Status app as a Funnel into Logos Tribe

Proposals
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Context

Status was founded with a powerful mission: to protect privacy, resist censorship, and empower individuals through decentralization. Recently revenue orientation led to centralizing certain features — particularly in the wallet stack. While those changes were practical, they conflicted with our long-term vision.

As the company currently moves toward building own decentralized technology stack, there’s a risk that the Status app may become misaligned with core values. But it also can be the opposite: Status can become the most effective way to communicate and preach our values, to join our Tribe.

Core Idea: Status as a Values Funnel

Status should serve as a funnel into our worldview — not just a utility, but a progressive introduction to the core principles we believe in.

It can:

  • Guide users from curiosity to conviction
  • Offer practical experiences of digital freedom
  • Convert users into advocates, contributors, or developers
  • Reinforce the why behind the how

By doing this, Status becomes our public-facing narrative, helping people feel and live decentralization — not just use it.

Even existing centralized parts can become a part of narrative that brings the discussion on tech limitations and tradeoffs.

Implementation Paths

There are different possible ways to implement this funnel in code. Each serves the same goal: help users internalize our values through interaction and context.

1. Gamified Journey (Engaging & Interactive)

A playful, mission-based user journey that teaches and motivates through action.

  • User roles: Choose a path like Beginner, Explorer, or Cypherpunk
  • Missions: Complete real tasks (“Send an encrypted message”, “Sign in with keycard”, etc.)
  • Visual rewards: Badges, collectibles, cyberpunk-style progression
  • Narrative: Users become agents in a broader movement

This option is engaging and can boost retention, especially among newcomers who enjoy learning through exploration.

2. Narrative-Driven Onboarding (Storytelling, No Game)

Use real-world or fictional micro-stories to explain each part of the product.

  • Contextual stories: “Why does storing your key locally matter?”
  • Step-by-step scenarios with illustrations or animations
  • Serious tone — focused on emotional clarity, not gamification

This fits better for users who value clarity and purpose over play.

3. Modular Experience: User Chooses Trust Level

Let users choose between different setups at onboarding:

  • Quick & Easy → enables centralized fallback services
  • Private & Trustless → only local storage and decentralized components

Highlight every trust-related choice throughout the UI, helping users see and own their level of decentralization.

This builds understanding organically, through actual configuration.

4. Integrated Educational Content (Low Friction)

Embed concise, contextual education across the app:

  • “What is a public node?” → short explanations linked to features
  • “Why should I back up my seed phrase?” → explained in real time
  • FAQ and “Learn more” buttons designed into flows

This adds minimal UX complexity but steadily builds user understanding.

Conclusion

Whichever implementation path we choose, the underlying principle remains: Status is not just a tool. It’s a gateway to a worldview.

If we focus product development around that, we can:

  • Set Status’ role in the ecosystem
  • Increase retention, contribution, and alignment
  • Strengthen the brand as a movement
4 Likes
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Very cool ideas.

I’ve also had the idea a long time ago of having some sort of customization on the onboarding for the type of user/persona.

It was more focused on the privacy aspect. So it could be some sort of slider or chooser.
Something like
Full UX experience <============> Full privacy experience
Where the Full UX is with all the external providers that we cannot decentralize like the Tenor for Gifs, Wallet providers for prices and data, etc.
And the Full privacy would be no 3rd party at all. Where you need to setup your own providers if you want to re-enable some of the features.

We are already going a small step in that way with the Privacy mode, but it would be even cooler if there were in betweens.

Also, we need to work harder at integrating the decentralized solutions that we do have like Fluffy for mainnet connection.

Anyway, I like that we’re thinking similarly and your idea of gamification is very cool, especially with the tie-in with Status Network!

Also in the spirit of the super app, we’ve started thinking about splitting the chat, communities and wallet into modules for possible disabling of sections the user doesn’t use

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Great post, and I’m so glad to see the idea sinking in and people exploring how to move forward.

Some thoughts. If we want to provide an appropriate experience to all levels of user (your grandma to hardcore privacy advocate), should we do this in a singular application? I would argue no. Just thinking about the option space and attention to defaults and onboarding flow feels overly complex and way too confusing.

There are so many differentiated audiences within the SNT community (exacerbated when you extend to web3 and principle-aligned peoples). As a general rule, the more you generalize your audience the less likely you cater to any of them appropriately.

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Another benefit of having two applications would be that IMO no privacy maximalist would risk using an app that has 3rd party deps, even if disabled or unused. At the very least that would be a red flag and a point of friction.

Also, just ideating on the “separate apps” point, this kinda opens up the opportunity for the different status app(s) to provide our users:

  1. a privacy-preserving product that’s completely aligned with our core values and doesn’t sacrifice privacy in favour of usability/retention/revenue/etc. That would be our testbed for the logos tech, where we could experiment and explore use-cases in a lean fashion without worrying too much about ui/ux perfection or user retention. It can still be seen as a “user-facing product”, just not in the traditional sense.
  2. a traditional user-facing product, which serves as an introduction to decentralisation and our core principles, while providing value to users who care less about privacy. That’s where we would have e.g. a tight integration with the Status Network. We can be explicitly transparent about what exactly isn’t privacy preserving (external service providers) and the privacy-focused alternatives (logos) we’re working on, what issues they solve and why it’s important. This will expose the privacy gaps we have and help steer the direction we’re building towards, while gradually filling these same privacy gaps with already tested solutions.
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Having two apps might also be a good testimony to our backend.

If we can run the same backend in two variations, then anyone (third party) can do it.

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Recently, the focus on revenue led to centralizing certain features — particularly in the wallet stack.

Not in response to your comment, but expanding on this point. I’d like to emphasize it differently: we were explicitly told from the very top in 2024 to prioritize revenue above all else, aiming to achieve self-sustainability as fast as possible. This imbalance was a mistake that many CCs discussed and predicted would cause the problems we see today. Status didn’t have much of a choice, did we?

From my past experience and now at Status, I believe an organization should always care about revenue, but not only care about it. Many companies fail miserably because they assume revenue can just be sprinkled on top of an existing product later (“we’ll just add a fee here and there”). This is exactly what I’ve heard between 2022-2023 in Status.

Revenue keeps us grounded and protects us from drifting back into the fairy tale of infinite resources. It’s can be a good constraint.

The other major goal affecting our prioritization is the rush to reach the elusive PFM. We should reflect on that because we don’t need to operate like a Silicon Valley startup like it has been the case in the last year or so.

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It’s nice to hear from you the idea of different apps for different audiences because this very idea has been discussed many times in the past within Status. Status’ user interviews are enlightening regarding this point.

We might not want to cater to a wide spectrum of personas. I believe we should focus our attention to specific personas with particular use cases, learn/fail and expand as needed.