The Now
A new idea is born and only you can make it take flight! Take a journey with me into the past and into the future I hope to give you, together we will stand on top of a mountain and see the impossible!
I personally don't care about the Steem price! What I do care about is sustainable business on the Steem blockchain which can weather the storm of high or low Steem prices, with a long-term view of job creation and daily incomes on Steemit, helping everyone get a bigger stake of Steem which I believe, if maybe, just maybe we are patient enough and stand behind each other as a unified force in the blockchain space, we can become the world's greatest social media platform, ever!
It takes a village to raise a child, but it takes an army of dedicated and talented individuals working as a team to create something truly world changing. We are on the cusp of that very moment and we don't even know it.
The Past
I stand proud to have joined Steem in the incubator stage before payouts became real, I stand before you as the first Steem witness in Africa, my powerful server and seed remain active at the service of the community.
My journey on Steem started as Steemit Community Manager for Bravenewcoin.com, I actively sought out Bravenewcoin CEO, Fran Strajnar and persuaded him to allow me to post on their behalf for a profit share, he agreed and I posted for @bravenewcoin for several months, with a total of nearly 100 posts. Most importantly I became good friends with Fran; who in my opinion, is one of the most influential and connected people in blockchain and banking, the mentorship and business acumen I learnt from him was among the most valuable gifts I received from being involved on Steemit.
After a while, I developed ideas for my own projects, the first being the @steemdrive billboard initiative, where with the help of fellow Steemians and trusted friends was able to crowdfund the second highest grossing non-developer post on the Steem, yielding a gross post value of $27 037.14 which was used to launch the first digital and massive print Steem billboards in Durban, South Africa ... followed by New Zealand and Chicago made possible by the amazing collaboration with @cryptoiskey and @theprophet0 respectively. This project was intended to create employment for billboard liaisons in their respective countries and sub-regions.
Billboard crowdfunding was only feasible when the Steem price was over $2.00 so when it dropped below that I came up with the SteemSports mass SP distribution games concept, and created further jobs for nearly 20 people, including writers and developers.
SteemSports started-off in "robin hood" style, giving the game winners a share of the liquid reward and the balance to the writers and editors, in a well-oiled publishing model which soon gained the @steemsports account the #1 reputation rank on Steem, which it still holds to this day. We distributed nearly 250,000 SP to winners and writers alike over the span of the project and then shifted to a monetary pay plays system with a dedicated website developed by the then CTO, @furion and managed by my good friend @cryptoiskey.
We created a truely vibrant chat channel and had some new writers such as @writingamigo come fresh off the web to join Steem via our project. It was in this project where I met @smooth and am proud to be his friend on Steem, my change of timezone caused us to lose touch a bit, but his attentive ear and encouragement meant more to me than he will ever know.
The project was heavily trolled by uninformed parties, just as we had planned a media roll-out with healthy exposure for the project and for Steem itself, an initial release on the coremedia.info magazine can be seen here. The steemsports.com site operated up until a recent hard-fork in early 2017, rendered our integration inoperable and the project remains as a daily showcase of @cryptoiskey's graphics capabilities and dedication while the rest of the team no longer found it profitable to continue on.
In the time overlapping the creation of Steemsports, I came across another great project by @marcgodard called @steemvoter, which is a curation bot with a simple interface to empower ordinary users with whale bot voting capabilities, I quickly identified the synergies and cross-promotion between SteemSports and steemvoter.com and since I had already made friends with the developer @marcgodard it was an easy progression into buying out half of his project and becoming co-owner.
Since then I introducted Marc to bravenewcoin.com to help market his other equibit.org project which took up alot of Marc's time at which point he sold his share to @cryptomancer who is now my current trusted and talented partner on the project.
Late in 2016, I flew to Johannesburg in South Africa and met Steemit CEO Ned Scott at a Steem Saturday event which I was proud to be guest speaker in as ambassador for Steem and my related projects and met other great Steemians, including @gavvet and @jacor and other blockchain professionals at the amazing event.
(Starting from bottom right in the photo is Robert Marshall -MD of QuadroIT, then me...hello, @gavvet behind me, then Ned Scott and opposite me is Adam Meister)
Furthermore, ten months ago I wrote a post suggesting Vote Power Delegation, today it is a reality.
The Future
Without giving up too much, I will tell you that I have big plans on Steem, a concatenation of my prior and current Steem projects into one global game changer for the community, creating further ease of employment for bloggers and developers alike. I am making contact with developers at this stage and will release further information in due course.
"Dream today, for tomorrow your dreams may become a reality!" - @thecryptodrive
If you believe in dreams, vote thecryptodrive witness!