Steempress Delegation Renewal Application review
Deadline: October 8th, 23:59 UTC
We have prepared this commentary as a step prior to final processing of scores and delegation recommendations to Steemit. We'd invite you to respond to the questions presented here in the comment below. This project has a lot of merit and we also see some good areas for business improvements.
We plan to score the application based on reponses provided here before submitting to Steemit.
Please submit one answer per comment below and reference the question number in the comment.
Original Application: https://steemit.com/delegationapp/@steempress/steempress-delegation-renewal-application
Questions from the Committee
Please note that scores above are preliminary and will be improved once the committee has received acceptable responses to the below clarifications.
Please respond to the clarification questions in the comments section below.
Please respond one question per comment and put the clarification number at the start of the comment.
(3) Project Info:
(3.1)
There's no company listed so when people pay for a pro-service where does the money go?
(3.1)
Specify what Legal entity is this project being run under. If none, then please provide names and addresses of individuals who are responsible for the project. Details can be provided privately if you do not want your addreses on the blockchain
(4) About terms of delegation:
(4.2)
Your terms of delegation seem like your own requirements rather than something that Ned said. Was there direct communication on this?
(5) About market:
(5.1)
We really like the problem/market that you're trying to address, but it's hard to match that up with how you're trying to address it. Your problem statement actually seems more like there aren't enough curation trails for word press users rather than there needs to be more Word press users migrating to Steem.
Your market fit focuses on the items in the below KPI's, The committee proposes to focus your project deliverables on the following KPIs:
- How many word press blog spots have incorporated SteemPress (primarily by people who are new to Steem).
- How much engagement & commenting from steem community to blogspot owners is achieved?
Please provide practicable and realistic targets and dates for achieving these.
(6) About core team details:
(6.1)
Can the project confirm that it will bring more core team members on in the form of either paid employees or volunteers? The success of the project will likely be highly challenging with such a small team
(8) Business Strategy
(8.3) Increasing steem power powered up and burned
(8.3.1)
Does Steem press have a target date to bring in a client / community / user who will purchase 150K+ of steem in order to reward their user base via steem press?
(8.3.2)
How many pro users does Steem Press have and is there a target number of pro users with a target date for achieving this?"
(8.4) About financial incentives to Steemit/community
Your short answer appears to be "nothing." We agree that the opensourcing of Steem Press is great and a valuable contribution, but we're still looking for the ongoing benefit of a 1M steem power delegation.
How does your current approach get new users to purchase steem?
(8.5) Financial stability after delegation removal
How will this project bring in more value from steem purchases (or other boost to the Steem platform) than it distributes via its Steemit-delegation upvotes?
(9) KPIs
(9.1) Please clarify the target timeframe for achieving each of the specified KPIs
(9.2) It would be good to add two more KPIs:
- (9.2.1) How many Wordpress blogs have incorporated SteemPress.
- (9.2.2) How much engagement & commenting from steem community to blogspot owners is achieved?
Please provide practical and realistic targets and dates for achieving these
(10) Token Distribution
(10.13)
How are you incentivizing yourselves or others to bring in new Word Press communities?
(10.14)
Can you do a token distribution with an equity token instead of powering up your individual accounts with Steem from steem power delegation provided by steemit inc?
(10.15.1)
Please specify if you will provide other services to the steem community until the project is in a position to make a token offering?
(10.15.2)
What incentives / initiatives can the project provide that prevents it from leaving Steem following having received such a significant delegation?
(11) Delegation Request
(11.1)
This project has already had a delegation for 1 year, this will make a total of 3 years. Does the team agree that this is a fair amount of time?
Above 12 months extension is stated, but here it is 24 months. Please clarify if you are requesting 12 additional months or 24 additional months.
(13) Metrics
(13.3) New Accounts Onboarded
(13.3.1)
What plans do you have to grow the new accounts metric?
(13.3.2)
Have existing Wordpress users been brought into Steem? Recent success stories would be good to illuminate here.
(13.3.3)
Does your project have a list of high level word press bloggers that you will target to bring into Steem? If not, would you agree to create one and present to the committee?
(13.10) Steem deelgated by Clients
Please clarify what service you provide to your clients in the client list attached to your application that falls under the scope of your project for these clients. i.e. are you providing steem press services to these clients and are they paying for these services?
(13.15) Road Map
Please provide more long term milestones since there is a lot happening in 2019, but nothing in 2020.
(14) Other Questions
(14.1) Do you have published guidelines for how the delegation vote is used?
Deadline: October 8th, 23:59 UTC
100% Beneficiary set to @steem.dao
3.1 : There's no company listed so when people pay for a pro-service where does the money go?
We will be incorporated before receiving money for the pro-service. So the money will go to the company's new bank account. Hence why it was mentioned that incorporation is in progress, as we plan to have it for the pro service, which is also the first time where we will truly benefit from having a company.
Specify what Legal entity is this project being run under. If none, then please provide names and addresses of individuals who are responsible for the project. Details can be provided privately if you do not want your addresses on the blockchain.
Company expected to be a LLC. Details on addresses sent privately.
4.2 : Your terms of delegation seem like your own requirements rather than something that Ned said. Was there direct communication on this?
There were no terms of delegation provided by Steemit Inc or Ned other than to use common sense regarding what would be a bad use of the delegation and trusted us not to misuse it. However, we did provide Steemit Inc with a 13 slide power point pitch deck and presentation explaining our idea for SteemPress and how we would use a delegaiton. Since the delegation was granted on the basis of this presentation, we consider it to be the terms, or promise that we made to Ned/Steemit Inc, until other conditions are made.
5.1 : We really like the problem/market that you're trying to address, but it's hard to match that up with how you're trying to address it. Your problem statement actually seems more like there aren't enough curation trails for word press users rather than there needs to be more Word press users migrating to Steem.
Your market fit focuses on the items in the below KPI's, The committee proposes to focus your project deliverables on the following KPIs:
How many word press blog spots have incorporated SteemPress (primarily by people who are new to Steem).
How much engagement & commenting from steem community to steempress owners is achieved?
Please provide practicable and realistic targets and dates for achieving these.
We assume you meant to say that "our KPIs actually seems more like there aren't enough curation trails...". We agree that going forward, a new KPI on user growth would be more ideal. The main reason this was not originally included is because we have had a healthy userbase with which to harvest learning on how our product had to improve in order to attract quality WordPress blogs, sustain new users, and scale sustainably. Growing our userbase has therefore not been a priority until the objectives mentioned in our more recent roadmap post have been met.
We are open to community feedback on our growth strategy, which is now public, but still believe that growth comes after key bottlenecks and obstacles have been understood and dealt with.
We propose changing 1 KPI to the following: "Number of successful referrals". With the goal of reaching 100 by the end of November.
6.1 : Can the project confirm that it will bring more core team members on in the form of either paid employees or volunteers? The success of the project will likely be highly challenging with such a small team
The current plan is to expand the team to include two more members (One person for design and front-end dev, and one person for marketing and communication). While we would love for this to happen as soon as possible, it is also crucial that they are the right individuals that fits well in with the team. Again we are open for community suggestions and would love to hear from anyone interested in joining the team.
SteemPress has also had volunteering moderators since the beginning, currently numbered at 3.
8.3.1 : Does Steem press have a target date to bring in a client / community / user who will purchase 150K+ of Steem in order to reward their user base via SteemPress?
No. But this could be made a KPI once the pro version is launched.
8.3.2 : How many pro users does Steem Press have and is there a target number of pro users with a target date for achieving this?"
Currently SteemPress pro is in closed beta, we purposefully only allowed 2 teams to use it to make sure that it's as close to perfect as possible before launching it. The target is 100 pro customers during Q1 2020
8.4 : About financial incentives to Steemit/community
Your short answer appears to be "nothing." We agree that the open sourcing of SteemPress is great and a valuable contribution, but we're still looking for the ongoing benefit of a 1M Steem power delegation.
How does your current approach get new users to purchase Steem?
We will install numerous incentives for the blogs we onboard to buy STEEM and/or hold the Steem Power they earn. One way is through our new gamified curation system where curation will depend on numerous factors including minnows who choose to buy and power up Steem power. We also market to our users that owning stake is crucial to drive engagement on their Steem powered comment section and allowing them to incentivise positive engagement and reader retention, which will make them buy more STEEM. This is opposite to marketing STEEM as a currency you earn in order to sell as all front ends currently do, we want to present it as a resource you want in order to power your blog. Finally, our discover dashboard and notification system will give increased exposure to curators with a decent amount of Steem Power (we will only show notifications when users receive an upvote worth more than a set amount i.e 0.20$). The goal is to showcase that Steem Power can help bring more visibility to your blog not only through higher self-votes resulting in higher ranking on one's own posts, but also through being able to do more frequent and more valuable curation of other users with similar interests.
These are some examples of how we plan to incentivise buying STEEM and holding Steem Power and includes smaller users as well as larger blogs. More advanced plans will follow the release of the pro version, as well as our plans for future SMT consulting and integration once SMTs are here.
8.5 : Financial stability after delegation removal
How will this project bring in more value from STEEM purchases (or other boost to the Steem platform) than it distributes via its Steemit-delegation upvotes?
This project will bring in more value by bringing much needed exposure to Steem. We believe SteemPress is one of the only projects that can easily scale and reach any community or niche. This makes Steem visible to investors and users, and by incentivising our users to buy Steem and curate people we drive a virtuous circle where people are easily omboarded and buy Steem to do the same.
9.2.2 : How much engagement & commenting from Steem community to blogspot owners is achieved?
Please provide practical and realistic targets and dates for achieving these
Over the past year we've had over 300k comments on steempress posts
In terms of target we aim to double engagement by the end of 2019. Then we aim to go 5x in Q1 2020.
10.13 :
How are you incentivizing yourselves or others to bring in new Word Press communities?
We have recently released a complete referral system to do just that.
10.14 : Can you do a token distribution with an equity token instead of powering up your individual accounts with STEEM from Steem Power delegation provided by steemit inc?
While this could be done, we do not believe it would serve any purpose before SMTs are live. It would also require extensive work in order to ensure a token model that treats all parties involved fairly while also considering our future plans and would thus not be a wise use of time at the moment.
10.15.1 : Please specify if you will provide other services to the Steem community until the project is in a position to make a token offering?
For clarity: The idea of a SteemPress token offering is a secondary priority and not key to our current or future plans. We want to make it as easy and impactful as possible for new websites to integrate with Steem and use STEEM as a currency rather than our own token.
10.15.2 : What incentives / initiatives can the project provide that prevents it from leaving Steem following having received such a significant delegation?
SteemPress already relies heavily on key Steem features that are unique in the blockchain ecosystem. So there wouldn't be any way for us to leave Steem even if we wanted to. We are open to sign a non competing agreement that prevents us from leaving Steem for as long as we have a delegation + 6 months after the delegation runs out.
11.1 : This project has already had a delegation for 1 year, this will make a total of 3 years. Does the team agree that this is a fair amount of time?
Above 12 months extension is stated, but here it is 24 months. Please clarify if you are requesting 12 additional months or 24 additional months.
We agree that this is a fair amount of time. It was, however, unclear if the stated 2 year limit mentioned earlier included prior delegation time or not. Hence why we wrote 1-2 years. We are requesting a 12 months extension which we then assume can be re-evaluated to potentially be extended at a later time.
13.3.1 : What plans do you have to grow the new accounts metric?
We have recently released a document which describes in length how we will achieve that : https://steemit.com/steempress/@steempress/onboarding-the-masses-steempress-updated-roadmap-and-growth-strategy
We also quite recently launched our new comment section with Steem account signup. Having more influential blogs change their comment section and encourage their followers to create a Steem account to engage better with their content will be the second key part.
An extensive summary of our growth strategy can be found in our post Onboarding the masses - SteemPress updated roadmap and growth strategy
13.3.2 : Have existing Wordpress users been brought into Steem? Recent success stories would be good to illuminate here.
Our largest user in terms of following would be @tommyrobinson whose website tr.news gets 400,000 unique impressions each month. Discussions are currently ongoing to also add the SteemPress comment section to also allow Steem account login and signup directly on the blog
13.3.3 : Does your project have a list of high level word press bloggers that you will target to bring into Steem? If not, would you agree to create one and present to the committee?
We are still working on the list, and we don't believe that it will be done by the 8th.
13.15 : provide more long term milestones since there is a lot happening in 2019, but nothing in 2020.
SteemPress does not plan for more than half a year at a time.
14.1 :
Yes. SteemPress introduced its first curation guidelines with our first post announcing that we had received a delegation. These guidelines were also provided to Steemit Inc and explained to Ned and Andrew when we pitched SteemPress.
Votes are done primarily through 3
Community curator trails (vote size depending on the scale and track record of the curation project)
New user welcoming votes (done manually by a SteemPress curator, size of the vote depends on criteria below)
Randomized tips (requires the user to first be whitelisted to prevent rewarding spam, the size of the vote the user is able to get as a tip depends on criteria below)
We also introduced a set of criteria to judge how large upvotes a given user would be able to get either as a welcome upvote or later as a tip. These criteria included:
The latter referring mainly to the fact that the blog should be authentic and with a clear goal of growing for its own sake, rather than being set up primarily in order to post to Steem and thus be able to receive upvotes from SteemPress.
As announced in our growth strategy, we will be making further improvements to these guidelines in order to incentivise additional growth, engagement and including positive gamification.
(13.10) Steem deelgated by Clients :
Please clarify what service you provide to your clients in the client list attached to your application that falls under the scope of your project for these clients. i.e. are you providing steem press services to these clients and are they paying for these services?
No stgeemian is delegating to steempress and we are not planning on releasing a system akin to "delegate to us to get x/y" as we believe it's very close to a bidbot model with more steps.
We provide to all of our free "clients" the capabilty to easily connect their blog to steem and benefit from all from all of the steem features directly from their blog.