sneakers? Just take a photo and post it on Instagram.

A positive feedback loop of views, likes and comments helps you to quantify how successful your signal distribution has been.


Eugene Wei calls this Status as a Service:

By merging all updates from all the accounts you followed into a single continuous surface and having that serve as the default screen, Facebook News Feed simultaneously increased the efficiency of distribution of new posts and pitted all such posts against each other in what was effectively a single giant attention arena, complete with live updating scoreboards on each post. It was as if the panopticon inverted itself overnight, as if a giant spotlight turned on and suddenly all of us performing on Facebook for approval realized we were all in the same auditorium, on one large, connected infinite stage, singing karaoke to the same audience at the same time.

It’s difficult to overstate what a momentous sea change it was for hundreds of millions, and eventually billions, of humans who had grown up competing for status in small tribes, to suddenly be dropped into a talent show competing against EVERY PERSON THEY HAD EVER MET.

Social networks are subject to network effects: The more users join a network, the more valuable the network becomes. Your incentive to use Facebook increases with the number of people you can distribute your signal message to. This is why social networks are free to use – in order to maximize their signaling potential they need to acquire as many users as possible.

A social network like Path attempted to limit your social graph size to the Dunbar number, capping your social capital accumulation potential and capping the distribution of your posts. The exchange, they hoped, was some greater transparency, more genuine self-expression. The anti-Facebook. Unfortunately, as social capital theory might predict, Path did indeed succeed in becoming the anti-Facebook: a network without enough users. Some businesses work best at scale, and if you believe that people want to accumulate social capital as efficiently as possible, putting a bound on how much they can earn is a challenging business model, as dark as that may be.

While Path did indeed fail as a distribution provider, I would argue that keeping the network’s size small can still have benefits in line with my signaling theory: Deliberately limiting the number of people who can join a network (e.g. by charging a membership fee) creates scarcity which in turns makes the network more interesting. Network membership becomes the signal message. Users pay a membership fee to signal to other members that they are part of the tribe.

Some examples:

These social networks still rely on some critical mass and network effects, but need to set an artificial limit to the amount of people who can join. If membership isn’t scarce, the membership loses its signal message. The same applies to physical products: Apple will never offer a cheap iPhone to compete with low-end Android devices – it would destroy the company’s signal message that the iPhone is a luxury product.

In contrast to iPhones, there is another limitation that social networks with this strategy face: Like in the before mentioned software examples, signal distribution is limited to the in-group. Signaling however is strongest when you can signal tribe affiliation to both in-group members as well as outsiders. This is also the reason why luxury car manufacturers don’t limit their advertising campaigns to potential buyers but deliberately extend it to people who will never be able to afford the car.

But as we’ve discussed earlier, the intangibility of software makes signaling to the out-group difficult: You would instagram a photo from your Equinox gym, but would you share a screenshot of your MyFitnessPal Premium subscription?

Instead of monetizing network membership, the software products that monetize most successfully have chosen another strategy: Make memberships free and monetize signal amplification instead.

05 Monetizing Signal Amplification

Earlier, we defined signal amplification as product features that help users to increase the strength of the signals they want to convey to stand out of the crowd. In the example of our aforementioned sneakers, flashy colors help to amplify our signal message.

Similar amplifiers exist in the software world, but they often come in the form of a set of tools. Take the Instagram photo editor for example: Applying filters to your photos makes them look nicer and hopefully more noticeable in the app’s status arena – aka the newsfeed.

Eugene Wei calls these amplifiers Proof of Work:

Almost every social network of note had an early signature proof of work hurdle. For Facebook it was posting some witty text-based status update. For Instagram, it was posting an interesting square photo. For Vine, an entertaining 6-second video. For Twitter, it was writing an amusing bit of text of 140 characters or fewer. Pinterest? Pinning a compelling photo. You can likely derive the proof of work for other networks like Quora and Reddit and Twitch and so on. Successful social networks don’t pose trick questions at the start, it’s usually clear what they want from you.

While Instagram, Twitter and the other above-mentioned social networks are free to use, other companies have figured out a clever way to monetize their signal amplifiers. The two companies who have done this most successfully are Tinder and Fortnite.

Let’s start with Tinder.

06 How Tinder Monetizes Signal Amplification

Tinder is a social network for dating – or in other words, a signal distribution network to display your mating worthiness. Like other social networks, Tinder is subject to network effects: The value of the network increases with its size. The obvious strategy therefore is to make memberships free so that as many people as possible can join. (Technically, dating apps are two-sided networks. The value for female members increases with the number of male members and vice versa.)

Tinder’s primary proof-of-work mechanism is to optimize one’s profile picture for a maximum number of swipe rights. But with millions of rivals on the same platform, competing for status with just a few pixels of profile picture real estate becomes a really hard task.

Luckily, Tinder offers a variety of additional signal amplifiers that help you to stand out. The sole purpose of features like Tinder Boost and Super Likes is to outcompete status rivals by giving you preferential signaling treatment. And guess what – they come with a price tag.

Tinder’s entire business model is built on the assumption that people are willing to spend money on signaling. That assumption seems to be correct: Tinder made a staggering $1.2 billion in revenue last year making it one of the most successful apps world wide.

07 Fortnite – The Ultimate Status Battleground

Fortnite has seen even greater levels of financial success: In the last two years combined, the game has brought in more than $4 billion in revenue – and like Tinder, it too monetizes primarily with signal amplification.

For the longest time, the monetization model of games used to be – and for many still is – one-time upfront payments which then allowed you to play the game for as long as you wanted to.

That business model changed with the emergence of mobile games on iOS and Android. Instead of charging players upfront for access, mobile games are typically free to play. However, in order to progress faster and win the game, users will eventually have to pay for small upgrades with in-app purchases.

Similar to these traditional mobile games, Fortnite is also free to play. As a multiplayer game that many play with their real-life friends, this strategy makes a lot of sense – the network becomes more valuable the more people join.

In contrast to mobile games however, Fortnite is also free to win. None of the in-app purchases available impact the core gameplay. You can’t buy more powerful weapons or stronger armor that give you an advantage over other players.

That’s because the core gameplay isn’t the core signaling layer – and thus also doesn’t offer the greatest monetization potential.


Fortnite is more than just a game. It’s more like a giant virtual theme park, or the closest thing we have to a metaverse even. People don’t just come for the battle royale game – they come to meet and hangout with friends.

But if The Elephant in the Brain has taught us anything it’s that you don’t just meet people for fun. You are engaging in a constant battle for attention and status. Signaling is the meta game that Fortnite provides – and monetizes.

Fortnite’s monetization model is based on cosmetics: The skin your character wears; the looks of your glider and the tools you use; the way your character dances (emotes) – all of these are signaling amplifiers with different signal messages to uniquely express yourself in the game. And you have to purchase them.

Fortnite has pulled off what so many other software products have been struggling with – monetizing a purely digital product whose value is not based on utility or entertainment but solely on the one thing we all secretly care so much about: Signaling.

08 Summary

While the physical nature of material goods and services is perfect to visualize hidden signaling messages, there are natural limitations to distribution and amplification.

Software perfectly complements physical goods by distributing their signal messages at scale. Maximizing scale, however, prevents it from monetizing said distribution. This is why social media services are free to use. The added signaling value is solely captured by the physical products that are being shared.

The intangibility and fungibility of software also makes it difficult to create and share (and monetize) software products that contain hidden signal messages of their own. This explains why there are no software equivalents of luxury products such as Rolex watches or Louis Vuitton handbags.

The financially most lucrative strategy for software companies is to provide distribution for free and instead monetize users who want to stand out of the crowd with paid signal amplification.

A closing thought: I tell myself that I write these blog posts “just for fun”, but let’s be honest … all I really want is to signal how smart I am. So if you could head over to Twitter and give me a Like or a Follow, that’d be great. Thanks!

Thanks to Gonz Sanchez, Jan König, Max Cutler and Robin Dechant for reading drafts of this post.
Mar 28, 2020  ×  Berlin, DE
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