Anyone to start Bid-Bot business? Read this first!

Is there really profit in Bid-Bot business?

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I am far away from being a whale or a bid-bot owner.
Being just a minnow, I write some scripts and build tools to analyze the steem blockchain.

One of the tools is used for the voting performance of the bid-bots.
https://fdsteemtools.neocities.org/botanalysis.html

My post shall be considered as an analysis of the bid-bot business model with a limited time frame and close-to-real assumptions.

Let's start with analyzing a whale bot.
We will check 24 hours voting data on 23th April 2018.

The bot properties are as follows. Bot name is not given, but properties are actual.

The bot has an SP of 757k and vote value at %100 of 156.48 SBD ( value shown at your account as you receive the vote)

The 24 hrs. voting performance of this bot is as below :

This bot has used %964 of voting power in 24 hrs.
The %100 efficiency is %1000 so we can say that this bot has an efficiency of %96.4. ( which is really good - customers are happy and they are preferring this bot )

For the customers, this bot has given slightly negative ROI in average, -%0,72 and this is most probably compensated with following curation votes.

The customers have paid approximately 758.16 SBD in 24 hrs.
Here I have an approximation.
I have divided the voting to vote windows and assumed that the minimum vote is given to minimum bid accepted by bot.
The other payments are found by taking the ratio of minimum bid to the actual vote percentages.
I have validated this approach by checking manually on some posts and it seems to be a valid approach.

The 90 days earnings of this bot should be 68 234 SBD.

Coming to this point, now we can conclude the profitability.

1. If the investment is yours, the 90 days net profit is 68 k / 757k = %9
   This is a very good profit, you barely can have it in another business.
2. If you want to delegate SP for this business there is a break-even point.
   You have to find a whale to accept to delegate 11SP per 1 SBD and even, in this case, you are just paying the depths.

Today, the market for SP delegation is as below :

8.46 SP per 1 SBD for 90 days.
With this market price, it is impossible to run a bot with delegated Steem Power.

Then, let's be humble and run a minnow bot instead of a whale bot.

For this, a bot with 10k SP should be adequate for a start.
This is an investment of approximately 33kUSD.

Let's analyze a suitable bot and see the results.

This bot is perfect for analysis.

11k SP and vote value at %100 of 2.25 SBD

The 24 hrs. voting performance of this bot is as below :

The income of this bot is 7.82 SBD in 1 day ( 24 hrs.)
Here, we see that efficiency of the bot drops to %90 instead of %96 of the whale bot.
This can be considered as a con.
As the bot is smaller, you have more competition in the market which leads to fewer customers.

The bot ROI is positive, %29 which is very good for the customers but bad for the business.

If you want to get all the SP with a delegation, to pay for the SP, just to break-even, you have to find a whale to delegate you SP with 15.5 SP for 1 SBD for 90 days.

This is approximately 2 times the market value, which is not feasible for any whale.

If it is your own SP then the income you get is %6.5 for 90 days, which is still OK but worse than the whale bot.

Conclusion

• If you run a bot with your SP, you can expect an Operating Income of %6 - %9 for 90 days.
  Do it.
• If you want to run a bot on delegated SP, either find a whale that will delegate you the required SP with > 16 SP per 1 SBD or don't even start it.
  You will for sure lose money.

Important Notice
These are findings on a very short ( 1 day ) analysis. Please do your own analysis before deciding to enter any job. Listen to everyone, but decide with your own facts and data.

FD.