The Make 250 new minnows is a month event was a fantastic success. It involved a massive outreach to redfish, which gave me some interesting insights to what's going on here on STEEM. So, I thought I would share some of this in a debrief type post.

We spent a lot of time asking people to power up and finding out their views on becoming a minnow was very insightful. We contacted over 400 accounts, and these are some of the findings. This was a massive outreach that enabled us collected a lot of information, personal opinions and data.

Insights and Observations

1. Many people have not found the support of a community.

Communities are a long-awaited feature of STEEM, however the spirit of community does exist with the people of STEEM and there are many communities house on discord. Its also well known that Search on Steemit is not fantastic, so finding communities could be rather hard for a new comer. If we look to the communities, they too find it hard to find people on steem so they can grab them and nurture them in their community.

2. It takes to long to grow

A mindset expressed by many. It takes a long time for many to grow to minnow status and if you keep powering up there is no liquid gain for their efforts. People don’t want to post and earn to keep leaving it in the platform. People want to post and earn and spend.

3. Lack of understanding/awareness

There were also quite a few people that had no awareness to the benefits of powering up. Some people didn’t even know how to convert SBD to STEEM.

We also found many people just didn’t respond to us. Maybe they considered our invite to pump them as spam, however personally I feel this is unlikely. What is more likely is that people just don’t read their comments or know how to find their mentions.

STEEM needs a healthy balance of user types. We need creators, we need consumers, we need curators. We need people spending and we need people saving and investing.

One of the problems I see is that we have to many spenders and not enough savers. Lets face it, I don’t blame people that have earned STEEM or SBD for their efforts wanting to enjoy the fruits of their labour. How many people are really prepared to continue posting and engaging for years to grow their accounts to dolphin or higher status? The ugly truth is that for most, by posting here on STEEM, it will take years.

The table below shows some stats taken while running the 250 new minnows in a month campaign

https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmYpkNCCFmk6koJEu4apW3VVQCK1L3DY1bb4jMUuX7esnr/2.png

During this time we had a net reduction in SP of 0.65%. Although this does not seem much, considering we are producing more steam each day, we have a larger cash out flow than inflow. In fact for every 1 new STEEM we generate 1.6 STEEM is leaving the platform. Could this have been why STEEM prices haven’t rallied like some of the others and we have slipped back down to rank 50 on Coinmarketcap?

Another observation is that accounts were powering down almost as fast as we could create them. Much of this can be tied back to how long it takes to grow, and it gets to a stage, people want to spend the rewards they have. We had a massive intake of new users in the second half 2017 and early 2018. Many of the accounts powering down, were set up during this time and have not been active in a number of months. The problem now is that new accounts are not coming in as fast as they were, and the new accounts coming in, are also not growing as fast because the prices are all down so much. We are not replacing what we are losing.

Conclusion

We have a lot of work to do here on STEEM and what to focus on first is a case of which comes first. Communities and a better search facility I believe will make a difference. We need a plan so we can take some action on bringing new users to steem. Recruitments and onboarding should be made some sort of priority. We need to replace what we are losing, and the current rate of new sign ups is not providing that. When people do sign up, we need to find them, and we need to be able to cater for and support the spenders and the savers.

Make 250 new minnows in a month gave me a better understand of the life cycle of a STEEM users. And we very much have cycles. We need to be able to expand the duration of each cycle and we also need to try and increase the %’s of each cycle moving forward into the next.

Many people on STEEM already thought is was how things are going. The outreach and data collected during this event solidifies this theory. I hope we can highlight the extent of this problem and that we can address it as the spiral right now is downwards.

It’s a long road ahead. Good job I just Powered UP :-) We need to take some action. Whos up for a challenge???