Ok, so, blockchain is cool as can be, and you'd like to use it for a business! But where to start and what to do?

Hive Engine is a very early platform designed to facilitate business via blockchain and has a number of tools to help people do that. In the toolbox are legal services, website creation, and a commerce tool. These things collectively help you spread your business far and wide.

Getting customers is hard. Hive-Engine helps!

As an inventor you might spend a lot of time figuring out a piece of software or product to put out in the world. That might sound challenging, but it pales in comparison to actually turning your idea and your product into a profitable business. It turns out that the real heart of growing your business is acquiring customers.

Engine can help you in two main ways. The first is that by building off of Hive and Hive-Engine you have a built in community of crypto hounds to start from. It's hard to ignore how much time saving this can enable. By locking into a group that has an interest in your company succeeding the whole community has an incentive to help you grow.

The second piece is that you can build your own community through Tribes!

What's a tribe and how's it get me money?

A tribe at it's core is a website. It's a service provided by Hive-Engine where a user can create their own token, distribute it like Hive does through posting rewards based on stake, and what closes the loop is that because we're now integrated with Woo Commerce (which associated with word press) you're now able to build your business and accept your own token back for value. So, mint a token, and list things for sale that can be purchased in that token on standard Word Press commerce sites!

When you create a token the first question you'll be asked is "what gives this value?" The ultimate answer is that people accepting it for value is what gives it vale, and the best way to start is to accept it for value yourself for a good or service. Then you start getting the word out. This is where the token really shines. You can rely on other people to help you!

By using micropayments in your token currency to blog about the service you're offering you're able to incentivize an audience of people to talk about you, and you're using a micropayment blogging system to help you collect customers. Not only are they spreading the word about your product and services, but they're often attracting good customers that are already familiar with blockchain and cryptocurrency.

What's it all cost?

The cost to start tribes is based on the platform token BEE which goes up and down with market forces. Currently there's a lot of BEE for sale at 1 BEE = 1 HIVE.

To create a tribe you need to burn 100 BEE when creating the token.
1000 BEE to enable staking.
You have to pay hive-engine 1000 BEE to enable scotbot, which is the tool that distributes the tokens like Hive does.
You then have the option of creating a website like hive.blog, which we call Nitrous. Nitrous costs 1000 BEE to create and $50/month for us to operate for you. If you don't want to spend $50 per month you can host the service on your own, or you can stake BEE (up to 5000 BEE max) for us to host the service for you and staking waives the monthly cost.

How does all this relate to a business?

I'm not an attorney and can't give you legal advice, but you may want to consider if it's in your interest to create a corporation, and have a security token for the operation. It can allow you to legally raise money as a corporation from investors. There's a couple of different options. Some let you raise an unlimited amount of money from accredited investors. Some let you raise a limited amount of money from non-accredited investors.

The cost for that can range, but roughly speaking getting your business incorporated and setup to legally raise money in the united states is around 10,000 USD. It's a service that can be brokered through Hive-Engine.