How do you reckon I should reward the Ninja Warrior community?steemCreated with Sketch.

Today is my Steem birthday!
Thanks to @steemitboard for letting me know. You do good, guy.

So I'm in the midst of learning coding so I can build a Steem front end for Ninja Warrior enthusiasts. It's a huge industry... the TV show is in 22 countries, there are multiple competitor shows that are also excellent, and there are so many Ninja Warrior gyms all over the US, Australia and the world.

Currently though, it's really super hard for anyone to find any advice on how to train for Ninja Warrior... My wordpress site Australian Ninja Warrior gets a lot of hits from all around the world, but it relies on me and two others to update it.... and we've been slack... and it's obviously Australian-centric.

Mostly though, all Ninja Warrior online activity is on Instagram, which is a brilliant place to show off, but a terrible place to teach people complex moves or training techniques... most people interested in training for a show or competition basically have to find someone else in person to teach them. Almost everything I've learnt has been at a Ninja Gym, not online.

So... that's the why... the what is a front end that is similar to Steemhunt, in that it ranks the day's top voted posts.. and you can sort by week, month and all time. I'd also add in a drop down selector for types of posts like 'Obstacle technique', 'Competitions', 'Episode Reviews', 'Introduce Yourself' etc. I'd have a shop page as well and would definitely open it up for gym owners, businesses, vendors of ninja products, competition organisers and event planners to either invest in Steem or advertise on the site. Ideally I'd also like a video paywall for the extra celebrity ninjas to get paid specifically for their content. I'd encourage the businesses to invest in Steem to provide upvotes for content creators they support/use their products.

I really want it to be global so that as new countries join the wave of enthusiasm, people can create content ready for them.

That's the what, and the who.

The 'How' is what I'm struggling with... and not how to build it (although that has been way harder than I imagined, and I really just need to get it to a point where I can open source the thing and ask Utopian for help/pay people to work on specific tasks.

The How that I'm struggling with is the economic side of it all.

Ninja Warriors tend to be extremely content rich, but financially poor... in that they're usually young, either work in gyms or spend all their lives in a gym, and spend all their spare money travelling to competitions... or spending a month camping in a line to get onto one of the shows.

I want to set this up so that people could realistically afford to pay for a competition entry fee, or buy a product on the site from posting good content on our delightful little blockchain. The problem is that it's all super complicated. Get a Steem account, understand the wallet system, etc etc. I'm excited about the @steemonboarding project to take some of the pressure off.

Like Steemhunt and many other apps... I'd be posting the content to my own database, as well as the blockchain. I'm thinking of setting it up in a way that allows users to create an account instantly on my site, and then connect to the blockchain later... only then would their posts get submitted to the blockchain and be eligible for Steem rewards. Similar to many Dapps, I'd also have my own scoring/voting system that all verified users would use.

My question is... what's the best way to reward these content creators?

  • I could let Steem do it all for me.. but there's a steep learning curve for the users.
  • I could set up the platform as a 100% beneficiary, exchange the Steem/SBD generated and send it to them via Paypal. There would be fees galore and they wouldn't get much because they're not networking on the platform itself.
  • I could ignore the whole Steem rewards thing for a bit and hook it up later as the site is more established.
  • I could introduce an SMT, but I still don't see how this would work in this scenario... without me investing a heap of money and then giving it out myself.

The problem with the SMT as I see it, is that someone has to buy the SMTs for them to exist... so it's either me, and I give them out for good content to be exchanged to Steem and then exchanged to fiat... or businesses buy them, and hand them out... but then they don't really get value for that... not like they would with Steem Powered upvotes.

The main way that I understand SMTs to operate is that I create an SMT... someone buys it for a price I set... and I receive that value in Steem/SBD in whatever percentage I decide (80% to the platform, 20% to me for example) - it's great as a fund raiser, but in my mind doesn't really work as a reward system. Unless, as I said, a business buys it... I get the funds... the business gives it to a content creator.. .who then exchanges it for Steem (who provides that Steem, me?).

The mental obstacle for me is that the Ninja Warrior content creators would all jump on if there was a way that through their hard work they could raise funds for a short term goal... and maybe Steem itself is the solution... but it's also milked fairly heavily, has no real scarcity and without me investing an absolute ton in Steem stake (which I absolutely don't have), no way to help these guys earn anything above a small amount.

Maybe that doesn't even matter if the content and the comradery is what brings users to the platform. Maybe they won't care that their posts (the ones who actually get a Steem account) have $0.04 next to their post if they make it to the top of the list for the day...

I realise this post is a bit of a mess... and it's super late and I've got a crazy early flight tomorrow morning.. but I was wondering if anyone has been able to make any sense of this and has any ideas and/or smarts to get this working in my head.

Thanks!

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Lots to think about here! First off it's awesome you want to/plan to create a platform for NinjaWarrior. I can help 👊.

Honestly I think the first hurdle is not to worry about the rewards. If the only reason people are using the platform is because they get a few dollars in rewards it is not going to be sustainable. That said rewards can help bootstrap a community - users come for the dollar but stay for the connections. With that in mind the focus should be about creating a great platform/community first - deal with the blockchain and rewards later.

The problem is that the reward pool is simply not big. At current prices ($118M x 9% Inflation - 75% to reward pool - $8M) 8M USD is the total paid out to all users in a year, app/business are also trying to use this as their income through beneficiarys/curation rewards - it's just not enough to support X amount of apps and users IMO. Obviously there is a sentiment that this will rise but still...

Getting steeminc delegation or large community sponsorship would allow you to distribute rewards and help bootstrap the community but to make a sustainable business I feel it needs an extra way to inject value. SteemMonsters is the best example we have right now.

My approach would be -

  • Value first - become THE place for Ninja training/ news/ whos who
  • Community features - share/document training (regardless of STEEM rewards)
  • Ask for $ early (external sponsorship or users pay for exclusive content )
  • Reinvest and try to bootstrap stake. Then start thinking about how to utilise STEEM to encourage usage.

🤷‍♂️ Been round in circle on these type of ideas myself so happy to chat but still not 100% on what the best action is.

Thanks dude!

I basically want to get a basic front end up and running... then open source it for Utopian fun, and then offer Fiat to devs to help out. I really want to be able to understand all the code in the system so I'm not reliant on anyone else for time-critical support.

I completely agree with everything you've said... and want to confirm that while Steemhunt, Dtube, etc all entice existing Steemians to use their Dapp, I'd be going the exact opposite way by bringing a lot of new content creators to the blockchain... and I'd expect their rewards to be absolutely dismally minimal... so yes to your calculations, and almost none of the 8M would find it's way to my users... except for the occasional curie or welcoming vote.

On that note, I'm also not sure I could offer anything to delegators... and so wouldn't expect anything from the blockchain in that regard. Alternatively though, I do feel confident I could muster up some external sponsorship - it's a huge industry and there are lots of people making money from their gyms, competitions, etc. The space has yet to become too crowded with options. Exclusive content should be really easy to sell... and I really do believe that becoming THE place for Ninja Training won't be too hard at all. I've already got a fair network and personal contacts.. and as I mentioned, I don't believe I'd have any competition in this space.... yet.

I actually really like your idea of just thinking about the rewards later. I didn't want to design anything that might handicap me later, and maybe I can just build it, bring them across from Instagram, delight them with the content and community and then try and transition them to the blockchain... by which point I might have some stake myself or have found some investors/sponsors that like what I'm doing.

Thanks again mate!

Hey @aussieninja hey bro I really like this idea. I'm not much of a ninja myself but I still like to think I can pull off a mean handstand.

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Happy Steem birthday! Really cool photos!

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Thanks dude! Really appreciate it!

I think a two tiered approach would be best. People come, they join up, sign up etc as if it were a standard site. They can interact, upvote, comment and post.
After they've thoroughly learned the architecture of the site; you may require a certain number of posts, or a certain number of sponsors, etc; you can run them through an obstacle course that teaches them everything they need to know to get set up so that their interactions on your condenser start flowing through to the chain, and the upvotes they dish out and receive have actual value.
Just have two different font colours. After people are comfortable on the site, made some friends and want to take things further, they'll start asking questions and be directed to the longer, more involved process.
That's my instinct based on what you've laid out.

Thanks Mr Clarke, I like that idea a lot... it really does take the stress out of that initial learning curve that could be too big to overcome... the influencers and trendsetters in the community all know each other, so it'll either have everyone or no one. I was lucky with my Wordpress site, I was up and running before mania hit...

The second part of my question was whether Steem is an appropriate reward mechanism... I feel a lot less stressed about this now that you've suggested a clearer path... but do you think it's good enough, or should I try and build this with SMT or other in mind?

Thanks so much for your reply! It has seriously helped a lot.

If posts and comments are visible in other condensers, that could pose difficulties, since I might be on steempeak, and only see half of a conversation that happened between one of your green members, and one of your gold members; but if conversations aren't visible on other condensers, then you'll need to be the source of either your SMTs or the upvotes to reward your members, since steemsters are unlikely to visit your site specifically.
I think perhaps sponsorship might be the key here; perhaps even naming rights to the site or the SMT. Are there brands looking to present themselves as riding the cutting edge of technology and fitness? Even $50,000, (which is nothing to them); could kickstart the operation, particularly while Steem is cheap.

Hmm, I hadn't considered that... I guess I have 3 options in mind:

  • Not worry about it... and just mention at the end of each post that all comments are visible using my front end. At least anyone using Busy or Steempeak would have a logon to my front end.
  • Make replying to other people's comments a gold service only. This might be too annoying or frustrating to my userbase though. I would assume initially, my userbase might be something like 95% green.
  • Post green posts and/or comments from an admin account to the blockchain... with some text like "This was posted by user blah on frontend blah". My community all know each other... they can be a chatty bunch.

Some of the events and competitions have some serious venture capital behind them, so maybe I could find a sponsor. I've got a couple of ins at Nike, who I'm sure are super annoyed that all the profesh ninjas all wear New Balance on the most popular reality TV show in the US.

Just to be clear... the 50k sponsorship would go into purchasing stake in the Steem blockchain for upvotes?

You've definitely given me a lot to think about. Thanks dude!

You look so not injured in that photo.

Haha, it's a lie. I had seriously dislocated my left shoulder 2 days before that photo, and had physio just a few hours before... also, this photos was taken at like 2am.

Is that you in the top photo bud!?! Geez look at the big scar on ya knee. That would of crippled your ninja career for a few months eh? @aussieninja

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Does anyone have any experience with crowdfunding? I could potentially raise Steem stake that way... I have a huge community to play with... with a lot of parents paying lots for their kids ninja interests... I'm just not super sure what I would offer... and if Steem is a safe bet in that regard...

You got a 39.58% upvote from @ocdb courtesy of @aussieninja!

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