Why BeScouted and how to Get BeScouted SMT early.
While Steemit.com or Busy.org are amazing blogging platforms, different types of content need different content discovery mechanisms. That is why after spending two months on Steemit we have decided to connect our photography community BeScouted to Steem blockchain.
BeScouted is a photography community that connects businesses with photography industry professionals where everybody can create a contract through our unique casting tool we have developed and find members for their TFP photoshoots or find paid work in visual media creation sector.
Apart from that, everybody can create their portfolio and since it is on Steem blockchain receive all the rewards just by sharing their photos just like on Steemit.com
Discoverability
Many of you who are on Steemit for a longer time know, how difficult it is to track content of your favorite authors, and get your work discovered even when you have thousands of followers. Since BeScouted is a photography community we concentrate of discoverability of quality photographic content and talents.
We also do not believe in content discovery through the value of the rewards, that is why BeScouted jas semidiscreet voting mechanics, meaning that you do not know how many upvotes an image has before you decide to upvote it. We show the value of collected rewards for now, but the sorting of popular content is linear meaning the more upvotes you have the higher it will appear in POPULAR tab.
If you believe that your quality photography content does not get deserved attention try BeScouted and also keep in mind that anything you upload on BeScouted will also be cross posted on your Steemit blog.
You can read more about our Mission and Vision here.
SMT
Eventually we will be launching our SMT to fund further development and enhance functionality of the website as a native token will have so many utility options, like image sale micro transactions, settling payments in our SMT with the photoshoot participants for the business side as that will save a lot of time and money for all parties, unlocking different features depending on the amount held, fingerprinting images created through our casting system which would allow fair reward distribution through beneficiaries mechanism each time a transaction with the image is made, face recognition search for casting and many more to mention later in our SMT whitepaper.
We are already getting interest from VC's that are considering investing into BeScouted but taking money from corporate investors restricts liberty of action a lot. Venture Capitalist invest money because they want to get returns back as fast as possible. So they are pushing different monetizing options, initiating early sale of the company or mergers. We are not saying that all Venture Capitalist are bad, some of them are true visionaries that help with their network and experience, but we would like to stay independent for as long as possible and let the community decide the direction they want to see BeScouted moving in.
Getting SMT early.
Since it is not possible to build SMT yet, we can not start any kind of distribution now. After some thought we came up with a simple plan how we could reward those people that like what BeScouted is doing and would like to delegate some of their Steem Power to @bescouted.com account that is used to promote quality content on BeScouted and to introduce even more people to STEEM and Steemit.com.Delegation.
BeScouted can not guarantee that SMT will be created because much of this depends on third parties and existence of technical possibility to create one. So far we have information just as everybody else that creation of SMT token will be possible and SMT whitepaper.
So delegation of your Steem Power is not considered and agreement or any form of contract. Only delegate your Steem Power to @bescouted.com in your good will and desire to support our project. You can withdraw your delegation at any time with no consequences.
HOWEVER. For those who will delegate any amount of their STEEM POWER to @bescouted.com we would like to give a portion of our SMT token in initial distribution as a sign of our gratitude and these are the following guidelines:
- We will be tracking and recording delegations with this tool. http://www.steemreports.com/delegation-info/?account=bescouted.com
- Minimum amount of delegated Steem Power should be no less that 100 SP for the simplicity of tracking.
- You must hold your delegation for 6 months to be eligible to receive our SMT in initial distribution.
- 1 SP delegated for 6 month equals an equivalent of 1 USD of SMT that will be created.
For example. You delegate 1000 Steem Power to @bescouted.com for 6 months and will be eligible to receive our SMT tokens worth of 1000 USD equivalent when we do our initial distribution.
If you withdraw your delegation before 6 months period there is no way can calculate proportions and ratios. Of course you will have our gratitude for your very appreciated input into development of a global photography community that makes lives of millions of freelancers easier.
So far we would like to thank the following supporters for delegating their SP:
- @creadordelfuturo - a whoooooping 15 000 SP.
- @dexter-k - 1000 SP
- @shortcut - 100 SP
Thank you guys for your support of our mission and for sporting hundreds of content creators on BeScouted as they are our fellow Steemians too.
If you do not want to delegate but you love photography, you can also support amazing content creators on www.bescouted.com by connecting your steemit account as you will receive all curation rewards as you do on Steemit.
And finally we would like to thank everybody else form Steemit community:
Developers who helped and are continuing to help us with the development of BeScouted on Steem blockchain.
SP Delegators for substantial support and selfless action towards the whole community.
Content Creators for creating amazing and engaging content.
Curators for Upvotes and Resteems.
We will continue to bootstrap BeScouted to become the biggest photography community in the world that rewards content creators.
David
This is very interesting and deserves wider attention! I just created an account. It was easy, I didn't yet bother going through any further verification steps to participate in projects, direct message, etc. as I just wanted to get in and test out the voting and Steem integration. Linked Steem with my posting key and was ready to go.
It took me just a few moments to orient myself. I had to realize that some of the contributors have not created Steem accounts and promoting their photos did not trigger a Steem upvote. I think once they see others on the site having some success, everyone will sign up and link to Steem without a doubt.
The design is nice and you've really succeeded in building a community before Steemit Inc. launches communities on Steemit.com.
How are you (or the community if it is consensus based) moderating content so that it stays on target? What's preventing someone from signing up and just posting memes?
And not being a photographer myself, I must admit I'm most inspired by the tech and the potential you're demonstrating here. Once you're up and running is there the potential to deploy other instances of the site with different concepts or "skins" so to speak? I.E. could the backend tech you've created be licensed to a person or group to do the same with a website based on illustrative and graphic arts rather than photography?
Definitely considering delegating a little SP... interested in seeing how this plays out!
The community was created a little while ago, with the emphasis on Castings/Projects that can be created by anybody and will be bringing businesses, casting, modeling agencies, and production services on board once we get more traction and stremaline processes even further as right now we are working lean and bootstrapping to see if we have a market fit. But once we have discovered Steem blockchain and love the concept we started implementation immediately which will help us with traction in the future as well as will allow transaction settlement in CryptoCurrencies for instant and 0% transaction fee settlements. And not to mention countless other applications.
Some of the community members are still waiting for Steemit account approvals, as we can not afford paying for their account creation, some of them are waiting for a week or more already but we are sure nearly everybody will take advantage of the deal. Why not to. Which will be much simpler after Velocity and effortless onboarding.
Currently we have centralized moderation of content which we hope to change to some form of consensus algorithm in the future.
We are also thinking of other verticals once we get the business side up and running on photography, we are already hosting some actors, but will be definitely looking for ways to include other categories and as of right now with our MVP version creation of other instances is not enabled as per say, but that is a very nice idea so thank you for bringing it up, we will definitely consider it once we have more resources for development of core architecture as we already are getting these questions from the community and there is clear demand for that.
And thank you very much for your well thought and lengthy comment, that is what we need to develop a tool that the community will love and use. The main restriction right now is money.
And thank you for the thoughtful reply and info!
I'm not sure... but you may want to reevaluate the USD equivalent value proposition you've made for the delegation/SMT distribution. I realize it's all tentative like you say and subject to change... but you could very easily receive a few hundred thousand SP worth of delegation. To my understanding, when you launch the SMT you'd only be able to give people the USD equivalent in SMT tokens that you're proposing above by actually funding your SMT (either personally or through investors) with that USD equivalent in Steem. I feel like it would be more prudent to announce a designated percentage of the initial token distribution and divide it among the delegators in proportion to their contribution. I think it's dangerous to talk USD equivalents this early, before the market can value any SMT launch you make.
And again, I could be thinking wrong... SMTs are nebulous at best at this point and you may have it better reasoned out.
Either way I'll send at least a small delegation your way, whether it rides the six months or not I'd love to see you build your community.
With any more self contained community like you've created at BeScouted, the keys to those users doing well and growing their influence and rewards in relation to Steem at large is definitely activity and retaining Steem Power. An active, contained community should create an interesting feedback cycle as long as people are voting and not cashing out at a fast rate. I'd be interested if you have ideas behind incentivizing activity and holding SP. You're creating a very interesting test case here!
If you would have to fund your SMT tokens before making a distribution that would kill the whole purpose of of raising money for development of the project through an SMT ICO. Do you know this for a fact or is this just your presumption?
We are thinking of raising a Capped amount for development needs at a fixed price on first come first served basis and distribute a certain amount to the community, if we get too much delegation (which is hardly possible) we would probably make an announcement that we have more SP than we can effectively curate and stop accepting new delegations. (well since you can't stop accepting them it would mean that this offer would not extend to new delegators).
Designating a percentage would be a very centralizing move as it could happen that we have 20k SP delegated for 10% of tokens?
I will contact you on steemit chat tomorrow if you do not mind, and we can have a prolonged discussion there.
Considering retaining SP or our SMT we will be developing different features that will become available depending on the amount you are holding, like you get your voting slider at 500 SP now for example. It is basically like a membership, that you can earn by being an active and valuable community member, or you can buy and hold certain amount, to use these features and sell it when you do not need them anymore, unlike spending money on a monthly basis for buying memberships as it is now. It is all hypothetical now and actual features and use case scenarios will be indicated in our SMT whitepaper and i would not want to speculate them here now as everything is in a constant change.
And as i have already said, delegation should be done from good will and in support of the community as we do not benefit from it personally. Any curation rewards received from that delegated amount will go the development of the project, paying for the servers, nodes and other utilities. This is not some form of obligation or a contract, but a guideline which we will do our best to fulfill when the time comes, in order to maintain the trust of the community that takes years to build and one day to destroy.
Photography industry is more than 50 billion dollars annually at least. And the whole sector is still operating on outdated tools and processes with countless middlemen leaching from the freelancers as freelancers create 90% of the whole visual content. It is extremely fragmented, hence we believe a social marketplace built buy community for the community would be of extreme value.
Sure, you can hit me up in chat. I certainly don't have any inside info and I think we're on the same page. I was just pointing out that in order for a new token to have any value, it would need to be infused via the market. Whatever the size of your initial fundraise is should theoretically be the starting market cap of the token. So if you've pledged $100k USD in token value to delegators, $100k of the initial fundraise wouldn't be available for development. You'd just want to be fairly confident in raising multiples of that amount to keep the delegator share reasonable. You just may want to consider a reasonable cap from the outset. I definitely see your point that a percentage system could end up awarding too many tokens if delegation amounts are too low.
Put a small delegation your way, no expectations, not thinking of it as an investment. I think you're one of the furthest along in preparing for a really viable SMT and have an interesting model that I'd like to see succeed!
*edit - I also like what you're describing for the holding of SP/SMT conferring subscription membership type benefits. Definitely what I think will be needed for successful projects to maintain value and not just "bleed out!"
Thank you for your delegation, we appreciate it a lot! Having many smaller delegations would only allow us to distribute SMT more evenly.
Lets say hypothetically, our goal to raise is 10 million USD for the development, we are not saying this will be the cap, but just for an example. We will create 12 million SMT coins in total/There will be different distribution mechanics for current users, some free tokens maybe etc. 10 million will be actual ICO with a fixed price 1 SMT = 1 USD.
500k will be an ICO presale. The rest of 1.5 million will be distributed to current BeScouted members and early delegators.
So lets presume we have 300 000 in SP delegations, so we will distribute those tokens 1 Delegated Steem Power for 6 month = 1 SMT = 1USD.
What will happen after an ICO in a secondary market we can not tell as of right now. The price may drop to 10 cents or it can go up to 10 USD per SMT. All is hypothetical and we do not want to speculate here.
But the point is that delegators will get an amount of BeScouted SMT at fixed presale price. The amounts and prices here are just for hypothetical discussion.
What we would like to happen is to get as many people as possible involved, have their vested interest in BeScouted, spread the news, and be active participants in BeScouted Eco System.
Be involved in a discussion with the community, hear out their ideas, and listen to what they have to say and what tools solutions they would like to see on BeScouted as a marketplace and after summarising implement the ones that benefit the community the most. We are asking everybody to send their suggestions or ideas to [email protected]
We could raise money through a VC, but raising through a VC has some disadvantages regarding freedom of action. We want to try and build a community for the community by the community with BeScouted as a coordinator of an effort as so many amazing open source projects fail due to the lack of that "push".
So why not just do something that was so hard to do prior to the blockhain and give it another try now when we have the technology in place and let people decide for themselves, take control and responsibility into their hands and see how it develops?
The power of a collective mind, experience and knowledge is immensely strong we just need to find a way how to harness it and make the most out of it.
Glad to hear about projects seeking to launch via SMT. Please continue to update on Bescouted's development process. Thanks for posting
Thank you for you time to read. We will definitely be doing regular updates.
@bescouted.com Steemit is gonna change lots of lifes, it has changed mine and many others but that is just the beginning. Followed
Could not agree with you more.
Only if I had SO I could delegate lol anyway I am very happy to have found BeScouted as you guys now and I am excited to be growing with all of you :)
As everything is still in motion and is not set in stone. We can promise that we will be looking for different ways to make sure that most active community members will get a share of BeScouted SMT initial distribution for being active BeScouted members.
AWWWW You guys have too much of a good heart. Be careful sometimes in business that can get People in trouble. :P But You guys are just amazing
Good Post
Good Post
I gotta say I am super happy to be a part of this project. Being a photographer myself it really excites me to see this direction developing in the Steemit community. It is exactly what I hoped for a year ago when I joined Steemit and to see it developing so quickly is amazing. I can't wait for the SMT to launch and I'll be doing everything I can to promote Bescouted :)
And we are super happy to have you on BeScouted @dexter-k We believe that things will pickup speed even more as the time goes and we will be able to be a part of a global block chain enabled community that makes their own decisions and builds ecosystems that meet the needs of the community and not only needs of investors and platform builders. Such projects have a chance to expand exponentially to a scale never seen before. And thank you for your effort!
Should you have any ideas, thoughts, suggestions how to build it better to suit the needs of the community more you know how to contact us on BeScouted directly. Cheers!
This is great news, wish you guys the best! You have my boy @dexter-K - I'm not a professional photographer and I don't have any SP to delegate (if that changes, I definitely will) but I'll be upvoting the heck out of your content. Keep it up!
I believe in your project and I know you have something with great potential there! From the little bit I have, I'll definitely delegate some.
If I may make a recommendation: with a post like this, in my humble opinion, the most important would be a link to a page where you can make the delegation. Make it easy for the ones willing..