Normally I try to keep my articles concise and to the point. Don't put too much information in your article, or you will lose your reader's attention. Nobody wants to read a giant book..
This is not one of those posts. Trimming my journey down to a few highlights would defeat the purpose. Becoming a dolphin was a lot of hard work. It took months of dedication! It is not as simple as "one, two, three". There is no magic formula (at least that I'm aware of).
I plan to share this with future Steemians who are on their way up, but might have become frustrated along the way. "You were an early adopter, of course you have tons of money" I can hear them say. "It's not like that anymore. It's impossible to get noticed unless you were here before it got big."
I'm sure that things will be much different years from now, but I believe the path that I followed will always be there for people who are willing to take it. It is not an easy path, and the specific steps along the way will likely be different than mine - but it can be done. You can go from dust to minnow to dolphin if you stick with it and try.
My brother told me about Steemit a few months ago. It was right as Steemit was on its way to the moon. He is heavily into the "crypto-currency" scene, and always passes along hot tips that come his way. When he told me about Steemit, I was really intrigued. After learning what it was about, I told him I wanted to invest in it. He told me that the smart thing to do was to wait until it came down in price, as coins that are pumped 1000% pretty much always do. I said if this is really going to become the next Facebook, then who cares. It will be worth a ton more eventually, and I don't want to risk missing the boat. Sign me up!
After spending time to read the "white paper", I realized that the smart thing to do was to power-up. I took my $250 worth of STEEM (a medium sized investment for me - I'm not rich), and powered up my 62 STEEM. After that, I started exploring the site. I work in software development for a living, so I was not really turned off by the "crude" site. It was beta after all. This is supposed to become the next Facebook (future tense). I shouldn't expect it to be that level of a website right out of the box. It will get there.
I spent a lot of time looking through the top trending posts at the time. I was amazed that people were making thousands of dollars on their posts! I decided to write my first post and get a slice of the action. I was curious how long a post could earn money for, so I created Is there long term earnings potential for posting good Steemit content? as my first post. I got an answer to my question (no, not currently), and 6 upvotes. No $1,000 yet though - OK.
After watching lots of other people earn tons of money, I thought an article about how the whales think might attract the attention I was looking for. My post on Steemit Whale Psychology got me 29 comments, 13 upvotes, and $0.05. Still not the $1,000 I was hoping for.
It was really hard to get your posts noticed back then. There was no "Resteem" yet. There wasn't even such thing as Followers and Feeds! Pretty much the only way people would find your content was manual digging or bots. I certainly hadn't made my way onto a bot list yet. You had to 'know people' for that. I was just a random person on the site. Why should anyone pay attention to me?
I spent the whole weekend creating posts, trying to get something to stick. After several posts that maxed out at $0.67, I was starting to get a little frustrated. I spent my whole weekend posting and earned less than a dollar. I still thought it was a cool concept, but I couldn't afford to spend my time doing this if that was all I was going to make.
I am not an amazing 'content producer', so I figured my spouse (
Right near the end of the weekend, he decided to post a funny video he took of a bumble bee getting into a "fight" with another bee in our garden. At first it got nothing, but then all of a sudden it shot up to $900! Holy cow, we thought. This is actually happening! It turns out 
He knew about the 50/50 SP/SBD split, so we started the process of cashing out our $489. $500 bucks for posting a video online was really cool! He thought it was exciting but was still skeptical. I told him to wait until he got his money; then he'll know it was real. I started the process of converting the SBD and sold it on the exchange. By the time the conversion happened and we cashed out the STEEM, he got about $300. In the end it was very cool to get $300 cash for posting a video online, but there was still room to improve the user experience. $1,304.89 to $300 in your pocket is a pretty big drop. I created [Important] Why Steemit Needs to Change the way Pending Payments are Displayed! to try and bring some attention to the issue.
I continued spending tons of time on Steemit, posting on lots of different topics. My posts rarely made more than a few cents, but the hope/dream of making it big kept me going. No matter what I posted, I barely managed to make a few cents. The few times that I wrote about suggested improvements for Steemit though, those actually got some attention. $4.87, $1.73, and even one for $17.72. It wasn't a $1,000 trending post, but at least it was something!
I continued my posting for pennies an article. I knew I wasn't making even close to minimum wage, but I was still having fun. I just needed to get that one "big hit" and I'd have thousands!
Along the way I recruited several friends to the site, but after the first month or so I was the only one still posting. Even I was starting to get a little burned out from all the small payments, but I didn't want to give up. The site is in beta I told my friends. Don't worry about making thousands of dollars yet, just try and make friends. The money will come eventually if you keep at it.
By the time all my friends had left and had started making fun of me for "still spending time on that website", I decided we had a problem. If this is how most people are seeing the site, how are we ever going to become the next Facebook? I decided to take action. Dear Whales and Dolphins - Please Read This Letter I wrote. This was an urgent call to attention! My friends were leaving, and I'm sure they were not the only ones!
With all my friends long gone, I still decided to carry on. I would post whenever I could. I kept writing article after article, most of which made $0.00. The few $1-2 posts that I wrote were a big deal. (These were my success stories that I held onto.) Every bit of SBD I earned, I powered up. This 5 cents of STEEM could be worth $50 bucks one day. Why in the world would I cash it out to earn 5 cents? I'm in it for the long haul!
Along the way I came across someone who was spamming links to their content. I downvoted their comment and replied to let them know why. They retaliated and downvoted several of my posts. It turns out they had a higher reputation and more SP than I did. I at least learned not to pick a fight with someone bigger than you :)
I continued on posting. I kept covering a wide variety of topics. My experiences with drugs. STEEM mining. Improvement suggestions for the site. Tutorials.. Lots of things, but nothing stuck. A few bucks was still considered a big success. I was not really discouraged though. I never lost track of the potential of what the site could be.
After spending a lot of time on the site, I had seen and wrote a lot of "Let's make Steemit better" type posts. I thought I could add value by organizing everything into a giant centralized / organized "Wish List". I spent an entire weekend gathering content. I stayed home while my friends went out for the night, so I could keep working on "that website". After spending the whole weekend on it, I launched my post. I probably hit the refresh button 10,000 times that weekend. By the time the weekend was over, my post had only made a few dollars. I was used to it, so it didn't really bother me, but I was kind of disappointed that I put in all that work and it seemed like barely anyone saw it.
There was a different thread where
I spent the next several days improving the wish list. I read article after article and tried to create the best possible list I could with all the community's enhancements. At that time people were writing a ton of posts about feature requests, so the list had grown by a lot just within a few days. I posted an updated wish list with a ton more content. 
I decided to take a break and work on some other content. The falling price of STEEM had started to become a big deal, and I was pretty sure it would keep going down. I wrote Down Down We Go – And why that might not be a bad thing. Even today, this post still outlines how I feel about the price of STEEM. Now that I had earned a bit of publicity, my posts were getting some attention. I made $19.31, which was one of my highest paying posts!
I continued posting. And posting. Many of my posts barely made pennies, but I could tell that I was getting more attention. I would post things and a decent amount of people would upvote. I wasn't making thousands of dollars or anything, but it was slowly going up. I just need to keep at it, I thought.
One day I decided to get personal, and wrote an article about a subject that is a big part of my life. Finding a balance between being out and accepting other people's uncomfortableness with being gay was the first time that I really showed Steemit part of "me". It was by far my most successful post too - $91.56!
I am not a very interesting person I thought. Was there anything else about my life that could add value? What makes me 'me'? - I thought. Well lots of things, but what would other people care to read about? I happen to have a very weird 'diet' that I had been on for several years (mainly to save money). I wonder if people would be interested in that.. I posted How I have eaten Breakfast and Lunch for under $2 a day for the past 5 years. It also got decent attention - $32.16.
I kept trying to think of ways that I could add value to the community. After a lot of brainstorming, I decided to create something called "The Daily Steem Poll". Basically it would ask the community questions (like what is your favorite movie) and get everyone's input. It wasn't really about making money. I was more interested in gaining followers and connecting with people. I decided to give away whatever SBD I earned on the posts, as a way to encourage participation. I consider the project a fairly big success (all the questions got lots of people to answer) but they took lot of time. I still try to continue with occasional polls, but it is no longer something I do "daily".
Several months in to my Steemit experience, there was a big divide. 
Almost a month had gone by since my last "Wish List" post, and I decided that I should make the next one really good. I spent another weekend putting together the best list of suggestions for the website that I could. I read tons of posts form other people and brainstormed a ton of my own. After posting The Steemit Wish List - Avatars, Notifications, Multi-Language Support, and More - Oh, My! (v2.0), I was happy to see a big response. I got a decent amount of upvotes, and a lot of comments. It was just around the time "Resteems" had first been introduced. As I was browsing my feed, all of a sudden I saw my post. At first I was confused, because I thought I was in my feed (not my blog). Then I realized
I continued to post and post. As usual, most of my posts did not make much. One thing that I started to learn though was that in order to do well, I really had to create an epic post. An epic post was not a guarantee for success (I have several $0.00 epic posts in my Steemit graveyard as proof), but it was a necessary ingredient. To this date, every time I have had a successful post - it has been something that I really poured my heart and soul into to make great.
All along the way, I continued to curate, upvote, and comment. In my mind, this is a really important aspect of Steemit for many reasons. You learn about what other people are interested in. You get to see what does well and what doesn't. You get inspiration for new posts. You meet and interact with all kinds of cool people! It's really a large part of the fun of being on the website!
As part of the "wish list" project, I had started to make connections with people on the Steemit dev team. One of them suggested that reading through the activity in GitHub, and providing the community with a "non technical" summary of what is going on, would really add a lot of value to the community. I started creating a periodic Steemit.com Development Updates series, and he was right! There were a ton of people who really appreciated it, and started following me to get the updates.
As I continued to add value to the community, I decided I would become a witness. I spent a lot of time looking into it, and paid for two hosted servers out of pocket (a witness node, and a seed). It has been an interesting process, and I have continued to learn a lot along the way. I am currently at position 65. To me this was another turning point along my path. Not because I have newfound fame and fortune from being a witness, but I have a newfound sense of responsibility for what happens here.
Two weeks ago, things were really starting to look bad on Steemit. Everyone was discouraged about the continuous dropping price of STEEM, and I felt the community had lost track of what made it great. I still remained as hopefully optimistic as my first day here, and was having a really frustrating time with people that just didn't see it. Had people given up? Was it really just about the money? Now that rewards were dropping, that was it? Was Steemit even worth investing in anymore? I put all my thoughts together, and wrote Attention Sharks - There is blood in the water. Are you ready to invest? Again, I poured my heart and soul into the post. This needed to be epic! The future of Steemit depended on it! Well - the community agreed it was epic. Still to this day I cannot believe it, but my post made it to #1 on the trending page!
It might seem really silly to people that look at Steemit as just a "social media website", but that milestone was truly one of the special moments in my life. I had really worked hard to become a part of this community. When I joined I was a nobody. I had gone from posting 10-20 posts a week that made practically nothing, to the #1 post on Steemit!
I remember when I first joined, there were all the big shots getting tons of upvotes on their posts. I wished I could be one of them. I had no idea how they did it, but I didn't think it was possible for me. It seemed like they all knew each other, and the only way to be part of the 'in group' was to be a celebrity or to have joined before the site got big. After months of hard work though, I've now made it up to 17.7 MV of Steem Power, and I'm even having conversations with lots of the people I looked up to and admired when I first joined. I guess that makes me a dolphin :)
I'm not sure where I'll go from here. Maybe its time to get started on a post - "Climbing From Dolphin to Whale"!
I feel like I should conclude with a good "moral of the story" for everyone who took the time to read all this, but I don't really have one. I suspect that that each person found bits and pieces that were useful or interesting to them. Everyone will probably take away something different. I hope you enjoyed my story.
Thanks for reading!