70% of staff of Steemit inc. have been dismissed recently. Only the core team is still there. What a tragedy! Even though they did nothing wrong, they still had to go.
It happened because the operating costs have gotten higher and higher, but the only source of income was to sell STEEM @ whatever price the market displayed. This is clearly due to mismanagement. Every 8 year old kid will tell you, that if your costs keep increasing and the earnings keep shrinking (steem is down to 40 cents), you will go bankrupt someday.
What bothers me the most is, that it would have been so easy to cover all operating costs and payslips. Steemit.com is lucky to have very high traffic everyday. Just showing 1-one single ad on top of the trending, new and hot page would have easily earned them another 4-10 million USD per year. Whoops!
Even though the situation @ steemit inc. has never been worse than today, STEEM is still the best blockchain. There is no other chain that has accomplished more. I hope that they quickly learn from this massive failure by reducing costs and getting several new streams of income.
All this is very bad news and may create additional FUD. I don't want STEEM to die like some shitcoins, but I am already mentally prepared for STEEM to crash to 5 cents because of this mess... They need to get their shit together fast.
I think this can only be avoided, if bitcoin starts a new rally in early 2019. And it is not looking like that's going to happen in Q1.
But, I am going to stick with STEEM anyway. "If you are going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start." "Without friction there is no growth"...
The active users will probably start to decrease now and only the core cummunity might be staying for the vision, and not for profit.
Let's use this mess for a restart:
My call for action:
- lower the operating costs significantly.
- Get different streams of income for steemit inc to cover the costs of servers and payslips; just selling steem @ whatever price is a totally unsustainable business plan.
- Realise that it is in fact unsustainable and act upon that knowledge.
- Reveal an updated course and vision for steem an steemit inc.
- Get the laid off team back on board.
- Focus more on steem and bring in investors once SMTs are ready.
- Create lots of collaborations with other companies (not necessarily crypto companies) Quora would be a perfect fit for example:
Quora is a magnificently brilliant and simple site, where people post questions, and provide answers to others’ questions - for free. Why not tokenize this? This site has 190 million users...