Greetings Stackers!

I am here today to seek your help in raising sats/time to help me grow my brand:

THE LOST+UNFOUNDS

I’ve had too many bad jobs in my life to tell me that there cannot be a better way to treat people. Most people work for a flat wage or salary and that’s playing Russian Roulette with your life.

When your earning potential is capped, you are offered stability with a variable of workload. When your earning potential is unlimited, your varied workload is a choice!

Open-source. Bitcoin. Nostr. A.I.

Ladies and gentlemen, these are the keys to a successful harmony in the world. These are the keys to bridging the wealth gaps. The keys to ending poverty. The keys to peace.

THE LOST+UNFOUNDS is a creative extension of my dream to create and bring change to the world through a reform of business philosophy. The effort to craft a more equitable exchange of energy between humankind. As Michael Saylor says, Bitcoin is energy.

Our words have power. The power to create, and the power to change, either positively or negatively. But they can’t destroy. As much as we want to take down the establishment, there is always going to be one somewhere else (this includes somewhere else in time).

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I worked in the service industry for 20+ years and I know that my words over the years have heavily influenced the buying decisions of patrons. Sometimes for a big tip, sometimes for no tip at all. But the owner made a profit either way.

As a young aspiring DJ, I worked nights for a flat rate of cash and grew a small neighborhood bars from 50 people to 300 on a Tuesday night. Many residencies at clubs. The rate stayed the same. And due to the local DJ’s undercutting in good old Portland, trying to renegotiate for a percentage of the sales was a huge risk to my wallet and I have mouths to feed.

Perhaps, I was operating in fear, but then again why does this fear even need to exist?

Without my efforts to speak or act on their behalf, I realized, a lot of times the people that I work for would have never sold their product or services to a portion of these customers. And it never sat right with me that sometimes the only benefit I got from some transactions was a pat on the back.

A storm was brewing…

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I tried making a Shopify store, and I was buzzing along listing products and having a good time, until I stumbled across a way to expand my traffic: Affilate Plug-Ins.

What an awesome idea! I eagerly added this extension Referral Candy to my site. It came with a dashboard, allowing me to customize referral codes, track affiliate commissions, set levels, and gave affiliate access to track sales as well.

I had a way to save the world! I would give everyone higher commissions to lure talent and generate sales. Easy right? Well, not exactly.

You see this affiliate program had a couple of key flaws that I felt could damage my business and credibility.

First, if I ever wanted to expand the business and I was no longer in charge of managing the percentages for payouts, then I would have to place my trust in someone else to follow my vision. And Shopify plugins crash all the time or get removed completely. Sound familiar?

I was dealing with a centralization problem.

The second major issue was with fund allocation. The plugin allowed me to set commissions, but they were configured to take a percentage off the retail price. This would force me to have to spend time manually doing the math to make sure I’m not eating into my profits, and forcing me to create higher profit margins.

What I needed was to be able to enter the cost, set the sales price and then have only the profits being split. This would keep me from making accounting mistakes aka losing money to pay my affiliates. I reached out to the dev, but they wouldn’t add the feature.

The third, was a gaming feature, a left field idea that I came up with to encourage a friendly competition and boost engagement in the program. I wanted to have a special allocation of profits be directed to a pool that is a revenue split based on percentage of daily sales generated by affiliates.

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The tools we are using right now, I believe, have the ability to make this a possibility and change business in a special way. You see, I think we all understand the concept of an MLM to be home to the dreaded “pyramid scheme”, and from research I know that all MLM’s are not, but the threat is always in the back of my mind so why even try?

But what if it was open-sourced, and on blockchain? What if the wallet configurations are immutable? The commissions permanently set?

What if the only requirement to become an affiliate was a nostr account and a lighting wallet?

And since we are stepping away from centralization, why not create a decentralized-Amazon/Shopify that utilizes the affiliate program? A place where business owners don’t have to search for help because if they have the right product everyone in the community benefits from helping you grow?

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I call it THE TRADING POST. I do not care if someone steals this idea. I will just come work for you. If you see the vision and have the ability to help make this abstract vision of my thoughts a reality, please send me a DM when you have created it.

I want to spend the rest of my days making this concept a reality, but my time and resources are limited. I am gaining a stronger grasp on what Bitcoin can be, the power in its transparency and proof.

I believe that though we all can’t be fully altruistic, we can at least come closer to 50/50 agreements between workers and owners. In fact I believe that the plus side should flip to the workers because in this system, owners can be workers too.

I would propose a 58/42 split in favor of the workers.

42% for direct affiliate sales 8% Allocated for residuals from affiliate referral networks 8% To a bonus profit share fund

Many people may say that’s too high it will never work. Why would a business owner be willing to give away so much money?

Well for starters, the cost to acquire a new employee can be significant. In this system, the labor is already there.

The cost to acquire a customer can cost even more. Not to mention, with centralized systems, how do we even know that our ads are being put in front of the right people?

Word of mouth is the strongest form of advertising. And most of the time it’s free. But wouldn’t it be cool if the next time someone asked you where you got your cool shoes from you could give them a link and if they copy your style you at least get paid for it?

I know this is a big shill. But thinking out loud I can’t help but think that I’m not crazy. That we are approaching a point in time where I can make this a reality. So, I ask you, if you have a way to help me create this platform to plug my business into, whether that’s w/ sats to hire developers, or your time and effort, please don’t hesitate.

I have drafted a bit of a white paper with a more comprehensive dive into THE TRADING POST, I will paste it below.

If you read this entire thing, I thank you! Even if you can’t donate, just share this post. Feel free to poke holes and give critique, I am open to suggestions. I know I haven’t thought of everything, but I’ve overturned a lot of stones and found gold.