1 Introduction
Welcome to the FAQ section of the platform! Here we try to answer some commonly asked questions and concerns about using the platform.
2 Personals
2.1 What are Personals?
Personals are a special form of classified advertisements in which the person advertises themselves to people rather than offering a specific service or buying or selling a specific product.
A personal typically contains a written description which includes aspects of personality, identifiable details such as age and gender, as well as interests. Typically personals are also anonymous since they are usually viewed publicly by many people, such as newspapers.
2.2 Why are personals anonymous?
Basically, since the business model of personly is not based on who you are (since we do not do any user tracking), there is simply no need for you to share this information with us. Personals are traditionally not something which require full disclosure of personal information.
There are many real reasons where someone wishes to remain anonymous when seeking a partnership. For example, a teacher who is looking to date in the same small town as where he or she teaches and does not want to be seen by one of their own students! Or someone who is eager to explore his or her sexuality but is not ready yet to expose this to the world in their personal profile.
Lastly, personly still provides a way in which one can submit their data to us for verification process. This will let other people know that the personals created by a verified account have a strong likelihood that the account is human and not a bot. But this verification information will never be shared with anyone else.
3 Business Model
3.1 What is our business model?
Many matching websites are struggling to integrate proper business models into their platforms. Their solutions typically involve creating artifical barriers for charging their customers, thus degrading the user experience by creating a divide between those who have paid and those who have not, to the point where these platforms work in completely different ways for different users!
At personly there is no need for these artifical barriers since the business model is intrinsic to the platform itself. If you would like to match 3 people, you create a personal valued at 3 tokens and get 3 matches.
Of course the process is slightly more involved, but this is the basic point, that personly works exactly the same for everyone. Payment just allows one to do more of the same thing.
3.2 How does our platform serve users?
When a user registers, they receive as a registration bonus a fixed amount of tokens that can be used to create personals and generate matches. Our business to customer model relies on people purchasing tokens via fiat money from personly in order that they continue to make personals and match other people.
Since the aim of the platform is to be much cheaper to use than traditional dating services, there is no immediate danger in running out of tokens quickly since tokens matched by people are only deemed "spent" when an actual conversation is initiated by both sides.
3.3 How does our platform serve businesses?
The second way personly generates revenue is via our business to business model. This model functions pretty much exactly the same way as the business to customer model in terms of registration, except that a user creates an organization within the platform after registration, essentially converting their "user account" into an "organization account". Once the organization has been verified, the organization can continue to create personals which have different match characteristics, as explained below:
Firstly, personals created by organizations have the ability to match the same people repeatedly, for example to promote events, whereas non organizations are not able to match the same people again.
Secondly, organizations have spent a token once a match from their personal is created, which is a fair tradeoff since they are able to reach many more people more often than ordinary user accounts.
So essentially, the business to business model functions the same was as the business to customer model except that organizations are able to spend more to reach more people.
4 Privacy
4.1 Am I being tracked by 3rd parties?
At personly we are firmly against 3rd party cookie tracking. If there is an technical solution we can implement and control ourselves, we will opt for that approach and keep any collected data strictly in-house, never to be shared or sold to any 3rd parties.
In some narrow cases a 3rd party cookie is required if the service is too complicated to build ourselves, such as a payment gateway or security layer. But on the whole you can be very sure that neither you nor your browsing habits are being tracked by any 3rd parties, and in the case of payment gateways the cookie is used strictly for security purposes.
5 Account
5.1 Can I delete my account?
We support full account deletion in compliance with GDPR. Unfortunately any tokens you have accumulated during this process stay with us, however in the future we may provide a technical solution that could allow a user to 'cash out' their remaining token balance to an as-of-yet unannounced cryptocurrency.
6 Cities
6.1 Why isnt my city listed?
If your city is not supported please be patient as adding a new city to the platform is a manual process and requires some judgement in terms of how many cities we wish to support per country. If you would however like to see your city added to personly much quicker please contact us and we will see what we can do to expedite this process.
6.2 Can I match by distance instead of by city?
The web version of personly currently supports matching people only via pre-defined cities rather than within a certain distance. The platform is certainly capable of matching people within a certain distance and once both user demand and privacy concerns are considered, personly would then come to a decision about whether to implement it or not.
The privacy concern is that web browsers first need permission from the user before enabling automatic location services, and this functionality would then reveal a user's precise location to personly.
7 Tokens
7.1 What are these tokens?
Tokens are essential to the functioning of the platform since they allow more flexible pricing model which can drive the cost per personal below the lowest denomination of most currencies. For example, buying 10000 tokens for 5 euros and assuming it costs 1 token to make 1 personal, would result in a single personal costing only .0005 euros.
Not only do tokens lower the cost of using the platform for the user, but they also function as an abstract currency. If we were to allow users to spend their own currency when creating personals, managing all the various denominations in the world would be very problematic for us and create unnecessary overhead.
7.2 What is the name of the token?
The name of the token is PNLY and is considered the currency of personly.
7.3 Is this token a cryptocurrency?
There were initially plans to mint and integrate an actual cryptocurrency into the platform as oppose to us simply tracking numbers in a database, however whereas traditional cryptocurrencies have a fixed supply, personly requires the ability to create as many tokens as are required for user registrations. This would mean we have to create a special kind of inflationary cryptocurrency which is right now not within our operational scope.