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RE: Adventures in running a Steem based business
This might be crazy and impossible, but wondering if you could "franchise" your operation. License the code to others who can operate it on their own server. Franchisee would possibly pay a fee up front to buy in, and and possibly a fixed or percent of profit fee ongoing. Just throwing that out there. Best wishes to you and all your business endeavors!
That's an interesting idea, but there are dangers in doing that. Steemvoter is still a business at the end of the day, and I don't really feel like giving away the recipe for the secret sauce, so to speak. Competition is healthy and all, but I'm not going out of my way to help it out!
In the real World, franchises have territories they are assigned, so the don't all compete in the same space. Not sure if there is any analogue to that online, so I see your point.
Then again, if you have an agreement to receive an ongoing percentage, if the franchisee manages to acquire tons of new business, you could possibly make more off the fee than your own instance of the service. Smart contracts could guarantee receiving your franchise fee automatically, I would imagine, although I'm not up enough on it yet to suggest the details. Maybe EOS will make that easier? Or is already possible on Etherium? Just more crazy ideas! :-)
You have a good point, such revenue streams could add up over time. Smart contracts could enforce payment of fees, that sort of thing is already supported by Ethereum (and will be possible on EOS too I imagine). But becoming a smart contract programmer is taking things to a whole new level that I'm not prepared to explore at the moment. Hmm, Steemvoter ICO anyone?
Actually, I'm keen to explore possible synergies with VIVA in the future. It would be awesome to integrate with the VIVA ecosystem and make Steemvoter a mint somehow.
EDIT: maybe that could work by having VIVA worker nodes running the voting scripts instead of the servers we have now! This could be worth looking into once team VIVA makes a mint kit available for devs to play with.