A Startup’s Journey Into the Steem Blockchain

This is the start of a new journey of taking my centralized web platform and converting it to a Steem blockchain powered decentralized application. My goal with this blog series is to describe the business needs I have and the solutions I find to those problems from a business owners perspective.

As a developer I will need to learn the technical details to get to the solutions that my startup needs, but I will write about the requirements and solutions that are driving my development work so that anyone who is interested in this process can follow along with no technical background.

I will give you some background on my platform so that you can understand why I want to build it on the Steem blockchain. It started as an idea aimed at website owners who want to offer cash or credit rewards on their website, as a marketing tool to keep visitors staying longer.

Failure #1

My initial MVP allowed users to point at any web element on their web pages and make that element give “loot” to visitors who clicked on it. It had a visual effect of a coin appearing like in Super Mario, with a coin sound reinforcing the reward that was given. Visitors could then go to my platform and cash out digital and physical rewards that the website owner had added. A trail of coin rewards could be added throughout the website that had to be followed in the correct order to earn the reward, which could be an Amazon gift card or a discount code for some other service. The main goal was to guide website visitors to viewing new products and text content or encourage them to go through a checkout process.

This worked very well from a technical standpoint and I was very happy with how I had solved hundreds of frontend and backend issues on my own to successfully force my will on my computer. I used PayPal to have users deposit funds that they could distribute as “loot” throughout their site, and let their visitors fight over. I started doing some marketing and got a lot of new signups that started adding content.

I noticed a problem however, they were no webmasters and could not add the required script file to their websites as I described in my guide. They also thought that my platform was creating websites for them that they somehow could make money from, which added to their confusion. I had basically created a marketing service for web developers who were also running their own small online business. The target population for my service was extremely small and it had all just made sense to me while I was building my platform.

I was at a point where I was ready to go full steam ahead on online marketing and was excited for the next phase in my startup, only to have reality come down on me hard. I had no idea of how to change the project, or even what the new business model would be, so I left it online as a proof-of-concept site without any plans for moving forward.

Failure #2

A long time later, I was browsing the web for some new frontend ideas for displaying media content. I ran into scrollable galleries that created infinite walls of images that you could move around with your mouse and was pretty excited about finding a good use for this type of visual effect. I started thinking about how I could auto-generate these galleries for users and make it easy for anyone to get their media content online. Combined with my reward technology this would be a great hit I figured, so I got excited again and started working on merging the two technologies.

It turned out to be another successful implementation from a technical standpoint where each tile in this infinite grid of images could offer visitors small amount of coins as rewards for viewing them. Each image tile could link to a web page with products or some other valuable content that users wanted their visitors to look at. It was basically set up as a visual marketing tool and I was ready to market it again.

Something wasn’t quite right though, I noticed that it was hard to make my users entertain the idea that they should deposit funds to their free galleries and distribute in each tile, partly because my website did not focus on a problem and its solution that visitors could clearly understand. I felt that I was onto something this time however and spent some time thinking about what I could do to make it a no brainer for people to use.

During this time I was watching my favorite YouTubers complain about how YouTube had cut their ad revenue by 90% and they were basically begging for donations to be able to continue making a living from their content. It then dawned on me that my service would make the funds go the opposite direction, from visitors to the content creators as donations via micro transactions for content they enjoyed watching. The idea of tipping or micro transactions in general is not new, Steemit is clearly proof of this, but I wanted my service to be a monetization layer on top of any website or service they were already using.

Thanks to YouTube’s API I could automatically pull in the entire video library of my favorite YouTuber into a scrollable gallery complete with titles and thumbnails of the videos. I added a large tip button to each gallery tile’s content that visitors could click to donate small amounts and all was working like a well-oiled machine.

I was once again ready to start the marketing phase of my startup! This is the exact time I really started looking into the blockchain technology, and I got hooked. The technology was fascinating and I wanted to learn more. Before I even wrapped my head around how everything worked I knew I wanted to take advantage of this technology somehow, so I started looking for APIs to communicate with the blockchain from my application.

Failure #3

I found a great service called BlockCypher that had a near complete API for Bitcoin and better yet, they had a special micro transactions API for low cost transactions! They even had code examples and support for Ruby on Rails, which I used to develop my platform. I was learning how to create and sign transactions on the blockchain through my implementation of their API and was near completion. I went back one day to their API docs and found a red banner explaining how they had discontinued the micro transaction API due to increasing transaction fees on the Bitcoin network. I was bummed, but noticed they also offered an Ethereum API which I knew would charge lower fees since the Ethereum blockchain was less congested.

After nearly rebuilding all my code functions to use this new API instead, I noticed that most of the transactions I needed to make still cost too much to transact on the Ethereum blockchain. I felt like giving up development on my project and made a last effort to put back the PayPal code I had developed earlier until one of the new Ethereum startups could build a system that enabled micro transactions at very low cost.

Current failure(?)

This is when I discovered the Steemit site through Dollar Vigilante who I follow on YouTube, and I feel that I once again have a path to converting my project to a decentralized application that removes me as the third party responsible for keeping and distributing user funds.

In the following posts I will describe my learning process with the Steem API and how this approach will work out as the ultimate solution to my problems. I am cautiously excited once again and if it wasn’t for my passion for development and the blockchain (and Steemit!) I would not be writing this post. Time to get some Steem test code running…