It was the summer of 2016 and I was working on a couple of web projects and hunting for domain names for one of them on NameSilo. I was basically planning to add a website on crypto to my portfolio, seeing as how the market was booming.
I had a few extra hours in the day and I thought it would be a great idea to get more involved in this space and monitor the markets and write about it in general in addition to investing some extra bucks in a few crypto projects. I also ran an editorial consulting firm at the time for my regular income.
Using a domain name generator I had come up with a ton a of good names. A few didn't fit with the project I had in mind at the time. It was when I was looking up a particular name, it led me to a press release or an article about Steemit on Yahoo or similar news website. I'm pretty sure it was Yahoo...Anyways
It described what the project was all about and I felt it was interesting. I visited Steemit and saw a whole lot of crypto and crypto-anarchy stuff that dominated the platform in it's early days, not to mention the insane payouts that went along with it. But I truly felt that Steemit was another one of those scammy websites or ponzi scheme and the payouts weren't real.
I also couldn't quite understand how it functioned but I found out that there was a slack channel for users interested in learning more about it so I signed up and forgot about all of this for a few days.
It was mid-June 2016 and I decided to re-visit Steemit Slack channel and find out more about how Steemit works. I found out about an ebook that was on it's way and started conversing with some of the users on the slack. @donkeypong along with few other well known users of our platform had authored Steemit 101 and published it on Amazon. As a voracious reader I decided to give it a read. It opened my eyes to the long-term, potential of this platform on a global scale!
It was around 25th of June that I had read the ebook and by then I was already in conversation with a few people on the slack. @sean-king, @riverhead and @smooth were some of the people who went out of their way to help me understand how this platform worked economically, algorithmically and I learnt quite fast. I enjoyed the slack conversations a lot those days. We were about 100-150 people at the time when the 4th of July event happened!
4th of July 2016 was quite an incredible day and I couldn't believe what I was seeing on the exchanges! It was insane watching Steem price rocket to the moon! Those were some of the busiest days at the time and I still had no account to use.
I kept the conversations going and I think it was the 7th of July 2016 that I finally signed up. I was one of the first few Indian users on the platform as well. I loved the discussions in the community very much and engaged with a ton of users. I didnt have a single post published at the time but networking with other users made me very happy. I felt I was connecting with some very cool individuals from across the world, who wanted to change the way things were done and as I progressed on the platform, it came to be true!
My first post was authored towards the end of the month and it made less than $20 while make-up posts, plagiarised content and identity thefts made thousands. It was one day about a week or two after I had written my introduction post that @berniesanders showed me some love and it rocketed to the moon. @summon joined him a few days later and took it up a notch. It was my first post payout and experience of a whale vote!
By payout day, I had made about $400 or so on my introduction post, while everyone was making 10-15x more. But frankly I couldn't have been happier watching my work being rewarded after two weeks of seeing it live and I'm grateful for the same. Those days we had 30 day payout period after the initial 24 hr period and I had 10SP in my account when I started. I didn't write a lot those days and stuck to building the community on Steemit.Chat. I probably authored 20 posts until my accident in February this year.
Looking back, I think I've stayed true to my word of sticking with the platform and after 1.5 years, I am Steeming away full-time. I'm glad I set aside my project on cryptocurrency and spent those extra hours on Steemit. It was one of my best decisions ever.
Dear readers and Steemians, How did you find out about Steemit? What brought you here? I would love to hear your story in the comments below.
If you like my work kindly resteem it to your friends. You may also continue reading my recent posts which might interest you:
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