We want to keep everyone who has supported us so far as up to date as possible.
As many of you know, we have been looking at a specific property, and had planned to sign a lease for the space incredibly soon. Some things have changed, and I want to make sure everyone is informed anytime we make big decisions like this one.
First:
The 2000 STEEM goal we have set for our startup was determined by the value of the currency, as it stood. As everyone here knows, STEEM, and cryptocurrecies in general, have seen a very large dip over the last couple weeks or so. We have watched as our startup fund has grown 25%+ over the last week, while the value in dollars has decreased by roughly 40%. This leaves us with significantly less spending power if that STEEM is converted to fiat at it's current value.
We have full faith that STEEM will see a hefty rise, and soon. Just not soon enough. We are now faced with making a decision between withdrawing now for around $2,700, or waiting until the value comes back up. Unfortunately, the latter leaves us vulnerable to further decreases in value, which are always a possibility in the crypto-sphere.
On top of that,
the terms for the space we were looking at have changed, increasing almost 3 fold. We were originally told one price, which included utilities, on a specific space. Apparently the agent with whom we were speaking didn't entirely know what the owners had in mind for the space, and when I got a copy of their lease today, things were laid out much differently than I had been told.
Things like having to have written permission for any partitions we put up, and that we can't rent the space ourselves. How is a makerspace supposed to be open 24 hours a day, or rent stalls to entrepreneurs if we don't have the authority to do with the space what our business model says we need to... I understand a large part of it is bureaucracy and lawyer talk, but it wouldn't put us in a very good position until we were able to buy the entire building, and do exactly what we want with it, but that would cost $550,000, currently around 225,000 STEEM...
By the way, whales, we would be more than happy to negotiate taking on a 4th member of our LLC, who would be entitled to a full quarter of all profits, in exchange for the funds to buy such a building, or any other... Come talk to us...
This was also a five year lease, at $1172 per month plus the cost of utilities "above what the building uses while empty", which was determined by them to be about $350. The building only has one meter, meaning even though we are only renting half of the basement, the lease reads as if we would be responsible for the whole... As is common, a stipulation in the lease states that If we vacate for any reason, we are still liable for the entire lease amount (roughly $70,000). So if I sign this paperwork, I'm stating that no matter what, I'm going to be giving these guys $70k. Idk about all that.
As it stands,
we are expanding our search for a location. We have mostly been focusing our attention on the downtown district, but have decided that any location may be what we need to start up, instead of a gem of a location with prime foot-traffic. If we can find a location large enough to host a small makerspace, roughly 1000 square feet, at the right price, we will withdraw from our fund, and get our physical presence started as soon as possible.
If we can get our physical makerspace started up in any location on something as small as a 6 month,or even a 1 year lease, it would give us the time to build our customer base, without chaining us to something we may not be able to afford to start. We have put in requests to look at a few other properties, and will be sharing updates as soon as we know more.
Dream Team;
Those who have invested with us deserve rationality, not a team who jumps to decisions that could start us off on the wrong track. We want your investments to be as powerful as possible, and create the greatest start it can. We are also looking at other avenues of funding, and will be starting a local crowdfund, allowing us to get started as quickly as we can. Please understand that we are very excited to get this project truly started, but we want to be very smart about it. There are now over 30 of you, and we want to do right by every single investment, small and large.
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There are three members of this LLC, 
I also want all of you to know that this changes nothing about when you will start receiving payments. As soon as our 2000 STEEM funding goal is met, all blog profits from that point forward will be subject to the budget including Dream Team Dividends. Mostly, this post is to explain that it may take a little longer for us to get our physical end up and running. We will start creating educational content focused around S.T.E.A.M., making, crafting, and tinkering, which will help bring in extra SBD to be shared with the Dream Team as well, we just won't be blogging about having a super cool space where we make super cool steem things... yet.