SteemPress delegation renewal application

Project Information

Company name:

N/A. Incorporation in progress.

Place of Incorporation:

N/A.

Token name (if applicable):

N/A.

Token Type (ERC20, Steem-Engine, SMT etc.):

N/A. Potential plan for SMT in draft.

Project Type (for profit business, flagging project, community, others please specify)

For profit business.

Existing Delegation Received

When did you get the delegation?

June 2018.

Under what terms did you receive the delegation?

No specific terms other than to use it responsibly with regards to community interest (not curating spam, plagiarism, low quality content for the purpose of earning benefactor/curation rewards) and to not abuse it through frequent self-votes.

What was the intended purpose for the delegation?

• Bootstrap an initial userbase of SteemPress.
• Improve our product on the basis of feedback from our initial users.
• Provide a beneficial service to existing Steemians that they would find valuable and thus improve their retention rate on Steem.
• Incentivise user growth and retention from outside the traditional Steem community from WordPress.

How have you applied your delegation for that purpose?

We have built our own set of curation guidelines that our userbase is familiar with, and worked closely with a wide variety of community-run curation projects.

The initial guidelines (which are still evolving) included rating steempress users based on:

• quality and originality of content.
• engagement with content on blog and on Steem.
• quality of the blog and traffic to it.

We have also worked with 23 different community-run curation projects to support the SteemPress content they curate through trails on steempress-posts only.

How long are you requesting the continuation with the delegation?

1 year.

Market

What problem is the product/project solving?

Blog owners want ways to monetize content, reach new audiences, improve engagement and ensure content is stored securely. Steem can be a solution to all 4, but requiring moving away from one’s blog to is not an option.

Core Team Details

Fredrik Aarrestad is a business developer and economist with a Masters in Economic Analysis from the University of Stavanger and an alumni of the International Space University. Before SteemPress, Fredrik worked at the European Space Agency with innovation knowledge management on the applied use of satellite applications. Before that, he was employed by the University of Stavanger to start a new incubation centre and open innovation program for students.

Martin Lees is a software engineer specialized in machine learning and blockchain. Before SteemPress, Martin worked three years at Orange, a large telecom company, on embedded systems. Martin has been involved with several projects related to blockchain allowing him to understand the technology, its strengths, weaknesses, and use cases. He has experimented with various dapps on Steem including a wallet creator and a decentralized storage system.

Minimum Viable Products

Our core product is the SteemPress plugin found in the wordpress plugin store at wordpress.org/plugins/steempress
We also provide users with additional features when logged in with their account at steempress.io.

Description:

• Automatic crossposting from WordPress to Steem with the conversion of text to fit Steem front-ends.
• A Steem powered comment section where users can log in with a Steem account to curate and engage directly on the website. Also connects the comments on both Steem and wordpress.
• A supporting web interface through steempress.io where users can access different settings, monitor their post schedules and moderate their chat.

Business Strategy

Fiat Revenue Strategy:

• Selling a pro-version with subscription fee.
• Optional ads in our comment section coming with a revenue-sharing model for the author and us.
• Affiliate programs to hosting services, exchanges and other 3rd parties our users looking to start a new blog and/or get into crypto will need.
• Revenue sharing with third-party complementing businesses
• Potential for our own token. Yet to be decided.

Fiat Revenue Projections in $/user every month: [E.g. $10/user]

Freemium users: Unknown.
Pro blog: 10$ per month per user.
Pro website 20$pr month per website.

How will your business strategy increase the amount of STEEM being powered up and/or burnt?

1. The pro-version of SteemPress is built for websites hosting multiple authors on their site while providing them with the ability to set their own custom benefactor rewards on content made through their site. To incentivise users to post through their website, these in turn buy and power up Steem to curate content made on their site, as SteemPress does not curate the content of their users. They thus have to provide the SP themselves (one such user currently exist who is testing our pro-version for websites)
2. Our curation guidelines for regular users focus on minnow growth through factoring in if the user is powering up. We thus provide added incentives for our users to power up their earnings rather than selling.
3. All new onboardings from WordPress whether it be the blogs themselves or their visitors using our new guest account system will result in more SP required to be staked to store content and engagement.

What financial incentives are you willing to provide to Steemit, Inc. and/or the Steem Community in return for the delegation? i.e. What's your skin in the game? [E.g. project tokens, revenue-share, etc.]

• None for Steemit Inc short turn.
• For community will do revenue sharing through our new referral program where Steemians can earn a part of both benefactor and subscription fees of blogs they onboard.
• Non-financial contributions are however made continuously to Steem and to Steemit Inc through our open source contributions. This includes testing of forks, participation in improving condenser and Steem code and the parts of steempress which we have made open source.

Are you or how will you become financially sustainable once the delegation is removed?

To this date, SteemPress has sold no more than about 25% of it's Steem-based revenue to pay for its operations. The rest have been powered up primarily on the two accounts @fredrikaa and @howo. This is one step to ensure sustainability as we have wanted to have our own Steem stake to provide similar SP-based support to SteemPress also after the delegation ends.

We further plan to increase our sustainability by providing a subscription based pro-version to a greater number of users. An optional ad-model is also in progress where users who want to earn additional revenue from ads in their comment section can turn that on in our settings. This will also allow us to earn a share of the ads revenue.

KPI Progress Measurement

Please limit each KPI description in this section to 100 characters.

Suggest at least 3 KPI’s per project with which to measure the progress of your project(s) in its(their) current phase. KPI’s must be measurable and objective (a percentage or numerical value), or binary (yes / no or completed / not completed).

KPI (a) description: Percent of gross-user payouts coming from non-steempress curation.
Note: This number reflects the extent to which the content of our users is also upvoted by other Steem users and stakeholders. We find it to be a crucial KPI for SteemPress (and all other top tier delegation receivers) as it reflects the extent to which other Steemians also see values in the content posted and curated by us, as opposed to it being content that is only upvoted in the pursuit of benefactor/curation rewards with no added benefit to Steemians. We thus view this as a key KPI to ensure that there is a "community validation" of content brought to Steem via SteemPress is valuable to its userbase.

KPI (a) target: 75%

KPI (b) description: SBD sent to businesses enabled by steempress
SteemPress has given life to complementing businesses providing hosting services accepting STEEM/SBD as payment for starting a website. While not a direct part of SteemPress, we see this as a meaningful contribution through added transactions and an increased number of available services to Steemians that accept the currency.

KPI (b) target: 500

KPI (c ) description: Community trails
Note: SteemPress does parts of its curation through community trails. We strongly believe that this serves the purpose of adding positive external benefits to the Steem community for multiple reasons. 1. It helps improve the curation rewards of curation projects and in turn improve their much valuable SP. 2. It adds more weight to their vote meaning they can give better support to retain good users. 3. It decentralizes the curation by allowing multiple communities with focus on different topics to help decide how we curate.

KPI (c ) target: 20

Token Offering

N/A.

We will consider the benefits of an SMT could have for SteemPress once they are out.

Delegation Request

How much of a delegation are you requesting? Limit your requests to one of the three tiers: Top-Tier, Mid-Tier or Test-Tier.

Top-Tier.

Specify the desired time frame for the delegation in 6 month increments:

1-2 year(s).

Which one of the following answers best describes how the delegation will be used to add direct value to Steem:

A. It will be used to create new accounts.
B. It will be used to give new accounts 15 SP to give them the resources needed to use Steem and purchase goods and/or services through our platform.
C. It will be used to incentivize the creation of content that promotes Steem / your project on external platforms.
D. It will be used to provide limited trial or discount services to clients to encourage them to hold Steem and delegate in the future.
E. Other: Please describe.

Explanation: C. Is most applicable to regular users being one person with one blog, and D. for larger websites hosting numerous authors.

Agreement

We agree that our business will continue to leverage the Steem blockchain as long as we are receiving a delegation and 1 year following the removal of the delegation. During this time we also agree to promote the Steem blockchain as a valuable technological protocol that delivers unique value. We are willing to sign a legally binding contract with Steemit, Inc. to this effect.
YES.

Questions (Where applicable, fill in tables above)
Please fill out the answers to these qustions as best as you can. If it is not applicable to your project please put N/A. You will be asked to upload spreadsheet data in the Google Form, you can clone samples from here: ( Table 1 | Table 2 ).

Table 1 (Totals)

Quarter	Q2 2018	Q3 2018	Q4 2018	Q1 2019	Q2 2019	July 2019	August 2019
(1) # Users onboarded
(2a) New users (Steem)	1305	1171	476	492	254	72	43
(2b) New users (non steem)	0	0	0	0	0	0	24
(3) Impressions	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	36 000
(4) Value disbursed from delegation (USD)	14324	35409	21828	13594	13380	2978	1794
(5) External Revenue (USD)	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
(6) Steem Powered Up (Project Accounts)	22 000	16000	24500	18000	27500	4500	9500
(7) Steem Powered Up (Clients)	0.85M	0.93M	1.36M	1.31M	0.1M	0.2M	0.02M
(8) Steem Power Delegated (Community)	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
(9a) % of incoming votes received from community	55%	56%	62%	66%	70%	71%	67%
(9b) SBD sent to businesses enabled by steempress	0	3253	6780	2237	960	212	170
(9c) Community trails	N/A	7	18	23	22	23	23
(10a) Steem burned	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
(10b) SBD burned	0	0	0	0	0	0	0

Table 2: Steem Power Delegated Per Client

N

How many new accounts have been created using your projects' account this quarter?

0 . Account creation and referral program just launched.

a) How many Steem accounts are interacting with your project (this includes guest accounts as well as Steem user accounts)

4600

b) How many Guest (non Steem) accounts are interacting with your project

2 . Feature recently released.

How many impressions is your project getting?

What is the total quarterly (USD) value of rewards disbursed directly tied to the delegation? (can be a negative number of your projects is a flagging project)

How much external revenue have you generated in USD per quarter? Do not count Steem income from curation / voting.

0

How much revenue have you brought to Steem as measured by total STEEM powered up through your project's Steem accounts
~90,000 STEEM.

How much Steem is delegated to your project to manage on behalf of your clients? (fill sum in table 1, and show break down by client on table 2)

N/A.

How much Steem Power is delegated to your project from the Steem community?

For the KPIs listed above, back report progress for the duration of the delegation on a quarter by quarter basis.

How much Steem / SBD has your project burned?

Describe what value the project continues to bring to the Steem community and why the community should continue to support your project?

As described in our vision post in 2018:
We believe SteemPress will be making direct contributions to the value of STEEM and the success of Steem-based DApps and communities for many reasons. Some of them include:

On-boarding new users from WordPress at scale

The first goal of SteemPress is to onboard as many WordPress users as possible. WordPress currently powers 30% of the web or 70 million blogs. With ~50k users interacting with Steem every week according to SteemReports, this means that if we capture 0.1% of the WordPress bloggers, we’ll already more than double the activity on the blockchain. That’s only taking into account the content bloggers themselves, and not the thousands of consumers who will learn and participate in the Steem ecosystem.

Lowering the barriers of entry for creators and consumers

For most people, mastering how to make effective use of steemit.com, let alone understanding the fundamentals of Steem, has a steep learning curve. With SteemPress, creators can make use of the blockchain from the comfort of their own websites, while consumers can now continue to engage with the content the way they are used to and enter Steem with simply one click.

Connecting users with STEEM Communities

SteemPress is already working closely with communities and curation groups on Steem. This includes providing a convenient way for them to browse and discover content related to their niche that is posted with SteemPress, as well as trailing their votes. This is done to help the communities on Steem grow as we attract new creators and consumers of content with an interest in the topics relevant to the community.

Marketing STEEM externally

All marketing of SteemPress will also include marketing Steem, as the benefits to bloggers of using SteemPress are the same as the benefits of Steem generally. Furthermore, the simple integration of Steem features with SteemPress will expose the audiences of our users to Steem and the idea behind it.

Allowing people to make tailor-made front ends for different types of content

The UI of steemit.com and popular DApps seems to be where most Steemians see room for improvement. However, it is difficult to satisfy everyone at the same time as different types of content may benefit from different forms of display. SteemPress will allow any user interested in trying a new way of displaying their content to make their own website for themselves or their community.

Synergies with SMTs

Since the beginning of SteemPress, we’ve seen multiple use-cases where a group of writers, film reviewers or artists collectively run a website that they want to connect with the Steem blockchain. We see these users as perfect examples of websites and communities who can benefit from Smart Media Tokens (SMTs) and we hope to be able to provide SMT consulting, setup and integration as a Pro-version for communities.

Perceived value of the token

As consumers of content observe how the bloggers they already trust, and the community in the comments they have interests in common with, both look to STEEM to monetize content and engagement, they also see value in the token. We hope this can create a cycle where consumers demand the opportunity to log-in with Steem from the creators, which again exposes more consumers to Steem, etc.

Describe your project roadmap with expected timelines and milestones.

• Enabling instant sign up to engage with content. (August 2019)
• A new website with Steem account creation. (September 2019)
• A quality focused referral program. (September 2019)
• Improved user dashboard with gamification and postive reinforcement through design. (October 2019)
• Content discovery page for SteemPress posts, blogs and communities (October 2019)
• A new curation policy and voting guidelines built to support a growth strategy. (October 2019)
• Launch a set of opportunities for community projects to contribute to shared goals through "SteemPress community challenges". (October 2019)
• SteemPress pro edition with subscriptions (November 2019)