If you have a small amount of steem and want to earn a return on it I would suggest delegating it to one of the other bots I suggested that pay out the earnings to delegators. Then you can power up the earnings and re-invest by delegating more over time.
It's just not worth it for me to host a bot that has less than 10k SP - it takes the same amount of work as a bot with 1M SP but pays out much less. Also I generally feel that it is better for everyone to have fewer, larger bots, than a bunch of small bots like those that are popping up now - so I encourage everyone to delegate rather than start their own.
thanks for your answer @yabapmatt. makes perfect sense. I think I'll have to look into ROI on various bot delegations. I understand that unless you have a serious amount of voting power it's not worth the time and energy. Great work, there are a lot of crumby bots on the loose ! ;)