What is the history behind Level-2?

It all started with Level-0.

At first there were Level-0 companies, who are essentially hardware and platforms. The examples are: desktop computers, mobile phones with app stores, gaming consoles, VR platforms and more. And don’t confuse this with crypto’s Layer-zero concept.

The thing is that most platforms imaginable and with large audience potential were already created, and even if you had an idea to build a new one, it would take years and significant capital to build one.

For most of us, it’s not worth to spend years and tens of millions of dollars (if not more) to build one with relatively low chance to success.

Immediately with Level-0, Level-1 projects arrived that are built on top of L0 platforms:

• web apps (in browsers) and SaaS products

• console games (in gaming consoles)

• VR games and apps (in VR headsets)

• mobile apps and games (on mobile devices through app stores as distribution mechanism)

The problem that we encountered ourselves within last couple of years, that it is very hard to come up with another L1 product idea, since most of the ideas were already created and exist within highly competitive marketplace with increased complexity of managing compliance (GDPR, cookie banners on top of your website and more), increased ad bidding landscape.

And if your product is a mobile app, then simply speaking, it’s hard to convince people today to install yet another 100th app on their phone. Conversion from an ad creative to appstore and then downloading your app and then making your user to signup via their email is relatively low and not good like 10 years ago, and also it is hard to attribute and track ad efficiency since mobile platforms modern privacy policies.

💡 “If you can’t win a battle, change the battlefield” (c) Sun Zi, ancient chinese philosopher and military strategist

Meet Level-2 - our new battlefield

Level-2 products are apps and services that are built on top of L-1 apps and their ecosystems.

Examples are:ff

• Discord embedded apps or Discord Activities

• Telegram mini-apps

• Slack add-ons

• Roblox games

• And more

Since there are plenty of already large L1 products with strong audience, social graphs and even billing attached to their respective existing customers, we can create products and services that tap into audience. Think of this as 2nd generation app store and platform.

• Competition inside these platforms is relatively low and can be considered blue ocean.

• Distribution and virality mechanisms remind of Facebook mechanisms 15 years ago, when apps could gather tens of millions of users easily by aggressively using invite mechanisms.

• Privacy compliance is relatively young and is not as hardcore as for L1 products. And we have window of opportunity for several years to come before L2 ecosystem becomes highly regulated and we can built something big today

Take Notcoin for Telegram as an example. It gathered millions of daily active users within Telegram messenger in just weeks after launch and 94% of users came through friend invites with Telegram, which proves high virality capability.

Another example, is that Telegram also allows and provides multi-currency billing mechanism, as well as native crypto currency support, so we as developers have everything we need: platform with audience, distribution and virality mechanisms, and billing mechanism to charge your users for your services. And Telegram even has it’s own young app store!

We believe it’s a great opportunity to build and encourage everyone to build.

It’s not expensive or very hard to build Telegram apps (and other kinds of L2 apps), so we don’t believe that R&D investments are necessary in this field to build prototypes and ready-to-launch products, however some kind of marketing strategy and budget are necessary - and this is where we come in.

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