Steem People #2: Calaber24p
A student who decided to earn $40.000 on Steemit to pay a loan for College. And he almost did it in 2 months
It is my pleasure to introduce Andrew to you, an ordinary student from New York. 2 months ago he set the goal to earn $ 40.000 in a year to repay the loan for studying in College, and he has already managed to earn 32.127 SBD.
Profile 
I started the Steem People project to find and tell you the stories that will inspire newcomers and show them the opportunities offered by Steemit. While I was reading Andrew's story, it got me inspired too.
Start on Steemit
Andrew signed up 2 months ago and hit the ground running. In the first 3 days he has published 42 posts, mostly by posting news from other sources and different jokes. The first success was on the 4th day after the publication of the post written all by himself. The post instantly got $900, and that's what Andrew says about it:
I could not believe it, I was so excited and happy that people appreciated my work and cared about what I had to say and that was also when I started my goal to become the first steemit sponsored degree. Ever since then I have been saving up my money to pay off my college loan debt.
Big goal on Steemit
The next day he decided to set a big goal on Steemit – to repay the loan for College, believing that his example would encourage new participants to join the platform.
I took that post personally, because 2 weeks ago I set a similar goal. Not everything is coming out as I wanted and Andrew's experience enforced me not to give up.
The first big success
Andrew continued just as cheerfully as he began – for 11 days he posted a series of 40 articles, but posts with videos and news, about girls, music, and Pokemon didn't bring him any significant results... And finally, he made the big successful post which brought him $4,349 – "Whales, Dolphins and Minnows: Why Each User is Important and Has a Role to Play In the Steemit Ecosystem"
From quantity to quality
After that, Andrew changed the attitude to his blog, he shifted from quantity to quality, creating unique content and gathering the regular readers around his articles. 2 months later Andrew can be easily called a real blogger with his own style and point of view on a wide range of topics. In his blog you will find the articles about cryptocurrencies, economy, money, finance, politics, involving important public questions. Here's what Andrew himself says about it:
What I write is mostly just what i'm thinking about or something that has been on my mind recently. I find ideas by just living and reading other things online that spark my interest and I will make a post about them. I do have a list with future posts I want to do, but half the time I will get half a page into an article and find it boring so I scrap it. There's also many ideas I have that are too small to expand on so I try to add them together with other topics.
Most of Andrew's posts not just collect many votes and get good reward, but also often provoke hot debates, as, for example, the post: "Revamping Curation Is The Way To Increase Steem Power Demand" which got 158 comments.
Interview
We caught up with Andrew in Steemit chat, so you can learn more about his way on Steemit and plans on the further development:
What is your real name? Where are you from? How old are you? Tell little about yourself please.
My real name is Andrew and I'm 23 and From New York State
I'm taking my last two classes before I graduate with a double major in Economics and Asian studies with a focus on Japan. I take Japanese and although I'm not close to the best in my class, I still enjoy it.
Where have you got information about Steemit? How did you become a member of community?
I have been into bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general since late 2012/ early 2013. I'm addicted to finding new projects and use cases for the technology, so I had my eye on Steemit for a while, but forgot about it and someone mentioned it on reddit and I saw it was operational.
I became a member of the community by just posting and making content like everyone else, I also started talking to some people in the Slack and made a few good friends there.
And how is it to find a niche in the community? You wrote a lot of posts, and they did not bring results. But then, things have changed .. How did you understand about what would you write?
I'm not 100% sure how I found a niche in the community. I started off with a few meme posts and other small effortless posts, but then made it my goal to try and hit a post of 1000 words or more a day with various topics that I was interested in and it paid off. What I write is mostly just what i'm thinking about or something that has been on my mind recently.
How your education credit? What % complete?
My college debt counting everything totals to 75,000 with everything I have saved since the beginning of bitcoin I have about 50,000 put towards it so I would need 25,000 more to complete my goal. I'm hoping to be able to get that in the next year if I make an article a day.
How much time you spent for preparing one article?
It depends whether or not I am doing research for a more technical article or if I am talking about a more general idea for the future. If it's a more technical article, I probably spend an hour looking up various information and then another hour and a half to write it. It's usually just an hour to an hour and a half to write the article if I dont have school work or other stuff I need to do.
What changes would you see on Steemit?
I would like to see the community grow more and have more smaller communities of people dedicated to certain topics, like subreddits on reddit. Definitely would add to community interaction in my opinion.
What attracts you on Steemit, why you are here, and how you see our future? What it finally will?
I love that steemit rewards authors and curators that create content and spend much of their time dedicated to a site rather than reddit which just benefits. Also because of the decentralized nature, there is a massive amount potential for people in a society that does not have complete freedom of speech.
I think that we could be seeing communities of different people all interacting on the steemit blockchain with their own versions of the steemit site translated and with people of similar ideas. I also think this is why we need a client for it to become more popular, but the platform is still very new.
The main difficulties and problems on the Steemit?
In my opinion, the main difficulty right now with steemit is the retention of new users and incentivizing people to buy or convert Steem power long term. Right now we are getting signups but daily active users is staying relatively stagnant and the currency value is falling because there are few incentives to power it up to steempower.
What you could advise to a new authors?
My advice to new authors is to visit steemit.chat and make some friends with people who can help you get started. If someone is able to upvote you to even just one cent, you will get seen by much more people. If you keep working at it you'll eventually get noticed by someone and your subscriber rate will start to grow. Having an audience is a fantastic experience.
Some statistics
Author rewards in the last 30 days
Source: http://www.steemb.com/@calaber24p
Source: http://steemwhales.com/calaber24p
Summary
I hope that Andrew's example will inspire you on your own achievements. Set goals, try, fail, try again, and achieve what you initially wanted. A year later you will regret that you didn't start today, because there will be tens of thousands of such examples, and you even now can be one of those who made their dreams come true with Steemit.
I thank my friend 
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