Want to appreciate a friend? Don't just say thanks, 'SwearFor' them

Accolades and recognition are always short lived. This is because they are relative. What a college professor might think to have been brilliant might be of no relevance at a work place. Even within workplaces, great performance at one organization doesn't necessarily mean that it can be bench-marked to the corresponding level in another organization.

He invented SwearFor, an online platform where you can swear (think recommending) for an individual. It came out of a thought process that our lives are filled with valuable moments which get lost. Here's what Samson had to say -

When you do a favor for someone and the person wants to appreciate it, they just say “thanks”. The digital age has so far not been able to capture and highlight that moment for your future use. When someone does you a valuable favor, you want to tell the world or repay them immediately. Few weeks later, you forget it and that moment has lost its value. Now with SwearFor, you can send the person a quick Swear of appreciation, whereby you will project that person positively. Facebook for instance is a timeline of how you feel you have lived your life. In my humble opinion, what matters more is how others see you.

Subsequently, you can issue Swears for someone who is really skilled at doing something, whether it is building software, writing, cooking, carpentry and what not. The idea is that if you have 20 Swearers issuing Swears to you on the same aspect about you, your SwearFor profile will do a lot of talking for you.

When asked what his long time goal is with Swearfor, Samson said, "When a person walking into a job interview is habituated to or is expected to show their SwearFor Profile ID as a means for establishing their identity, that would be quite a nice thing to achieve.

SwearFor currently has no visible revenue model and Samson confirmed that they were currently focussing on growing their userbase and ensure more engagement on the platform. He says, "We are fortunate enough to have hit the reasoning among people that sooner or later, you will find the need to use who you have been, so better start collecting Swears today, from people with whom you are in good terms with. Yes, we have a little over 18,000 users. But to be honest I did not think it was a lot. There are products growing much more rapidly than us, but SwearFor is here to stay."While Samson isn't looking to raise funds for SwearFor at the moment, he did share that the few investors that he wrote to responded favourably.

Interestingly, for a product that says good things about others, SwearFor doesn't have a messaging system or a facility to write a testimonial. Samson is aware of this and he says, "We have stayed away from building a messaging system into SwearFor. People connect purely by Swears. There are way too many messaging systems out there, and we do not want to be competing for that space. Value should not get lost in messages, so we want to keep it to Swears."

Check out SwearFor and tell us what you think