The Market

Making Money

"If this country is worth saving, it's worth saving at a profit"
-- H.L. Hunt

Many projects dream of some extremely rich person coming along, seeing their proposal, and saying "Neat - to whom do I write the check?" In reality, seasteads are much more likely to happen if somebody can figure out how to make a buck with them. If floating cities are worth building, they're worth building at a profit. And if they can't be built profitably, it is far from clear that they are worth building.This section outlines some business and customer possibilities for seasteads.

It's very important to be honest about the advantages and limitations of doing business on board a floting platform. We've seen numerous proposals for ideas to make money on floating cities that are obviously not going to work, because they don't leverage any of the comparative advantages. There are lots of people out there who want to make money, and there is no easy way or magic recipe to do so. By moving a business to the ocean, you are cutting it off from resources and customers, making everything more expensive and more difficult. To be able to compete with the possibiltiy of doing the same thing on land, there has to be a damn good reason why the ocean is a better place.

After a fair bit of thought, we've only come up with two unique features of seasteading which provide its competitive edge. The first is the freedom offered by sovereignty and the second is the unique ability of seasteads to provide some of the comfort and stability of land in remote marine locations. Hence any business must center around one of these features.

The fundamental seastead business is that of manufacturing, and perhaps operating, the seasteads. We think the best way to characterize this industry is as real estate development. The main differences from conventional development are that the land must be built instead of made, and the developer must provide all utilities rather than just paying for a connection to the grid.

An example of a similar business is a company called International Marine Flotation System Inc. They design and build floating homes, marinas, restaraunts, docks, and roads based on concrete floats. They've even built entire floating home developments. A seastead manufacturer would be in a similar business, but geared towards constructing more isolated and self-sufficient real estate [FloatingHomes].

One nice thing about this version of the real estate business is that its in some ways less speculative than on land. A land developer must often risk a large chunk of money on a piece of land or a building. Because seasteads are modular and expandable, the developer can start small - like building a skyscraper a few floors at a time. If successful, profits can be rolled into further expansion. Since there is plenty of room on the ocean, this means no ceiling to the potential profits from the initial stake. This goes a long way to making up for the uncertainty due to the novelty of the seastead business [Hunting2001].

While we're going to present a number of business ideas to demonstrate why this real estate is potentially valuable, the seastead developer should not be specifying its exact set of tenants in advance. Just like the builder of a skyscraper, its important to know something about potential customers (that they exist, their utilities needs), but there's no need to micro-manage. The seastead builder should be in the real estate business, not the fishing, banking, or medical research business. As Eric Hunting says: "The business plan is straightforward because everything revolves around creating habitable space, the revenue it produces in rent, lease, or sale, and the costs accrued in maintaining it, making it useful, and making it attractive. ".

Business Models

{ There are enough of these that its probably worth grouping them into sections }

Seastead Construction Corp.

With this business model, we hypothesise that there are enough groups of people that want a seastead, for whatever reason, that it makes sense to form a corporation that specializes in building seasteads to order. The corporation would not worry about the day-to-day operation of the seasteads it produced. These groups may be interested in residential seasteads for political freedom, or they may be developing one of the many business ideas we propose.

The residential groups can be roughly partitioned into political groups (e.g. libertarians [Atlantis1994], socialists, communists, etc.), religious groups (e.g. fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, etc.) , and single issue groups (e.g. drugs [Island], nudists, gun enthusiasts [FrontSight], environmentalists [Celestopia], etc.) While sometimes these groups can legally form their own land based communities, they may prefer to do so in a more isolated environment like a seastead to avoid hassles with local authorities. Some of these groups will have no legal land based option available to them, so something like a seastead will be their only option. Essentially seasteads would function as intentional communities, with far greater independence and autonomy.

Luxury Resort

{Restructure this as Resort w/ subsections, cruise ships, timeshare, drugs, etc.}

The luxury resort business is thriving [stick a few refs here, maybe a pretty graph]. While many resorts try to leverage some local community or artifact, there are others that merely exist to provide a complete experience unto themselves. For example, many people go to Club Med^® and cruise ships with no real intention of ever leaving the facilities. A luxury seastead resort could be tailored to meet the needs of these people. Note that a luxury resort seastead would have to compete with the existing luxury resorts. Thus, issues of how to get to and from the seastead, providing amenities, etc., all have to be worked through. A seastead can offer some experiences that may not be possible at other Luxury Resorts, and these may be the key to its success.

An example of a resort tailored to a specific, freedom-oriented issue is the Front Sight Firearms Training Institute in Nevada. Besides offering training in the use of firearms, as well as similar topics (chemical agents, climbing and rappelling, and soon executive protection), Front Sight's plan is to become a luxury resort for gun lovers. Around a third of the 170 1-acre home sites have already been sold as part of a package which includes a lifetime membership in the training facility. Condominiums and a hotel are planned as well. Front Sight is expanding rapidly with the income stream from its members, and seems to have found/created a succesful (and previously untapped) niche market.

The United Arab Emirates are pursuing an extremely large, ambitious, expensive project to build an ultra-luxury resort called The Palms. What is interesting about this particular project is that it is being built entirely on the world largest man-made islands. In fact, the islands will be visible from the moon with the naked eye, and will create 120 km of shoreline. Construction began in 2001 and is expected to end in 2007. { I've been to their webpage but I couldn't find it, need a reference and info on cost - P }

Can a floating luxury resort be profitable? The answer has been yes for decades, as we can see by looking at the cruise ship industry. This ships produce nothing, import all their food, water, and fuel, and still turn a profit. About 10 million people a year take a cruise, providing about $17B in revenue. Clearly a floating resort can be a profitable business model. This is not to say that it will be easy - cruise ships actually take people places, which is an advantage. But seasteads can provide some other things to offset that.

Sin IndustriesA seastead is the ideal setting for the so-called sin industries like drugs, prostitution, and gambling. Drugs are low-capital and high-profit, but also carry a great political risks. Still, European countries are relatively tolerant, and as long as drugs are only used locally, the idea may fly. [insert drug stuff from elsewhere].

Prostitution, as long as it does not involve children, is widely accepted. It is at least claimed that some tourism to Thailand and Costa Rica is motivated by cheap prostitutes. Gambling is also widely accepted. While gambling is common enough that it is unlikely to motivate visitors, having it adds substantially to a resort's bottom line.

Timeshare Resort

Timeshares are in between an intentional community and a hotel resort. The residents are owners, but they do not stay there all year. We believe this has some major advantages in terms of financing and market appeal. With financing, time share residents pay up front. Thus you don't have to get a loan with the hope of having enough business to pay it back. You let people buy shares, and when you've sold enough, you start construction.

In terms of the market, we believe that the number of people willing to spend a few weeks each year on a seastead is far greater than the number willing to drop everything and devote their lives to it. This is even more dramatically true when you consider financial resources along with desire. In our many conversations about seasteading, we almost never encounter people who are seriously interested in living on a stead full time and have the money to buy a full share upfront. Yet we constantly meet people who find the concept intriguing and would love to try it part-time.

Earning money becomes less of a problem for the residents, because they can work normal jobs the rest of the year. Much less self-sufficiency is needed because resources flow in from the outside. As time goes on, seasteads become sea-cities, the internal economy grows, people find profitable seastead-based businesses, and more and more people can choose to live there full-time. This exemplifies our incremental approach.

Underwater Resort

While being completely underwater makes the engineering quite difficult, having some habitable underwater area has much to be said for it. It has an undeniable romantic appeal (underwater weddings? Parties? Honeymoon suites?). Jules' Undersea Lodge in Key Largo, Florida, charges $300-$600 per night [Jules]. It has received a lot of media attention, for example it was featured on "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous". Hydropolis, the worlds first luxury underwater hotel, is to be built in Dubai (close to The Palms) and completed in late 2006 [ReutersDubai]. The project is funded to the tune of five hundred million dollars. Poseiden Resorts is another planned project [Poseidon]. The Global Coral Reef Alliance [GCRA] has demonstrated that electro-accretion can be used to build and sustain artificial coral reefs for diving.

Even from an above-water seasted, underwater tourism and exploration can be done via submersibles. There are some interesting personal subs on the market [Hawkes], [USSubs, as well as semi-submersibles [SubSeaSystems] suited for tourism. Remotely-operated vehicles could be used initially, as that is a lot easier than carrying around actual passengers.

Personal Resort

The Aquatic Pod Suite from the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog is described as:

The world's only aquatic pod suite that offers panoramic views simultaneously above and below the surface of the water. Circular, with a 'flying saucer' aspect, the suite rests directly on the water, the lower portion submerged approximately five feet. Perfect as a getaway at a favorite lagoon, beach, lake or river, the suite offers spectacular 300° views of the environment. Beam lights illuminate the depths for viewing the aquatic surroundings after dark. With a 150 square-foot interior, the self-contained, circular suite has all the furnishings for two people to enjoy on-the-water living. The interior has a central air conditioning system, desalination unit, mini-bar, audio-video system with Bose stereo, king-size bed, toilet and shower. Outside, a floating terrace circumscribes the unit, providing a 6.6-foot-wide surface for sun bathing or enjoying breezes off the water. The inflatable terrace also lends stability and extra buoyancy to the suite, and protects it from scratches and bumps when visiting boats or windsurfers dock alongside. The above-water entrance is a watertight aviation design that prevents stray moisture and splashes from dampening the interior. Unlike houseboats, this unit remains permanently anchored at a specific location by an environmentally-friendly anchor that attaches with a durable, corrosion-resistant chain. It can also be towed by a boat. A 2.5kva diesel generator with exhaust silencer produces 220-volt power to supply all necessary electricity.
[HammacherSchlemmer]

The listed price is $91,100. While we don't know how well the product has sold, at least this provides some evidence of a market for floating platforms.

Retirement Home

A November 2004 article in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society suggested that living on a cruise ship might be an alternative to assisted living facilities. The abstract reads:

Options for elderly patients who can no longer remain independent are limited. Most choices involve assisted living facilities, 24-hour caregivers, or nursing homes. State and federal assistance for payment for individual care is limited, and seniors usually pay for most costs out of pocket. For those patients who have the means to afford assisted living centers or nursing homes, "cruise ship care" is proposed. Traveling alongside traditional tourists, groups of seniors would live on cruise ships for extended periods of time. Cruise ships are similar to assisted living centers in the amenities provided, costs per month, and many other areas.

This article begins with an examination of the needs of seniors in assisted living facilities and then explores the feasibility of cruise ship care in answering those needs. Similarities between cruise ship travel and assisted living care, as well as the monetary costs of both options, are defined. A decision tree with selections for nonindependent care for seniors was created including cruise ship care as an alternative. Using a Markov model over 20 years, a representative cost-effectiveness analysis was performed that showed that cruises were priced similarly to assisted living centers and were more efficacious. Proposed ways that cruise ship companies could further accommodate the needs of seniors interested in this option are also suggested. Implementation for cruise ship care on the individual basis is also presented. Ultimately, it is wished to introduce a feasible and possibly more desirable option to seniors who can no longer remain independent.
[JAGS_10_2004]

Seasteads have some potential advantages for a retirement home. They are affected less by the waves, which should be more comfortable, and they have more space for permanent residents. A disadvantage is that they don't go to as many exotic locations. { Other Thoughts? }

Offshore Manufacturing

There are some manufacturing processes that are sufficiently dangerous that they need fair amounts of area around them. The land acquisition costs and corresponding regulatory hoops required may be quite substantial and expensive. Its also hard to acquire a large enough buffer zone around your plant to convince people that its safe.

For example, the oil companies have not been able to break ground on a new refinery in the US in decades { Source? - P}. They might like to have a refinery that floats. That way they can refine the crude closer to the source and just ship the finished product around. We suspect that Union Carbide feels similarly about manufacturing pesticides. Processes that do not require large energy or freshwater inputs are ideal, and for them, it may be cheaper to build a seastead than go through the permitting process on land. Its also a lot faster. This is true even for a clean, non-polluting plant.

What is nice about this example is that it provides a truly gargantuan market, worth literally billions of dollars, if seasteads provide a useful solution. Investors like to see a large potential upside. It may be possible to get some capital from relevant industries, as the cost of seasteading research is small compared to how much it might save them.

One interesting twist is an industry which requires little in the way of physical raw materials: outsourced coding. A business trying to do this was founded in 2004:

Take a used cruise ship, plant it in international waters three miles off the coast of El Segundo, near Los Angeles, people it with 600 of the brightest software engineers they can find around the world (both men and women), and run a 24-hour-a-day programming shop, thereby avoiding H-1B visa hassles while still exploiting offshore labor cost arbitrage and completing development projects in half the time they'd take onshore or offshore...

The scheme first came to Mr. Cook one day while he was cutting his grass in San Diego. With his unusual background as a super-tanker captain and an IT professional, the idea made a lot of sense to him. He took it to Mr. Green, with whom he'd worked before and who has served as both a buyer and provider of outsourcing services, and they saw the possibility of creating a new form of IT sourcing.

A year ago, they formed SeaCode, Inc. with Mr. Cook serving as CEO and Mr. Green as COO. They've signed on a marketing director and CTO and, even more importantly, found an investor. Start-up costs won't be cheap. A broker right now is searching for just the right ship to buy -- somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million.
[SourcingMag2005]

Ocean Science Platform

In order to study the ocean, ocean scientists normally need to get on a boat and go out to sea. It would be useful to have a platform that stays on station from which they could do their research. Under this scenario, the seastead would be towed to an interesting location and the research would take place as a dedicated community. The benefit of having the scientists always on station may outweigh the additional costs of operating a seastead. An example of such a platform is the Scripps Institution of Oceonagraphy's Flip, or Floating Instrument Platform, which can float horizontally or vertically.

Environmental Demonstrator

The kinds of seasteads described in this paper will be quite self-sufficient once they are built. As such they will appeal to members of the environmental movement as an example of how to build communities that live within their environmental means as opposed to the resource wasteful communities of today. In addition, the environmentalists have successfully managed to raise large amounts of money to support their cause. Perhaps several of these organizations could get together to fund an environmental demonstrator seastead.

World Library

Most of the countries in the world have signed onto the Berne Copyright Convention. A seastead in the middle of the ocean is not bound by any copyright laws. Thus, it would be legal to obtain and digitize a vast library of material that national and university libraries can not amass simply because of copyright restrictions. While it would not be possible to export this material back out to the Internet, one could imagine researchers choosing to come to the world library seastead simply because they could do their research in a fraction of the time required to do it using conventional libraries.

Patent Free Zone

Patent laws vary from country to country. There is a push to unify these various patent laws across all of the industrialized nations. A seastead in the middle of the ocean would be exempt from all patents. Thus, to save money, somebody could choose to implement some portion of a patented process on a seastead. While nations could choose to impose tariff on products imported from a seastead, not all countries would do so.

A risk with such a venture is that a corporation who is being infringed upon might encourage their friendly national navy to board the seastead and shut it down. As will frequently be the case, the seastead must balance the profit and attractiveness of unique approaches with the potential problems.

Marina

Marinas offer services such as shelter, water, food, electricity, and medical facilities to the boating population. While seasteads may not be able to supply the same level or price as land-based facilities, they can service remote areas where other options are not available, as well as offering some unique attractions. The seastead can be moved whenever the current crop of boaters in a given area grow bored, thereby picking up another crop.

Tour Base

A seastead could serve as the base for touring some unique and remote area. It would offer more roomy and luxurious accomodations than a boat, and provide a runway, allowing for access by air instead of sea. The tour destination could be an island or archipelago, something underwater (reefs, sunken ships), glaciers, or anything else remote and interesting. If the seastead is mobile, it may periodically move so that it can offer an endless variety of tour destinations.

Fishing Base

A seastead could serve as a supply cache, storage facility, and processing facility for commerical fishing, allowing fleets to go farther and stay longer.

Mariculture Products

There are a number of products which seasteads could manufacture and sell to the rest of the world. In The Millenial Project, Marshall Savage discusses several options, including protein powder from spirullina algae, pearls, seaweed, fish, and shellfish [Savage1992 pp. 44-57]. Seaweed can be made into paper and textiles.

Seasteads may have a major advantage for mariculture. One reason why the sea is a much harsher environment for life than land is that when things die on land, their remains are readily available for scavenging. When things die in the ocean, they sink to the ocean floor, removing useful resources from the food chain. Natural upwelling zones, which constitute only about 1% of the oceans surface, produce approximately half of the worlds fish. Once OTEC is a viable energy source, or perhaps earlier if wave-powered pumps such as the Isaac's Pump are used, seasteads will be bringing nutrient-dense water to the surface as a side effect of generating power. This can be used as the base for a food chain of aquatic life. { expand this discussion? Need references }

Advanced Medical Research and Treatment

Government bureaucracy is a major barrier to medical and biotechnological advancement. The FDA has historically been slow to approve new medical treatments, and promising areas such as stem cell research have been curtailed by governments. Seasteads would be an excellent place for cutting-edge medical research and treatment.

Communication Station

Ships far from land generally communicate via satellites, which are very expensive and have a high lag time. Seasteads could extend this range, providing phone/internet service. The platform would be connected either to an undersea cable, or by bouncing through some relaying platforms. The seastead design's height and stability make it well-suited to being a communication tower.

Virtual Services

This category includes banking and financial services, corporation registration, and internet hosting. Some readers may be surprised to see this category listed so far down, as these have been often proposed as natural businesses for a new nation. Unfortunately, we seen them as problematic. While there is a large market for virtual services, there is also a lot of competition. Any country with a fiber optic connection can enter these industries, and many have. The simplest way to look at it is that the required infrastructure (communications bandwidth) is much, much cheaper on land than at sea. Thus it is unlikely to be a comparative advantage for a floating city.

For example, we believe that one of the reasons HavenCo had difficulty finding customers was that they had to compete with the Bahamas, Panama, Costa Rica, etc., with little extra to offer. Their regulatory advantages were offset by bandwidth and cost disadvantages. Virtual businesses can always switch jurisdictions if there is a crackdown, or locate redundantly in multiple countries. There are better ways (like cryptography) to achieve the desired goals of a data haven than putting it in a remote location.

Financial service industries are quite conservative, and it will be a long time before seasteads are seen as stable enough. Additionally, since these services can be located anywhere, seasteads must compete against the top jurisdictions in the world. And that is a difficult task.

Energy Production

This business model is not exactly far-fetched, given that its what the vast majority of fixed ocean structures have been built for. Besides oil, there is methane hydrate, as well as a wealth of renewable power from the sun, wind, and waves. While such sources are currently not competitive, it is certainly possible they will be in the future. The ocean is a great place to get wind energy, since speed is higher, and energy goes up with the cube of speed. With a large enough budget, OTEC may be feasible. With the right system, wave power could be economical. Nuclear power could be kept offshore to reduce the negative effects of a meltdown (although such problems are very unlikely nowadays). Any of these sources could be used to make hydrogen, which would be shipped away.

As with any seastead business, there will have to be good economic reasons to generate energy on the ocean, since maintenance is more expensive. Since there are substantial transmission losses, it's best to generate electricity close to where it is used. However, as we can see from oil platforms, OTEC, etc., some aspects of this industry actually are suited to being done at sea.

Space Launch

{ is this accurate? I'm sure a space buff will correct me if not. Also, needs pix.}

There are a number of advantages to launching from the ocean. Rockets are dangerous, and its good to have not only a clear area to launch from, but to be over uninhabited areas while going up. Launch vendors have to warn people about potential falling booster stages, and there are a lot less people to worry about on the ocean. Additionally, it makes recovery of booster stages easier, since the ocean is softer than land, and its easier to get anywhere on it, and transport something heavy back.

Also, the earth's equator is the best place to launch from, because you get maximum energy from the Earth's rotation. Heavy regulation in countries like the US slows innovation in the space industry, partly because of these safety risks, and the ocean would be a lower regulation environment. In general, a floating platform is a pretty good place to launch and recover boosters from.

Cargo Transshipment Port

Many people know about the incredible wealth of Hong Kong, an area with few natural resources. Some of them know about the free market policies which helped lead to the wealth. But Hong Kong's placement is also crucial - it is in a convenient location to act as the cargo gateway from Asia to the world.

There are some locations that are naturally suited to transshipment, ie moving cargo between ships. Since a seastead can go anywhere, we can just look at the entire ocean, find the point in the water that would be a bustling port if only there were an island there, and build one.

Aquaculture

If you're not familiar with the term, aquaculture means raising sea creatures like finfish and shellfish. The parallel goes something like:

Hunting	Ranching
Gathering	Farming
Fishing	Aquaculture
Agricultural Revolution	? Aquaculture Revolution ?

If you look at the transition from hunter/gatherer to modern agriculture, you see a huge gain in efficiency which allowed human population to skyrocket. Current ocean fishing techniques are much like hunting. There is a classic tragedy of the commons problem. Each individual gains from depleting the oceans, and no one replenishes them because others would get most of the benefit. Since no one owns them, technology goes into better harvesting and processing, not better production.

The standard way to solve such a problem is to privatize the commons. While some novel schemes for creating property rights in fish have been used in coast areas, it's much harder with migratory ocean fish. But aquaculture solves tis problem, since it generally involves raising fish in huge nets. It seems likely that this will produce a drastically higher output per unit effort, just as happened with food production on land millenia ago.

Not only can we get a cheaper supply of marine products, but there is a huge demand for aquaculture. Not only is the world's population increasing, but people are eating more fish as the health benefits become more widely recognized. There is no other way to meet this demand, besides offshore aquaculture. Production by fishing is expected to remain flat at best, due to the overfishing problems mentioned. Freshwater aquaculture has to compete with all the other demands for freshwater by our growing population. Most seawater aquaculture occurs in coastal regions, which are also in high demand. So offshore is the only way to go, and thus this is a very promising business opportunity for seasteads.

As you can see, there are quite a variety of business possibilities for a seastead. We believe there are many potential customers as well.

Market

{Wayne - There is a market. Residensea, Club Med, general interest}

{ Not clear that this should be a separate section. ie Market depends on Business Model. Should merge. }

Libertarians

Historically, many new-country projects have been envisioned by freedom-oriented individuals ([Atlantis1994], [Freedonia], [FreedomShip]). Such individuals have contributed time and money to projects much less realistic than seasteading. Thus we think it is reasonable to expect a great deal of interest in our project from the libertarian community once it is clear that our plan is actually feasible. While US National Libertarian Party membership has been steadily declining, we believe that this is a result of libertarians becoming weary of the lack of results, not a philosophical change in the population. The so-called "War On Terror" is currently adding more bite to the Libs perennial dissatisfaction.

Environmentalists

The past few decades have seen a huge trend towards increased environmental awareness. The Sierra Club had over 600,000 members in 1996 [Sierra1997]. The Nature Conservancy is the nations tenth largest nonprofit, with assets in 2001 of almost three billion dollars, and annual contributions of over five hundred million [NatureCon2001]. Contrast this with 28,000 members of the US National Libertarian Party (as of 11/2001), and you see that environmentalists may be the largest market. Self-sufficient seasteads with their low environmental footprint will have tremendous appeal to these individuals.

Recreational Drug Users

Recreational drugs are illegal almost everywhere in the world. While they are still widely available, prices are high, quality is erratic, selection is poor, and users risk imprisonment and the confiscation of their possessions. The fact that such a market exists despite these factors is indication of the vast demand for these products. We believe that there is a substantial market for a facility which offers a wide variety of high-quality drugs in a legal setting with available medical care in case of emergency. Even after the extra costs for "doing things right", such as medical facilities and rigorous purity testing, the profit margin for recreational drugs is immense.

One particularly interesting part of this market is for those individuals interested in receiving psychological therapy which uses psychedelic drugs as part of the counseling. For example, MDMA (ecstasy) was widely used for this purpose while it was legal. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) has received FDA approval for a $5M, 5-year clinical study to evaluate MDMA for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder [Doblin2002]. Anecdotal reports of the success of MDMA-based psychotherapy for individuals unable to progress through conventional methods are extremely positive [Shulgin1991 pp. 69-75, Shulgin1997, Stafford1992 pp 78-80]. Several other psychedelic drugs have shown great promise in studies as well, such as LSD [Stafford1992, pp. 78-82].

One positive aspect of this kind of drug use is the resulting publicity. While using drugs recreationally has a negative association, medical use is seen in a positive light. Medical marijuana treatment is a good example, and as some conditions require chronic use, it is more likely that sufferers will find it worthwhile to move because of their condition. At least two individuals (Steve Kubby and Renee Boje) have sought political refuge in Canada because the US would not allow them access to medical marijuana.

Note that the extreme paranoia of the US about drugs may restrict the possible locations for seasteads catering to this market. For example, the Caribbean might be close enough to make Uncle Sam uncomfortable.

Deep-sea Sport Fishermen

These people are just as fanatic about their hobby as anybody. They will spend serious amounts of money to bag a tuna or the like. They might like the option of being able to camp out on a seastead at night rather than always having to return to shore or camp out in the crowded ship. This requires that the seastead be parked where deep sea fishing occurs.

Scuba Divers

Scuba divers are another hobbyist group that loves to spend money. If the seastead is parked near some interesting reefs, it becomes a reasonable place for them to visit.

Boaters

People who own and operate boats (sail or motor-powered) often have extra money on their hands. They might like the challenge of locating and visiting a seastead. If there are interesting facilities on board, so much the better.

Aviators

People with personal helicopters and STOL aircraft might like the challenge of landing at a seastead.

Commercial Fishermen

Seasteads could provide supplies, storage, and general support for commercial fishing, as well as emergency medical facilities.

Some combination of these approaches will likely be used. For example, a residential seastead (condo, time-share, or hotel) might devote part of its area to research experiments. Since it would have a dock and infrastructure, it might as well sell its amenities to boaters. Residents would have access to a digital library, as well as deep-sea fishing and scuba diving equipment. Fishing, diving, and interesting tours would help fill hotel rooms. As time goes on, the market will determine which seastead services have the greatest demand.

One may well ask how a seastead can compete against a world full of other recreation options. There are many resorts, each competing to lure travelers - isn't the competition tough? Won't the primitive amenities be a major downside? It is clear, however, that there is a demand for resorts with primitive amenities, since many exist. We can't initially offer tennis courts and the comforts of home, but even if that rules out 99% of vacationers, that's OK. All we need to do is appeal sufficiently to a minority that they prefer us over other options. We think that the novelty of a seastead as a work of engineering, an environmentally sustainable community, and an experiment in self-governance will get us that minority.