Questions for Zappl

Some of you may have seen the recent series of posts by the account @zappl (I believe aka @thedegensloth), talking about the upcoming development and launch of a Steem-based micro-blogging site called zappl.io. The dev has also launched a crowdsale on the BitShares asset exchange. I've been thinking about it, thinking about contributing, and working up a few friendly questions that should be publicly answered by the dev (team?). It's possible that some of these have answers somewhere already, but I've not quite had the time to dig through all the comments yet, and the dev hasn't given us a central repository for all his stuff.

One place where he did answer some important questions asked by @pfunk is here, where the dev gives some good answers to due-diligence questions.. I'll try not to repeat those questions here.

Throughout, I'm not trying to accuse you of anything, but these are nonetheless questions that should be addressed.

1. What part of the world do you live in?

This is a strange question, but I ask it for two reasons. First, if you're in the USA, your fundraising may be illegal. The SEC is very particular about who is allowed to sell shares, what they're allowed to tell potential investors, etc. I'm not a lawyer or an expert, but I don't think your crowdsale would be smiled upon by the US federal government.

Second, $32,000 is not much money where I come from. Is it enough to do what you say you're going to do? In your answer to @pfunk's question of "who are you," you list 13 positions. That's a lot of people to be paid with $32,000, especially when you've also stated that you'll keep some (35%, I believe?) in reserve.

2. Will your system be more than a new front-end for the Steem blockchain?

Don't get me wrong, the Steem blockchain needs new front-ends. But if your project does more, that's exciting. You've talked about repurposing the "promote" feature. Why? With Steem, you can simply create your own operation.

Another way to re-phrase this question is to ask:

3. How will your website be different from busy.org?

From what I can tell, your website/apps will allow users to submit short posts to Steem. Will you limit the length of the posts, and that's how you'll distinguish yourself from the rest?

4. Will your website display content that was posted from Steemit.com or Busy.org?

I'm operating under the assumption that you're going to use the standard Steem post operation to interact with the blockchain, and that you'll use tags or json metadata to mark your posts as appropriately short-form. If I post something via steemit.com that meets your length criteria, will it automatically display on zappl.io? If I tag it properly on steemit.com will it display on zappl.io? Or, will zappl.io only display content that was submitted via zappl.io?

This question is really an invitation for you to explain a little more about how you plan to actually operate your system.

5. Why are you giving BitUSD funders a discount in the crowdsale? (or, why are you charging SBD funders a premium?)

SBD is currently trading at a huge premium to BitUSD, but in your two Bitshares markets, you're pretending that SBD and BitUSD are equivalent. Are you just treating the SBD premium as a convenience charge? This makes your crowdsale look like it was thrown together without much thought. There's nothing strictly wrong with doing it the way you're doing it, but it's odd.

6. Do you have a day job?

Or is Zappl going to be your main occupation for the next few months?

Thanks for your transparency so far, and I hope my questions haven't been too aggressive.

I'm not "out to get you"; I just need to know more. And anyway, I have over 500 followers and some of them will see this and maybe they'll want to contribute.

If you want to contribute to the crowdsale, you'll need a Bitshares account, which you can get via this link: Sign up for BitShares!