Many good devs were incubated at BuildTeam and we pioneered alot of things, take the SIngle Sign On for example, BuildTeam was the first to integrate Google and Facebook logins and now other apps are following suit. Granted TokenBB was an idea based on ChainBB, we rescued it when it was about to be abandonded, same with GINAbot, the developer is pretty much leaving Steem but we are keeping the project going and 8000 users like to receive her notifications on Discord about their Steem account activity.
Billboards weren't my finest moment, but I have never seen the community rally behind something with such passion which brought genuine tears to my eyes at the time, it certainly was a way better investment than a makeup post from someone who cashed out and ran away from Steem with her loot.
Dlease.io is an investor class delegation market that existed as a first on Graphene even before Chintai on EOS and has way more volume, at 23 Mil SP in total leases to date. I have observed some behaviour in our own team where if a 4 week lease with a good APR of 20%+ comes up, the team member would power up 1500 SP for example to fill it, taking those liquid funds out of circulation for 4 weeks lease time and a further 13 week powerdown, so it is incentivising powerups and retention.
I work every day to manage a team of developers and guide the various projects under my charge, MinnowBooster is probably the only seemingly undesirable product but with only 500K delegation it isn't much and isn't affecting much, we don't give away all of our profits and have used it to help pay for private RPC servers and even public ones at one point when we could afford it, at some stage we had 4 x 512GB rpc servers, two of which were a public cluster, we exhibit more corporate social responsibility than the average app who use the free nodes and when we tried to get people to band together and share the cost of private nodes not many were keen or only wanted to spend only $100 per month to contribute.
Very few people have stuck around and tried to innovate and keep business running, we don't always get it right, there will always be haters, business is about making money to sustain itself and its workers, we provide a paycheck to many and keep devs around and interested.
It merely looks like I do nothing because I co-ordinate things in a private discord channel, but anyone on my team can confirm I am active for many hours a day making suggestions, testing for bugs, editing communication posts, engaging in witness channels, trying to list steem on payment integrators as per recent posts you can see in my blog. Because I have a business on Steem and am a Top 20 witness I can approach such parties with a professional email.
At the end of the day I have a wife and kids, like many of us do and there is no shame in trying different business ideas to try and provide for them, I don't say I will always get it right, but at least I try and am still around and passionate about Steem.
RE: Steemit Update: HF21 Testnet, SPS, EIP, Rewards API, SMTs!