RE: Past, Present, and Future - A Personal Roadmap (56K Steem Power, ~1000 Followers, 90 Blogposts, and 5 Pounds Later)
I was running a series of workshops before Steemit, and stalled the idea of a co-working, co-living blockchain enrichment hub like what you are currently running. I secured some funds but just put it on hold first as I'm currently quite involved with the activities in here.
One of the biggest problems while planning out the hub (I was imagining it to be a place where anyone can just hop in, stay for awhile, and work on any projects running in the facility.. and enjoy the place.. on an island) was to figure out a core product / service in which the facility could sustain itself, while renting out space for others. But i guess you'd have more understanding of the playing field since you've been running such a thing. Personally, I think there may be a use case for Steemit. What I'm researching atm is to use a combination of apps of the aggregator economy (airbnb, uber, etc) or the upcoming apps of sharing economy (arcade city, slock.it, etc) to reduce any costs of building something new. Like in the case of Regus International, they do build and rent out spaces for startups and the likes. Well, for me it's still up in the air with nothing concrete. One reason why choosing an island like Penang or Bali, is that the hub may also be a contractor that tries to blockchain the entire space. And the facilities (entertainment, transportation, internet, etc) built around these places are pretty decent too.
At first, I thought maybe www.colony.io may be necessary for cross-contribution checks.. but after experiencing Steemit, I thought maybe such a thing isn't so necessary. I like the low-barrier kind of deal going on here, and there's a self-policing thing going on here to keep reputations in check.
Yeah Ethereum is difficult (at least for me), failed my course with b9labs, and now resitting. It's still a bit of a hassle, but perhaps necessary. Btw, Steemit has plans to develop their own smart contracts as well. But certainly not Turing-complete, I think? Not much details atm though.
At the moment, the hub I'm running is almost cash-flow positive, but there's still a lot more to do. After being 15 years involved in digital businesses I needed the feeling of building something in the real world as well. In the last 2 years I gathered a tremendous amount of information about the processes. The business model, as I see it right now, is a hybrid between renting the space and the online layer on top of it (the space can hold events, those are filmed and then made available for the online community as well). It's basically extending the real life membership to the online layer. The first part of bootstrapping the whole thing is very difficult (the chicken and egg problem) because you have to produce a lot of evergreen content to be consumed on the online layer. And another interesting direction is franchising the whole thing. I'm still working at it.
Yup could do very well too if one has an established online layer, especially a digital platform where just about everything is measurable.. Will be looking forward to your findings if you're planning to publish them here :)