Hello everyone! I would like to start this update off first and foremost with a big thank you to all of my supporters. I have now moved into the top 50 witnesses on the platform and I take the position very seriously.
I have more money invested in STEEM than I have ever had invested into one single thing in my life. This is not money I made buying Bitcoin early - it is money I have earned and saved through years of working as a software developer.
I have also recently set up a self-directed IRA account so that I am able to invest in STEEM with some of my retirement funds. You can read about that and learn how to do the same thing yourself here: A Guide to Investing in STEEM Through Your IRA!.
Suffice it to say - I am committed to the Steem platform for the long haul and will do everything within my power to improve the community, the platform, and the value of the STEEM token.
On that note, here’s an update of what I’ve been working on over the past couple of weeks…
Voting Bots
As probably everyone reading this knows, my main focus on the Steem platform has been around the voting bots and other types of content promotion services. I know many people here dislike voting bots and they certainly have the potential to be misused, however it’s important to recognize that they do provide an important service that doesn’t exist without them.
When I first joined steemit.com I had the same experience as many new users where I spent hours of my time making some posts that I thought were pretty good and provided value to the community - but almost no one read them.
It’s not surprising that no one read them - I was a nobody, I had no followers, my posts were instantly lost within the thousands of other posts submitted each hour.
Many users just give up at this point, not wanting to waste more time. I don’t quit easily though. I understand that to get visibility you need to advertise, so I tried spending some STEEM to promote my posts in the promoted section. I quickly learned that that is pretty much as good as throwing your STEEM away.
Again I didn’t give up and eventually I stumbled on the voting bots. I started to use them to promote my posts and for even a few dollars a post I started to get on the “hot” section for a few smaller tags. For $10 - $15 I could get in the “hot” section for more popular tags, and then people started reading my posts.
Each time I used a voting bot not only would I get back the money I sent to the bot from its vote value, but I also increased my follower count and the number of organic votes I would get on my posts.
At this point I found myself spending a lot of time looking through the wallets of the bots I wanted to use and summing up all the bids that came in every 2.4 hours to see when would be a good time to send in a bid for myself. As a software developer, I have an instinctive urge to automate things so I created a tool to do that work for me.
You now know that tool as the Steem Bot Tracker and it has come a long way since I first started it!
My goal with the bot tracker is to allow all new users who are in the same position that I was to be able to more easily promote their content and give it a chance to be seen. Previously less savvy users would send bids to the bots and just hope for the best and get taken advantage of by more advanced users who knew how to check the profitability of the bid windows.
Now everyone has easy access to the same information and I hope that eventually this lead to an efficient market for content promotion services. That means that using voting bots won’t be directly profitable - ideally you will break even from the bot’s vote - but the ROI will come from the new followers and organic votes on your content from the increased visibility.
The Post Promoter Voting Bot Software
In addition to just tracking the bots, I have also recently created my own voting bot software in JavaScript. As someone who used the voting bots often and recommended them to others, I noticed a number of issues with the existing voting bots that I wanted to fix.
The main issue is that of refunds for invalid bids. Many of the existing bots would consider any invalid bid as a donation, which I thought was a really bad experience especially for new or less tech-savvy users.
One of the first things I built into the post promoter software was the ability to automatically refund invalid bids. The idea is that you will either get a vote or a refund 100% of the time. Since doing this there are now 12 voting bots that do automatic refunds whereas I believe there was only one that did it before. All such bots are clearly indicated in the bot tracker site as well.
The Post Promoter software is now running over 4 million Steem Power over 9 different bots and I work on improving it constantly to ensure that no bid is missed and that bot users and owners alike have a seamless and profitable experience.
New Investors
Off the blockchain I have been doing everything I can to promote STEEM to everyone in my network to try to bring new users, and most importantly, new investors into the platform.
In the interest of privacy I’m not going to reveal too many details about this, but I am happy to announce that just this morning a colleague of mine made a fairly significant investment in STEEM on my recommendation.
Since he doesn’t plan to be active on the platform, one of the big selling points was that he would be able to delegate his Steem Power to one of the voting bots and earn a very nice return on his investment even without any appreciation in the price of the STEEM token.
For those of you who have access to larger investors, I would recommend letting them know about this opportunity which isn’t available with any other cryptocurrencies I’m aware of. If you need any help or ideas for pitching STEEM to investors let me know and I would be happy to help out!
Requests to List STEEM on New Exchanges
In the same vein as the above section, I’ve been trying to follow the lead of 
I have voted for STEEM to be listed on CEX.io and you can too by following the instructions here:
Attention Steem Community - Get out the vote campaign - Help us get listed on the CEX.IO Exchange!
As Tim mentioned in his post - please write your own original comment and do not copy/paste what we wrote.
Additionally I have also sent a request in to Binance to list STEEM. I have been using Binance a bit personally so I have a verified account and some funds there which will hopefully give my request a little more weight.
I very highly encourage everyone here to petition all of the exchanges to list STEEM. It takes only a few minutes of work and if we are successful it could really help propel the STEEM token to the next level.
Help Support My Projects!
Sorry for the long post, but for those of you who made it this far thank you very much for reading! If you would like to support my projects and/or my ideas and vision for the future of the Steem platform, I would greatly appreciate your witness vote. To cast your vote you can:
- Go here: https://steemit.com/~witnesses
- Find “yabapmatt” in the list (currently #40) and click the ^ vote icon
- Use Steem Connect to vote for me as a witness
- Or Use Steem Connect for proxying your witness votes to me
Love what I’m doing / hate what I’m doing - let me know in the comments!