RE: Why BeScouted and how to Get BeScouted SMT early.
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.