What is Success? | Rating Crypto Companies and Tribes

What has your company achieved? Describe success.

In many cases, they have already failed based on their answer. Many of these crypto companies haven’t really thought about what success looks like… other than “we make loads of money”.

I was listening to this talk by Andreas Antonopolous this morning and he brought up some great points about zero-sum games, opportunistic mentalities and the real reasoning behind many crypto projects. As he brought up these topics, I couldn’t help but apply this lens to tribes and how many of them have formed on Steem around the idea of making more money rather than bringing some greater vision into fruition.

Can we think about helping more people? Creating abundance for people other than yourselves.

Most crypto companies (and tribes) are formed around opportunistic mentalities. In fact, you can even apply this in a much more general sense to people who are interested in cryptocurrencies.

When you talk to someone with an opportunistic mentality, they are typically only interested in helping themselves to a greater share of the pie. They’re thinking in terms of a zero-sum game —> i.e. in order for them to win, someone else has to lose. In order for their company or tribe to succeed, other companies or tribes have to fail and lose “market share”.

Steem has an incredibly small pool of users. I think most of us agree that there are probably about 10,000-20,000 users on the Steem blockchain at the moment. It sucks, but this is what crypto winter has done to Steem. While the user base (and price) is low, the development is at an all time high.

When I look around, it seems that many tribes are fighting over a market share of the Steem pie. They’re trying to figure out how to gain more users than the next tribe and what they can do to get people to use their tribe at the exclusivity of another tribe.

This is a game that is doomed to fail. If we all try to fight over the small Steem pie, then we will all lose. Instead, tribes need to focus on going outside of Steem. We need to focus on increasing the Steem pie as a whole instead of fighting over who gets what slice of it.

I think 90% of a tribe’s focus on expanding its user base should be spent on going outside of the Steem blockchain to new potential users and 10% should be spent on getting more users who are already on Steem.. we can call the ladder “user retention”.

Tribes also need a greater vision for existing. @pennsif’s tribe.talk show is very eye-opening about the mission of tribes and why the founders do what they do. It’s pretty clear that some tribes have a grand vision and others exist simply because they can.

The question Andreas poses in this talk is to define success for your “crypto company”. I can imagine him asking me this for SteemLeo and my response would be this:

In one sentence —> Decentralize Seeking Alpha.

In more sentences —> We want to create a financial-focused community where authors and users alike who are passionate about investing can login every day and talk about the thing that they love to do. People can already do that on websites like Seeking Alpha, but guess who retains all the financial benefits from that? Seeking Alpha.

Authors make peanuts on websites like Seeking Alpha.
Users make nothing on websites like Seeking Alpha.
Owners make 99% of everything on website like Seeking Alpha.

The people at the center of the website make it all.. The company behind the website. They’re essentially keeping all the value and just giving the bare minimum to authors that will keep them coming back. Mainly, because there is no alternative.

I’d like to get in touch with more authors from these websites like Seeking Alpha and see what they actually make on each article. I have heard from several places that it’s hardly anything. They write mainly out of passion. It’s not a full-time gig for most of them and the majority of their revenue comes from hawking out their products.

The greater vision for SteemLeo is that the value that authors and users create for the site in the forms of great content, attention and engagement are rewarded for doing so. This means that everyone owns a slice of the SteemLeo pie. On a website like Seeking Alpha, the site owns 99% of the pie and then hands out little crumbs to everyone else.

Mind you, this is a long-term game. There is plenty of work to do before we get to the point of mass adoption. Right now, it’s one new user at a time. Slowly building in a solid foundation of tools, resources and attention. None of this will happen overnight.

Currently, I’m working on a new page for the SteemLeo website which will lay out the greater vision for what we’re trying to accomplish. It’s a mission statement of sorts. The important thing is that we have a mission and a reason for existing. I can’t say this enough… before you jump into anything in this space, DYOR and try to understand why something exists. Hopefully I have partly answered this for the SteemLeo tribe in this post. The vision page that will be live today or tomorrow will answer this more completely.

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Many people have asked me what they can do to support SteemLeo. One of the most underrated aspects is posting directly from the SteemLeo interface. There has been some work going on in the background surrounding canonical links and I will make a more detailed post outlining that as things become more clear.

Further than that, it’s about the ad revenue and the BAT rewards. The more people who use the site, the more LEO we can burn. If you want to support SteemLeo or any other tribe that you love, please consider posting from the native interface. It goes a long way 🧡

Posted from https://steemleo.com 🦁