February 2023 Status Update

Hello February! It is the first Tuesday (or Wednesday as of late 😇) of the month and therefore time for your starbeam.one monthly status update.

Nearly One Year Has Passed 🚀

I announced the preview on February 22, 2022. Can you believe that in two weeks that will be one full year? 🤯 This time last year I was uploading the different applications to Azure and learning a lot. One year later, we are actively generating revenue and running a business. My hope is that in one year we can be profitable and paying our Azure bills. Can we do it? 🤔 🤞 To be continued. 🚀

Alpha II in II weeks in Year’s II’nd Month 🤓

OK OK I am having too much fun with the roman numeral II. Maybe it’s the ♊ in me. 🤪 We’re getting ready for the next alpha which seems like it’s been forever in the making, primarily focusing on quality and performance. We’re also going to be making some adjustments to the available markets and wanted to make this the focus of this month’s update.

Market Refresh

What’s in the works? We’re going to be making a new market structure for artists and collectors. For the Alpha II, we’re aiming to have four markets with different areas of focus and price points:

• Standard Market: 1-Flare base price, AI-generated value/experimental works
• Featured Market: 5-Flare base price, AI-generated showcase works
• Treasure Market: 10-Flare base price, specialized market featuring generated works of treasure
• Traditional Market: 20-Flare base price, human/non-AI works

“What Happened to the .25?”

As you can see, we’re increasing our prices. Why? The .25 price point was meant to be a daily price point for collectors who either participate on a daily basis and/or subscribe to our artists. Unfortunately, subscriptions is a large story and we have not been able to get to it due to all the other features and fixes we have been attending to. Additionally, our collector pool has not been large enough to make the .25 viable. Finally (and most importantly), after doing some cost analysis, it turns out the costs to host the assets using the current design is more than what we would make from the projected network gratuities of the sale.

(Yes that is sort of embarrassing to admit three years into designing a product, but better to adjust now when we only have 100 users than later when we have many more.)

As such, we have increased the price points to double the projected necessary amount to cover costs with the Standard Market. We have also set the price of the Featured Market to differentiate more from the Standard Market, and its price point should easily cover any hosting costs for the assets required to comprise products.

Subscriptions Are Still Part of the Journey

Finally, I wanted to make sure to note that subscriptions are still part of our roadmap here and we will certainly have this as a feature at some point. Ideally, this will be when I have another developer or two to assist in wrangling all the chaos. 😁

Stand-up & Shine (& Shill)

Alright, that’s it for this update. In two weeks, with any luck I will have a further, official announcement for Alpha II. In the meantime here is the latest Stand-up & Shine (& Shill):

Until next time, stay bright out there. 🙏✨🚀