Hello everybody,
while I am getting back in the groove at home, I started thinking about a possible future idea.
Some users came forward to me asking if they could somehow invest in Skygems. Now, I am not the kind of guy saying "no" to money, but honestly I never really thought about this possibility and definitively never planned it.
Currently, our economic model is built on two variants:
A) Our/my scopes, which are basically the "first" ones (iDK, H8, CDK500, and soon RC16), which I bought and paid for, and where any income is coming into my (now neary empty) wallet and is basically being used to update the system and fix where fixes are needed.
B) Scopes owned by other individuals, mostly hosted remotely under good skies, where the owner has an agreement with Skygems leading to the scope being usable through our interface, and any income is being split on a commission-basis between us and the owner (disclaimer: most of the income is going to the owner). Examples for such systems are the Dreamscope, the RC360, FSQ106, or Tecnosky RC. The owner has to handle the investment for the hardware, and also the ongoing hosting costs and the likes. Still, for most i makes economic sense as they can keep using the scope as usual, while it is also being used by paying customers.
So on a first view I wouldn't know what to do if somebody would tell me "Lukas, I would put insert sum here into Skygems". Hey, glad you like it, but I'd say you are better off buying a huge amount of points for that money and use it that way - makes me happy as well 🙂
However, it seems that some people would be happy to have something special on the network as well. For full disclosure, I had to swear to my wife that I would not add "oh god another scope" 😊. What I could imagine doing is some sort of crowdfunded (or user-funded) telescope system. Let's assume something a little crazy (I admit) like a CDK700: 70cm diameter, Planewave, 4540mm of focal, with two Nasmyth fochi. Add one big Moravian C5 camera (yes, the ones with those huge 150 MP sensors), and maybe on the second focus add a spectrograph (Echell anyone?).
Full grown price would be in the region of 220k USD. Ouch 😰 . If I would have to put up something like this, it would have to be very expensive to use (in the region of at least 150 Pts per hour, if not more).
Now, let's assume we could fund it through the crowd. First thing to find out would be what the advantage of a funder would be. Could be a (way) lower hourly rate, for example. The hosting would have to be paid by us, as well as the running fees (data storage costs would go up quite a bit), so we would need to generate something over the year to cover for it. For anything above our costs I could imagine some sort of income sharing between the crowdsourcers, either in form of point credits or outright money as we do it with point B) scopes.
Ok, up to you. Those are just some thoughts, I am very happy to see other opinions and ideas as well 🙂
Clear skies
Lukas
