RE: My buddy @timcliff thinks investors are key! I think seeking steem investors puts the cart before the horse...
We need to concentrate on making more places and things to spend on, to even have something to invest IN!
Yes, exactly - but building these things takes investment. You're personally investing in your projects, and I'm personally investing in mine, and we have a bunch of other people doing that too. We're outside funding, in a way, or at least I am - I don't expect my Steem projects to be self-sustainable until late 2020 at the earliest. I'm going to be pouring resources into them for a while.
But if we're reliant only on the bootstrapping method, those things will get done much more slowly. If we can find a way to get some passive funding to come in and invest in building those small businesses, we'll be much more effective.
I think Tim's focus is too broad, looking for people to "invest" in Steem when what we need is people investing on Steem, but attracting investment is something we should be thinking about.
Right on the point.
The Focus on seeking investors must be on steem projects, not on steem itself.
Yer in the ballpark. And not wrong.
I do think we have enough business owners and entrepreneurs here already doing business online though to create quite an initial catalog of online and offline businesses that could take steem essentially immediately.
I'm one of them, and if there's a proof-of-concept I'm willing to follow it. But there are three essential problems that keep me from making more of an effort to sell real-world goods for Steem. (Though I'm happy to if someone asks.)
If I can manage to get more of my existing customers onto Steem maybe this will make more sense. But I don't see Steem as an effective way of generating new customers for my existing businesses at all. Maybe different forms of retail businesses will feel otherwise. Somebody like @arseniclullaby who makes and posts and writes about comics and also sells comics might do better than someone with more diverse work like me. I know he already sold some through his blog here because I bought them.
I'll probably be starting a Steem account for my tiny publishing company pretty soon, because why not, but I'll be a little surprised if it leads anywhere.