How do you reckon I should reward the Ninja Warrior community?

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!