01The Idea
Dshini launched in 2007 as a social network, a year before Facebook came out in German. The difference was cashback. The site passed what it made from ads and affiliate programs on to its members, in a fantasy currency of its own: Dshins. Dshini issued them itself and could adjust the supply. For orientation, the site showed a euro value, partly so the marketplace wouldn’t slide into inflation or price gouging.
You collected them by playing: daily tasks, built-in games, even just time spent on the site. Members saved them up like reward points. They traded them for rewards from online stores, for game access, with each other, or for a good cause.
02What We Built
A site where everything meshed. Here’s the “Entdecken” (Discover) section in the original, from a 2014 file:
- Three ways through the site: Discover, Earn Points, Marketplace.
- A daily bonus with a time window.
- A weekly bonus across seven days.
- Your own wish, with a progress bar.
- The feed: offers from people you follow and on topics you’ve tagged.
- Prices in Dshins.
Tap or click to open the page full size.
An Offer
Buy it, trade for it, put it on your wish list, ask the seller, or pass it on, all from one spot.
The Marketplace
Later a mix of eBay and Amazon: listing, trading, wish lists, search requests, ratings. Dshins were the official currency there, and something to trade in their own right.
Unlocked by Inviting
Some offers only opened up once you’d invited friends. Prices in Dshins, the euro value in parentheses.
Social Spirit
Members could pool their Dshins for charity. Dshini paid out the total as a real donation.
03The Characters
Dshini the character, from the first pencil line to the anniversary badge. The ideas for all the characters were mine. Gustavo Utria drew them, first as sketches, then finished. In the tour, she explains the site. She got company: Miezi the cat, and a playful rival, Dshinzilla. He had his own mini games and was later sold as a plush toy.
04How We Worked
We worked in short iterations. Back then, what tech could do changed as fast as game consoles going from 8 to 128 bits. We usually jumped on it early, right at the cutting edge.
- Our own codeOur own development environments and lots of code we wrote ourselves, mostly in-house, built on Symfony
- Cloud from 2009Virtual servers on Amazon Web Services, plus the AWS Summits in Berlin
- Graph databasesFor almost everything: feeds, profiles, how members were connected. Built in-house at first, later with vendors like Neo4j, whose other clients back then were giants like Deutsche Telekom
- Design from all overDesigners from Canada to Colombia
- No seed fundingThe company always paid its own way
05Who Did What
Idea, concept, the character, and product development. Under my supervision, that turned into mostly our own code. In the early days, everything a startup takes: building the product in your head and the structures around it.
Helped build Dshini out once it became a company, bit by bit during the Prague years.
By the end, jobs for about a dozen people, plus designers in several countries.
06Scale and Reach
- 2–4 million
- page views a day Author’s figure
- 600,000
- active users at the end, before the platform shut down; more counting Austria and Switzerland, and far more signed up over the years Author’s figure; also on my résumé
- over €1 million
- donated through Social Spirit, paid out in euros and added up over the years; visible to users at any time Author’s figure
- 2007–2015
- as a company, with no seed funding Author’s figure
07From the Archive
This is how Dshini looked online, from files dated 2011 to 2014. Development moved fast, and the interface changed several times over those years.
08In the Book
From the German book. An English edition is in preparation.
„Die Plattform, von der in diesem Abschnitt die Rede ist, war Dshini; ich habe sie zwischen 2007 und 2015 mitgegründet und aufgebaut.“
Zeit ohne Ausgang, Part One, Chapter 6 · Die Lichtlenkung, „Woher das kommt“