comeonalready, thanks for the insight and advices. I'll refer to your points very briefly as I have still my hands very full with technical issues, but I understand your concerns and I want to reply even if it's quick and not very detailed.
Your marketing skills and salesmanship are right up there with the very best of them
I'm a software development guy, not a marketing wizzard! I haven't made any single marketing effort yet other than creating this thread. But I'm great believer in “customer service is the new marketing” and I try my best to fulfill it. If it results in your impression that my marketing skills are great, then I'm truly happy because it means that I do my job well!
I am not even so concerned about the high end of the rate either. You can claim "as low as 1% on a bad day" if you've ever collected exactly 1% on any bad day ever in the entire history of your pool. And what exactly is your definition of a "bad day"? Is it one in which we earn the same as or less than litecoin? Or something else?
Trying to put more light very briefly now: the pool compares its results to competitors, not only to LTC, and “bad day” is a day when competitors did better than us. Also, I want to tweak this algorithm to consider multi-day average, so that the fee would rise only if our profitability would be better than competitors in a multi-day average, and a single exceptional day wouldn't be good enough. For example today's fee is lower than competitors' 3% fee, because our recent days profitability was hit by technical problems and that's why the pool's fee is lower than competitors'.
I still haven't finished this algorithm and that's why I don't publish more details because it's still work in progress and even I am not sure how it will finally work. I don't have time to work on it right now because I have tons of things to fix or finish on the backend and I spend dozens of hours daily on this. Once I sort it out, I'll provide more detailed info and update the website. For now just please know that the pool's fee is in the range of competitors' fees. Is it reassuring enough for now?
On exceptionally lucky days, why should you take a much larger percentage if the proceeds if they are largely a result of luck and not operational efficiencies? How is that fair to your miners?
I agree that good/bad days on traditional single-coin pools are purely related to good/bad luck and natural variance. But coin-switch pools are different creatures. I believe operational effectiveness is responsible for 80% and luck for 20% of results being good or bad. As I wrote before: I'm going to apply higher fee only if CleverMining will be consistently beating competitors during a multi-day timeframe.
As for your opacity in choosing not to discuss which coins you choose to mine... Absolutely everyone mining can determine with near absolute certainty which coin they are are currently mining by reading the Network "Diff" value from the Block line on their cgminer stats, divide by 65536 (a scrypt constant), and match the results to the list of coin network difficulties on coinwarz or coinchoose (without having to run all the various wallets themselves). THERE ARE NO SECRETS HERE! And it's hardly difficult to imagine efficient profitability optimizing coin switching algorithms. We simply don't want to do it ourselves, as it is more efficient to contract out to the best service provider. That is your opportunity. Don't blow it by being opaque and greedy.
I know that it isn't very hard to find, I don't mind. I'm not going to discuss any operational details about
how this pool works to achieve its profitability - regardless on how easy or how hard they are to find on your own. This is my policy and I'm going to stick to it. I believe it's for the best interest of all pool users.