Kibin’s Monthly Leaderboard: A Friendly Competition That Pays Cash!
Every month, Kibin dishes out a combined 750 cold ones to our top 15 editors of the month. Leaderboard (LB) points are given for each successfully edited paper.
But why do we do this? Please, allow Travis to give you a brief history:
Back in the day, Kibin started out as a peer-to-peer editing service. Basically, a user edited and provided feedback on another user’s paper, received credits for doing a good job, and redeemed those credits to have another user provide editing and feedback in return. If someone wished to bypass the editing portion, credits could simply be purchased outright.
This all came to fruition when I thought I wanted to attend law school. I composed my personal statement, but found it to be a huge hemorrhoid trying to find someone that would give me unbiased, intelligent, and helpful feedback. Ultimately, I decided to chuck law school and become an entrepreneur.
The jury’s still out on whether that was a good choice (see what I did there?). :-)
It turned out that people loved this idea. We received some coverage from large online news outlets, such as TechCrunch and LifeHacker, that sent droves of traffic and users, most of whom did not want to spend a dime. As you might imagine, trying to ensure quality editing and feedback in such a free-for-all system proved to be a costly and labor-intensive process. These two sides weren’t exactly adding up to what we envisioned.
Eventually, we admitted that our initial vision for Kibin was not going to scale. But we still wanted to be different! Who doesn’t? We decided to try a whole bunch of other crazy pricing models for a few months before conceding to simply being the absolute best proofreading and editing service the Internet has to offer.
While coming to this realization, we discovered that a small group of our editors was editing and earning credits but never redeeming them for personal editing needs. After inquiring with them, we found that we’d attracted a small group of editing aficionados.
To keep them active and interested as we figured out the future direction of Kibin, we created the monthly Leaderboard and gave away a small bit of cash every month. When we finally decided to become a more traditional proofreading and editing site and implement a revenue share with our editors, we chose to keep the Leaderboard as a fun and friendly competition.
If you couldn’t care less about all of that, here are the quick and dirty facts regarding the Leaderboard:
- The Leaderboard cut-off time is 9:00 PM, Pacific time, on the last day of each month.
- We’ll send you an email if you take one of the top spots with a prize.
- Cash prizes are directly credited to your Kibin account.
- Extra Leaderboard points are sometimes awarded by Kibin staff.
- Click here to find out how Leaderboard points are calculated.
May the odds be ever in your favor!!