Time for More Mature Businesses
It's not a surprise to me that two of the businesses growing fast on Steem (Steem-Engine & SteemLeo) are led by people who understand business.
Steem needs more sinks and they are providing them. At the same time, they don't forget they are running businesses and they need income.
The reward pool has been used as a source of income through beneficiary rewards or curation rewards for small projects for a long time and it still is. Sometimes tokens were used the same way. But these methods of generating income is limited in time and declining at best, or only based on pump and dump at worse.
To be sustainable, businesses need to rise to a different level and search other income sources, as they and Steem mature. Or they will never make it in the future as businesses.
So business owners on Steem should either learn more about this field, or partner with someone who understands it. In my opinion, of course.
Focusing on SteemLeo, I have to say, I continue to be surprised by the number of sub-projects and features they've released and the speed at which they do it.
And it's not only that, but you can easily see they treat SteemLeo as a business.
On LeoDex V3, they added the Services page, which will be a collection of services they provide at a cost. So far "Token Airdrop" is their first added service. They already provided this service ever since creating new tribes were weekly, if not daily happenings sometimes, but only now they added it to the new DEX interface.
What I couldn't test was how Leo Swap works (and what are the benefits for SteemLeo for providing the convenience of swapping), it may be because of Steem-Engine, neither LeoDex nor Steem-Engine were able to load market page for DEC when I tried.
But yesterday SteemLeo launched another business-oriented project called LeoShop which tries to fill another need in the Steem ecosystem: a functional marketplace. The number of categories of products and services which can be sold and purchased on the market has already grown since yesterday, when I read their introduction post.
For those who wonder about the sales fees, here's the quote that interests you:
The only fee charged by Leoshop is a 1% fee of completed sales. When a sale is made, the seller receieves 99% of the proceeds and Leoshop retains 1%, which is used to burn LEO (permanently remove the tokens from the total supply).
If it's a small market 1% is low, but if it grows, 1% may be enough to support an online business operation costs, but not too much to have sellers upset for paying it, like on other platforms.
They have thought of many aspects regarding the particulars of an online marketplace: reviews, disputes, escrow. All about that in LeoShop documentation.
A working marketplace for STEEM, SBD or LEO (and maybe more in the future) could be the nudge we need to start growing a functional economy on Steem.
Maybe that will reduce the selling pressure, if more stuff that can now be bought only with fiat will be purchased with our tokens instead.
For the same reason I also want to shout out to @jongolson and CTPTalk and what they do in this direction with Fire-Pay, their payment integration solution.
Great read :) need to reblog
Thanks Bradley!
Sometimes doing too much stuff is not good as a business perspective. At least they try to innovate and evolve in this ecosystem.
Yeah, it's important not to stretch too thin, especially after a while.
thanks for the shout out man. fire pay is doing great so far. more adoption and use case is our mission :)
I'm glad to hear everything is on track with fire pay. It's cool to have a way to integrate Steem-Engine tokens for payments on other websites!
I have noticed that the majority of tribes are in the "sleep mode"... waiting for SMTs, communities, or I don't know what... But, SteemLEO and CTPTalk are the two that are innovating the most...
And, both of these two are way under-the-radar of big players...
Made in Canva
@thisisawesome Moderator
This post is AWESOME!
It will therefore get a manual 100% upvote from @thisisawesome (will be done today), for the Awesome Daily Upvotes in category CTPtalk, we give out 1 such vote in that category per day, plus 4 more in other categories, and your post will also be featured in todays Awesome Daily report for more visibility.
The goal of this project is to "highlight Awesome Content, and growing the Steem ecosystem by rewarding it".
That is true but also great for smaller players like yourself on CTPTalk. Where else would you hope to be a whale? :) I haven't been as active in the tribe or I would have had this chance too. But I do have about the same amount of CTP as STEEM and growing more rapidly.
Yeah... It's nice to be a whale... But, everyone has a chance to be a whale... Whatever you invest money, or time (or both), you can reach that... I have invested a lot of my time and a lot of others, too... But the important thing is to bring value to the tribe and I think that we are doing a great job... Time will tell.. :)
And LEO and CTP tokens distribution were a way fairer than for other tokens...
I don't doubt that. True for tribes, not for Steem, though.
...and idea for the new vlog post is born... Thanks! :)
Congratulations @gadrian! You received a personal award!
You can view your badges on your Steem Board and compare to others on the Steem Ranking
Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness to get one more award and increased upvotes!