One of the main obstacles Steem and other cryptocurrency struggles with, is mass adoption.

Every Steemian has invited a friend, family or acquaintance to be part of the Steem blockchain as a content creator, an investor or a miner - but 99% of the time, the onboarding process fails them. The person we invited becomes skeptical or loses interest and then never ends up joining.

What is Cryptocurrency?
Where does the money come from?
I don’t believe a social media can pay you for posting.

These are only some of the questions we face when inviting someone to the platform. The problem is, most of us aren’t an expert on these topics and most of us are not a salesperson, so the results are understandable. If not even our best friends trusts in the platform and what we can achieve with the blockchain; they will never join the platform.

Even if they end up joining the platform, most of these new Steemians lose interest because finding a community they are interested in being a part of, a Decentralized App that fits their needs, or a tutorial account to get tips from - is almost impossible due to the browsing interfaces we have. There are two possibilities:

The person who invited them has to spend hours explaining how to post, use tags, browse, find a community etc, or...
The new Steemian ends up lost in an ocean full of plankton, minnows, communities, DApps, a trending page full of useless posts and too much information to process.

What is Steemonboarding?

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@steemonboarding is the first coordinated effort to bring Steem to the masses with a concise marketing strategy. We will provide the tools for the community to sell the idea of Steem to potential users in an organized and focused way. Starting with 10 languages and looking to expand to more than 20, our team will work towards mass adoption.

We know there’s already a lot of tutorials in the Steem Blockchain but they get lost between hundreds of posts, and new users end up finding a mismatch of information that is not in any kind of logical sequence. There are many great initiatives on the platform to help new users, but there has not been a coordinated effort to give them a smooth onboarding process. We look forward to working alongside these efforts to strengthen the overall new user experience. We will mix all of these ideas and bring some of our own to develop the ultimate website for anyone who wants to join the Steem blockchain and its different front ends, communities and DApps.

In other words, the Steemonboarding website will be the perfect tool that any Steemian can use to successfully invite, onboard and even train their grandma to become part of the Steem blockchain.

Step One:

Through a series of 2 minute video tutorials (in the user's preferred language) displayed in a friendly and simple interface, any outside potential Steemian can understand the basics of the crypto world and the Steem Blockchain. Anyone who wants to invite a friend, can point them to our website and we will make sure they are well taken care of and have access to all the information they will need to get started.

Each video will have its own text explanation below (in the preferred language) for those who are more keen on reading rather than watching videos

Step Two:

After watching the videos, if the user is interested in being part of the platform, there is an option to take a ten question test (out of a 250 question pool) regarding the subjects of the videos. If the user passes the test, we give them an account for free. We’ve been claiming accounts for a long time and we already have around 500 ready to give away.

We are currently working out a way of avoiding bots answering the test and mining accounts from us. We were thinking of a 5 minute conversation through a pop-up window on our website or perhaps asking to cross reference another social media account. If you have any suggestions please let us know.

The User is now a Steemian!

But only a rookie Steemian who only knows the basics and has no idea about how to blog, engage, join a community, use a DApp or the basic non-written rules of social interaction in the platform.

Step Three:

There will be an option to login to Steemonboarding using Steemconnect. When the Steemian logs in, they will have access to a new batch of videos.
These videos will explain what is a community, what is Steem Power and Voting Power, tips for making their first post, how to use the tags, how to use an exchange etc. What every Steemian should know before immersing into the blogging community.

Step Four:

In the website, we will have a specific tab dedicated to explain how each of the DApps work, how to use them, what benefits they offer to the Steemian and why people should use them.

There will be one final tab that will feature every community on Steem that wants to be featured. To browse this tab easily, the Steemian can order the communities by topic, by alphabetical order, or by specific language.

The Mindset of the Onboarded Steemian

One of the most important parts of the onboarding process, is the mindset the new Steemian will have when their journey begins:

Long term thinking: the rewards are not for grocery money next week or the summer holidays in 2019. They are their retirement in 2030. Holding and Powering up is the best long term thinking.
How to get started from scratch and build from the ground up - but also present the idea that investing fiat in Steem can be a potential growth path to help build influence.
Community engagement and DApp usage is key for a satisfying and meaningful user experience.
Avoidance of Bid Bot usage except for when visibility is key. Clarification of when visibility is key.
The role plagiarism and abuse have in the community.

Long story short: We will onboard people with a long term, non abusive and community engaged mindset who will know the importance of investing as a way of contributing towards the Steem blockchain.

Investment from Steemonboarding

In order to successfully onboard someone, we will support them through their first month on Steem while they adapt, find their own niche and become part of a community. Essentially, we will help them find their place in the platform.

To be able to support these users, we invested 10,000 Steem out of our pocket and powered them up to have some significant voting power. We know it won’t be enough if we do things right and onboard tens of people daily but at least it’s a start.

A Steem Power delegation from anyone who believes in this project, would be of tremendous help to be able to support these new Steemians. We brought them here, we want to see them succeed and become a positive and healthy member of one the DApps, be part of a community and actually invest money and time in the platform; we will support them through a very small curation team.

This potential delegation will be used mainly to support the users we onboard and any posting, curation or liquid rewards will be powered up to grow the account. That way in the future, we'll be able to support more recently onboarded users. Since we are a new project, part of this delegation will serve as leverage to fund some development and a team.

Business Plan

After several conversations with some people in Krakow during this past Steem Fest, we are currently considering several options to make this project profitable and self sustainable and so far we have several options. We will make a post very soon regarding this specific topic.

Road Map for 2018 and Q1- Q2 2019

This is the announcement post and we are already including a short term road map because we want to be transparent, but we also want to be held accountable. After all, this project is focused on helping the communities and the DApp. We want to work for you and for a common goal.

November 16, 2018: Announcement of the project. Whatever feedback you have about this idea, please leave it in the comment section.
November 20, 2018: Translators and Video makers recruitment process. We already have English, Spanish, Cantonese, Korean and Filipino. We are searching for at least 5 more languages. Details of this process will be posted on this date.
January 15, 2019: Beta version of the website online, testing phase begins. All the basic intro videos in all the languages will be available. The DApps and communities section will be browsable.
Q1, 2019: Website fully running and onboarding through our website available in ten languages.
Q2, 2019: Marketing Campaigns, onboarding contests and more to come. This will involve the Steem community, so each and every one of us can successfully onboard potential users in a matter of minutes.

The Team

Let’s reach Mass Adoption!

@anomadsoul and @coruscate

Steem Onboarding Founders

@Steemonboarding: The Marketing Tool for a succesful onboarding experience