RE: My buddy @timcliff thinks investors are key! I think seeking steem investors puts the cart before the horse...

[sircork]

Yer in the ballpark. And not wrong.

I do think we have enough business owners and entrepreneurs here already doing business online though to create quite an initial catalog of online and offline businesses that could take steem essentially immediately.

Comments

[tcpolymath]

I'm one of them, and if there's a proof-of-concept I'm willing to follow it. But there are three essential problems that keep me from making more of an effort to sell real-world goods for Steem. (Though I'm happy to if someone asks.)

1. My Steem audience and my real-world audience are very different. If there's anybody here besides me who buys medium-end art I haven't run into them, and I know some people who were actively looking and now have given up. And for the smaller things like books and greeting cards I don't at all get the feeling that trying to sell them to my Steem followers would be useful. I suppose I could be wrong about that. But as far as I can tell my Steem audience generally wants posts from me, not stuff.
2. Shipping. Steem is way more globally diversified than anywhere else I'm active, and partly that means that I can't effectively sell physical goods to most of the people I can reach here, even if they could afford them. Steem may be simply more suitable for digital assets.
3. The lack of an ability to have any sort of permanent post structure, or permanent ads on my page, and so on. Sure, I could build a website and put SteemConnect links on it, but how do I get people there consistently? Do I make my posts less appealing by putting ads in them all the time, and subordinate what's actually going well here for trying to sell stuff? Is there some method I'm not seeing?

If I can manage to get more of my existing customers onto Steem maybe this will make more sense. But I don't see Steem as an effective way of generating new customers for my existing businesses at all. Maybe different forms of retail businesses will feel otherwise. Somebody like @arseniclullaby who makes and posts and writes about comics and also sells comics might do better than someone with more diverse work like me. I know he already sold some through his blog here because I bought them.

I'll probably be starting a Steem account for my tiny publishing company pretty soon, because why not, but I'll be a little surprised if it leads anywhere.