@steemhunt expanding outside STEEM: Taking It Into Social Commerce

@steemhunt is the first application that I am aware of that outpaced the traditional sites. According to their latest post, their numbers far exceed the comparable site Product Hunt.

Here is a chart they put together.

The theory here is that tokenization and providing incentive for hunts is more effective. The numbers seem to bear that out.

@steemhunt is going to bring the STEEM blockchain into the social commerce realm. Through their multi-pronged approach, they are seeking to become a full platform of product discovery and promotion. At the same time, they aim to have the HUNT become a token that is used for bounties to hunters and discounted purchases to early adopters.

In short, they are creating a self-contained ecosystem that will unite product creators, hunters, and early adopters. This will help newer products find the "word of mouth" advertising that can be very difficult to acquire.

Thus far, the platform is focused upon technology products. This is something they are going to be expanding. To successfully achieve adding newer participants, they will stray outside the STEEM userbase. This will include them signing people up like any other site without the delay of approval from Steemit.

At this point, I am not sure if this announcement is coinciding with the targeted date of Hard Fork 20 or not. It would make sense that, to fully use the platform, each person signed up has a STEEM account. This is going to be possible for applications after the fork.

So what is the @steemhunt platform going to look like?

• Steemhunt - a community where hunters introduce cool new products
• Reviewhunt - a marketing channel where makers suggest large discounts or bounties in return for quality reviews from hunters
• Ideahunt - a Kickstarter-like platform where makers run crowdfunding campaigns

The first one has been in use since @steemhunt came online. Hunters posted thousands of different products over the last months.

Now it is time for them to move into the second phase.

This is how they described it.

Makers buy HUNT tokens to post bounties or sell products with discounted prices in Reviewhunt in return for quality reviews. Hunters can use HUNT tokens to purchase products or earn tokens from makers.

https://steemit.com/steemhunt/@steemhunt/introducing-hunt-platform-front-page-for-product-influencers-and-makers-by-token-economy

This is where we can start to see the social commerce idea take hold. People will be able to buy products using the HUNT tokens which they earn by posting, upvoting, and commenting on @steemhunt. At the same time, demand for the HUNT token is being created by having those entities interested in promoting their products purchase the token. This is used to provide incentive to hunters and others to promote the product.

We also see the third prong, Ideahunt, where HUNT tokens can also be used as for crowdfunding. Here people can get behind ideas they like with the money they earn being a part of the HUNT ecosystem.

The @steemhunt team put together another website detailing all they are planning along with a road map for the next year.

https://token.steemhunt.com/

It is really exciting to see the evolution of some of these applications and, in turn, the STEEM blockchain. People are setting up real world businesses meant to operate in a decentralized way. Here is an example of where tokenization actually increased the participation over the traditional sites that operated in this arena.

The shift to social commerce is an easy one. It only makes sense that the HUNT is used as a centerpiece to bring makers and hunters together. It is an idea we can expect to see duplicated over the next 6-12 months by other entities. Commerce is, for the most part, all about where the eyeballs are. This is where businesses gravitate towards.

How many will be on STEEM? With on-boarding of people via the applications, this could end up being hundreds of millions of people. Since the same user information applies to any application, all applications can increase their reach as more people join the STEEM ecosystem.

The final thing that I want to mention is the fact that @steemhunt is airdropping 100M HUNT tokens to Steemians. This means that hundreds of thousands of accounts can have HUNT in them. These are possible buyers for products that are posted on Reviewhunt. Essentially, they put the money in the hands of the buyers and are seeking to get sellers on their platform.

Things are about to ratchet up on the STEEM blockchain. If Hard Fork 20 goes off as planned, we might well see a large increase in users as the existing applications start promoting outside the STEEM blockchain. This will attract more users who are not familiar with STEEM but are interested in the particular application they are using.

We are going to rapidly move away from blockchain identification. The majority of people will not care what blockchain they are on. In fact, they will have no idea. Instead, to them, the important criteria is the application used and what they get paid in (SMT). Since many of these application ecosystems will have commerce tied to them, tokens will be spent on their platform. There will not even be a need to convert them to STEEM.

This is how I see things unfolding.

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