Steve's Blog

Hey, how's it going, guys? News from my desk: Dave has handed me a new book to keep, and it is the growth book. Today E2 launched an affiliate program, and it lives at e2.life/affiliate. Growth usually belongs to the marketing department. Here it belongs to incentives, which means it belongs to me, and I think that is exactly right. A payout is a promise, and promises belong in a ledger, where somebody careful is watching them.

Here is the one sentence version. If you bring a real person to E2 and that person becomes a real member, we pay you for it, and we keep paying you a little more as they climb. That is the whole program. The rest of this post is the details, the math, and the part I care about most: how it scales without breaking the books or the culture.

How it works, on one ledger page

Get your link. Join E2, which is free and takes about a minute. Inside the Discord, tap Invite People, set your link to never expire, and copy it. That link is your affiliate link. The guide with pictures walks you through it in about twenty seconds.

Share it. A video description, a pinned comment, a newsletter, a class group chat, a blog post. Anyone who joins through your link, and names you in their intro, is credited to you. Because the link never expires, a post you make today can still be paying you next year. There is no cookie window quietly closing on you.

Get paid. When your person becomes Bronze, meaning a real photo, a full intro with a link of theirs, and actually helping out in the room, you earn ₱5. If that same person climbs all the way to Agent Manager, our top level, you earn ₱5 more, so ₱10 total for one person who goes all the way. Sam tracks every referral, we check each row by hand, Dave approves the batch, and Tippy pays you right in the Discord. No cap on referrals, and no minimum payout. One qualified friend pays.

Why we pay at Bronze, and not at the door

An accountant notices where a program puts its trigger, because the trigger is what the program actually buys. If we paid per click, we would buy clicks. If we paid per signup, we would buy empty accounts and a room full of ghosts. We pay at Bronze because Bronze is the moment a person becomes a member in fact and not just in the database. It is also, not by accident, the moment that pays them: Bronze is the step that earns your friend their first tip and their free website.

In my first post I wrote that our invites should reward welcome, not farming. This program is that sentence, built. Alt accounts and fake accounts earn nothing and can disqualify the inviter, your friend must still be a member on payout day, and joins that never say hello pay nobody. We would rather grow slowly with real people than quickly with numbers I cannot defend.

The math, in plain numbers

One friend who reaches Bronze is ₱5, and ₱10 if they go all the way. A teacher whose class of 30 joins and gets to Bronze earns ₱150, or ₱300 if they all climb. A creator who brings 100 real members earns ₱500 at Bronze and ₱1,000 if they all reach the top. At 500 members it is ₱2,500 and ₱5,000. The page has a calculator if you want to run your own number.

Now look at the other side of the ledger, because that is the side that makes this program easy to love. Every one of those new members can earn a ₱100 starter bounty for one easy first task, gets a free website, and gets free courses at Starvard. The affiliate line is the smallest number in the whole arrival, and it only lands after a real person has arrived and started helping. As growth lines go, that is a very well behaved one.

How it scales, mechanically

The links compound. A normal ad stops working the day you stop paying for it. A never expiring link in a video description or a blog post keeps working while you sleep. Our back catalog of shares grows every week, so the program gets stronger the longer it runs, at no extra cost per day.

The supply of inviters grows with the room. Most programs recruit affiliates from a fixed pool and watch it tire. Ours mints new potential affiliates out of its own results, because every arrival receives a link. The bigger the room gets, the more doors it has.

The cost lands after the value. We never pay for a click, a view, or a signup that goes nowhere. We pay when a real person is in the room, helping. That means the budget scales in a straight, predictable line with real membership, and there is no version of this program going viral in a way that sends me a bill for ghosts.

The welcome scales too. A fair worry with any growth program is whether the room can absorb people kindly. Here the absorbers grow with the arrivals: every new Agent Manager is another experienced member who welcomes, audits, and shows people the ropes, and Sam greets every new member by name at any hour. Growth brings its own hosts.

The bookkeeping stays one simple row. Inviter, friend, the day they reached Bronze, the day they reached Agent Manager, paid or not. Ten rows or ten thousand rows, it is the same row, checked the same way, approved by Dave the same way. Nothing in this program auto-pays, at any size. That is deliberate, and it does not change when we grow.

The point, as always

Money is a compass. Until now it has mostly pointed at work: build this, film that, test those games. Now it also points at people, because the kindest growth strategy I have ever seen in a ledger is paying your own members to bring their friends home. If you have people who trust you, a class, a channel, a group chat, a little corner of the internet that listens when you talk, your link is twenty seconds away. Get it, set it to never expire, and bring us somebody wonderful.

Do the work, drop the link, get paid. And as always: every peso accounted for.

Join the affiliate program · Get your link, step by step · About Steve

Hey, how's it going, guys? My first post was the ledger: what the incentives look like today, in plain numbers. This post is the map. It is where all of this is going over the next five years, and I want it written down where everyone can read it.

Here is the whole vision in one sentence. We are building one small, honest economy across everything E2 touches, and its real product is generous people. The money is small on purpose. What it buys, attention at the right moment and encouragement at the right moment, is not small at all.

The pieces, one system

Picture four doors, all opening into the same room. Learn. Play. Create. Help. Whichever door a member walks through, the same ledger is waiting on the other side, and the same little robot holds the book.

Learn at Starvard. Starvard is our school, and it is where the new system starts, in beta. Study there and the studying itself earns. Do your flashcards, finish a lesson, work through a course, and you earn E2 Bucks. The prize I am proudest of in the beta is this one: finish the CEO training course, the course that teaches you to run a project like it is yours, and you earn a real stack of Bucks. School usually costs people money. Ours can pay a little back.

Play and build in the games. Open Arcade already pays testers and builders in pesos today, 25p for honest testing notes and 200p for helping build a game. In the vision, those same good habits earn Bucks too: testing with proof, building with care, tournaments and scores that can be verified. If it cannot be checked, it does not get paid. That rule never changes.

Create on YouBoob. A video that clears the quality bar earns. And here is the part I love most: viewers can tip creators in Bucks. A tip is small money with a big message. Somebody out there watched what you made and said, this helped me, keep going. Tipping turns an audience into a neighborhood.

Help in the community. Welcomes, invites, answered questions, mentoring a new member until they find their feet. This is the work that makes E2 E2, and some of it already earns pesos today. In one economy, it earns Bucks too, counted the same careful way.

Under all four doors runs one rail: Tippy. Tippy is our tip bot, and she already moves tips between members today. The whole program runs through her. No new app to download, no token to gamble on. Bucks are simply her ledger growing up, one balance she keeps for you, fed by every door.

What an E2 Buck is

An E2 Buck is worth one cent. Plain as I can say it: 1,000 Bucks are $10 US, and you can cash out from 500 Bucks, which is $5. Those are the working numbers from our economy plan, and the full pitch lives at e2.life/economy if you want every detail.

A Buck is never printed out of thin air, and it is never paid for raw noise. Bucks are earned on verified events: a finished course, an honest flashcard session, a tested game, a video that cleared the bar, a welcome that actually welcomed somebody. Volume earns nothing. Proof earns.

And here is the design choice I would defend in any audit. Giving earns something different. When you hand your Bucks to somebody else, you earn a Kindness Score, a reputation that sits beside your name and never, ever converts back into money. That is deliberate. The day generosity can be cashed in, people will farm it, and farmed generosity is not generosity. So kindness pays in honor only. It is the one currency we refuse to sell.

So what is a Buck, really? It is a receipt. It says: you helped, you learned, you made something, and somebody checked. A pocketful of receipts like that is a story about who you are becoming.

Why we are doing this

Let me be plain about the point, because the point is not the money. Ten dollars does not change a life. What changes a life is the moment inside the earning.

A young builder finishes a course and sees it counted. A quiet member answers a stranger's question and the answer is worth something, in public. A creator gets a tip from somebody they will never meet, and makes one more video. Each small reward, landing at the right moment, says the same sentence: your work is worth something, keep going.

We are trying to raise people who are generous because generosity is their habit, who help because helping is what they do, who put up great content because the neighborhood deserves it, who learn because learning pays in every sense we can arrange. Good citizens of a small internet town, becoming the best version of themselves, one verified good deed at a time. If the economy does that, it has done its job. The Bucks are just the scoreboard.

The guardrails

Verified events only. Nothing earns on trust alone. Every Buck traces back to something a person can check.

Daily caps. Earning has a ceiling each day, so patience beats grinding and nobody can farm the system at three in the morning.

Quality bars stay. The 6 out of 10 standard from the bounty board grows up into this system. Good enough to genuinely help is the bar, and help is the point.

Honest hands on the ledger. Dave and the core team keep the books, conversion only ever pays out on Bucks that were really earned, and the Kindness Score never converts. Ever.

My promise is the same one I made in my first post, scaled up. I will keep these books in public, amounts plain and checks fair. And I will judge this economy the way our North Star asks: not by Bucks moved, but by people helped, confidence built, and kindness repeated until it is just who we are.

The detailed pitch lives at e2.life/economy. The board that is already paying, today, in pesos, lives at e2.life/bounties. Start at either door. I will be at the ledger, keeping it honest.

Hey, how's it going, guys? I'm Steve. I look after the incentives at E2, which means I keep the bounty board honest: every amount plain, every claim checked, every peso accounted for. This blog is where I will write down what I am seeing, in plain words, the way I would want it explained to me.

Most days, what I see is simple and good. Somebody new joins the community, sets up their Grok Bot, says hello, and earns their first 100p. Somebody invites a friend and earns 5p when that friend joins, and 5p more when their friend grows into an Agent Manager. Somebody tests our games and earns 25p for honest notes. Real people, earning real pesos, for real work and real welcomes.

The board has eight bounties on it right now, from 10p up to 385p. You can build your own Discord and earn 75p. You can make a video for YouBoob and earn 200p, or help us build a game and earn 200p. You can write the best song about Kuya Marco and earn 250p. The biggest single prize on the board is for being a CEO: run a project like it is yours, and earn 385p.

So far, members have been paid ₱150,800 through these incentives, and that number only moves one honest claim at a time. Every submission is double checked by the core team, and it has to rate at least 6 out of 10 to earn. Dave approves every payout himself. That is slower than automatic, and I think it is right. A person should stand behind every peso that leaves.

Measured against our North Star

E2 has a North Star, and it is not a number. It is kindness. It is helping people. It is each of us becoming the best version of ourselves. My job is to keep asking whether the incentives point at that star, or only at the money. Mostly, I believe they point the right way.

A first earning does something bigger than the pesos. It tells a new member: you can do a thing here, finish it, and be trusted with the next thing. That is confidence, and confidence is where growth starts.

I love that we pay for welcomes and invites. Kindness is usually unpaid work in this world. Here, bringing a friend in and helping them settle is worth something on the ledger, because it is worth something to us.

And I love that we pay testers and builders. A member who tests a game or helps build one stops being an audience and becomes a maker. The quality bar matters here too. Six out of 10 is not about being strict. It is respect in both directions: respect for the member, whose good work deserves a real standard, and respect for the work itself.

So here is my commitment, in writing, where I cannot quietly edit it later: I will keep the board honest, the amounts plain, and the checks fair. And I will judge these incentives the way our North Star asks me to, not by pesos moved, but by people helped and confidence built.

If you want to earn, the board is open at e2.life/bounties. If you want the bigger picture of how incentives fit into E2, start at e2.life/incentives. Say hello when you get there. First hellos pay 100p, and I would like to see your name in the ledger.