How I got to 50k HP without investing money
Shame on all early dolphins
I found Steemit in July 2016.
I have seen people come and go; I am still here, still voting manually.
I never invested money and yet I am sitting on 50k HP.
This is my story on Hive.
The 1000$ Post
As explained in the last part, I got really upset, when I did not get enough votes on my posts.
I had gotten some random upvotes for memes (lol), but nothing substantial for my main posts, at all.
I started aggressively promoting my content everywhere, but got no further votes.
The most infuriating moments were, when someone would comment my post, but not leave a vote. I wrote a whole blog post about that subject. I finally snapped after I started translating an old German book into English and got 0.18$ for my 3 hours of work.
I got however -completely out of the blue- a vote by @dantheman himself on one of my comments
and that was worth 95$. For a single sentence. I was so happy.
btw: I wrote this quick script to find the post:
from beem.comment import Comment, AccountPosts
from beem.amount import Amount
account = 'felixxx'
check_value = Amount('30.000 HBD')
for comment in AccountPosts(account = account, sort = 'comments', limit = 10000000):
c = Comment(comment)
reward = Amount(c.reward)
if reward > check_value:
print(reward, comment)
# checks a users' comment history for comments' reward > check_value
These few lines of code would have been exactly the content that would have gotten me paid extremely well in those days, but I had no idea, how to even install Python. If you needed some inspiration to pick up coding, this is it; It's mostly practice, so just get to it.
I can be creative, but I had a hard time squeezing out good posts on demand, when all of a sudden sudden inspiration struck me; On the 17th of August 2016, I had a an idea:
https://peakd.com/@felixxx/if-i-had-a-million-usd
I wrote a post about what I would do, if I had 1,000,000 US$ in cash.
It is a cute thought experiment, anyways -engaging content- and my answer was pretty good. I garnished the post with little self-drawn MS Paint pictures to not infringe any copyrights. With that, I took heavy inspiration from @klye - not gonna lie.
After I had finished the post, I kept refreshing steemstats (wish that was still working) and waited for my big votes and after a while, @blocktrades voted and my post went to what felt like the moon.
Payouts were working differently back then, but my first payout (there were 2 payout periods per post back then) would be 982.30 $ before curation rewards (25%).
I will forever be thankful :D
The early dolphins ignored my post, of course.
I got some followers from it though, and below the post you can see some people commenting, who I interact with to this day.
It took my 2 hours to make the post and (almost) 1000$ for that meant a 500$ hourly pay.
This was the exact moment, I got hooked to Steem, which is now Hive.
I instantly swapped my SBD and staked everything.
I was sitting on maybe 300 Steem Power and those were worth like 800 $.
But it wasn't the amount of money, but how I got it, that fascinated me;
I got paid for an idea, a little bit of creativity - And there were other posts - Everybody was trying things out to see what woud amuse the whales. I was browsing new posts constantly and there was a lot of refreshing content. A lot was different than anything I had read before.
There were just a lot of intelligent, inspired people.
Soon I would meet some of them...
Next episode
Next episode I am going to write about the first ever steem meetup.
My largest payout was 550$ back in 2016. @dumar022 and I were sitting in a beach bar and he was scrolling through the phone and said dude you just got 550$ on your blog post. I said whaaa :) @dantheman upvoted it, it was an interesting time when whales were actively participating in curation. Nowadays it's only few of us who are manually curating, everything else just piles on autovotes, which sucks donkey balls.
At the beginning of each story of success is an idea.
If you have a good idea, never tell it to someone as long you have not patented.
My greatest idea of life I told to my old chief and he steal it and got scientific prices and a lot of glory. Now around 25 years later millions of US-Dollar has been invested in my idea in Germany and the Frauenhofer Institut has supported the development in the early years.
Sometime I think I should make a lawsuit against it, as soon as they went public in the USA.
They have stolen my idea and will made millions or billions of US--Dollar in future.
So - if you have an excellent idea - keep it secret until it is protected by yourself.
I was young and naive when I has this one in a lifetime idea.
This idea of me will lead to a paradigma shift in the field of opthalmology.
I wish you a good luck and thanks for your support in the past.
Happy days.
!BEER
!wine
!invest_vote
Oh, I'm looking forward to the next episode 😁
For me, it’s never how much I make on a post, it’s the fact that I am earning for my posts. That has always been enough for me.
The rewards system is not always 'fair'. In the early days I saw some make thousands from a post when I often made nothing. When starting out you have to weigh up if it is worth putting hours of work into a post that may make cents. Have to build your audience. I did a lot of commenting that has paid off eventually. Whether it is actually worth the time I put in is debatable and depends on how high $Hive can go, but it's not a purely monetary equation for me.
Well said.💯👌🏽
Nice code :)
da issa wieder
Die absoluten Anfangs - /Gründerzeiten habe ich leider unwiderruflich verpasst. Aber das, was dann kam, hat mich auch extrem geflasht! :-)
<3 Thanks for the honourable mentions captain.
Mein erster Post auf steemit fand auch keine Beachtung, aber wichtiger fand ich damals das man guten content belohnen kann.
Heute gibts dank Steemit, Hive und leofinance drei interessante Communitys bei denen man belohnen kann und manchmal belohnt wird 😇
@indextrader24 denkt du hast ein Vote durch @investinthefutur verdient!
@indextrader24 thinks you have earned a vote of @investinthefutur !
View or trade
BEER.Hey @felixxx, here is a little bit of
BEERfrom @indextrader24 for you. Enjoy it!Learn how to earn FREE BEER each day by staking your
BEER.You're a legend!
Hey @felixxx man, I've just read your series of getting the power you have atm (or at least the majority of that). You wrote that really legibly and I could find myself in the situations you've been into. I'll never forget my start on Steemit back then 3 years ago. I was making super cool shitposts (😅 ) along some of the "shit" original content I've wasted tons of my free time and was mad no one is giving some attention to it. Typical Steemit shitposter attention whore. But I haven't quit, and as I was student of graphic design back then I had a great project with my team - we were shooting our first movie. So after it was all over I thought I could give the best from myself and write a decent post about that... from the beginning to the end.
After I wrote it I remember I said myself, "if it comes to 2-3 bucks I'm happy", just don't be zero, that kills me mentally.
Few days passed and one of my friends from the college said "Tonko, check your steemit fast". At the time, we were in at English class among 150-200 students. I'll never forget that moment I checked the post and I saw around 105$ (half of that was from @hendrikdegrote). I reacted like hell and professor scolded me like I was a little kid. Temperature raised in a split of second and I felt like I won the lottery.
In the meantime I've quit and came back 2 years after, sometime in the 2nd month of this year. I've grown and my posts are growing too (I believe). I hope for another such sweet surprise for you. Thanks for bringing memories back mate!
Wish you all the best and much more of those creative charged posts.