Minnow Building, A little Background and Who we are Supporting...

This entire program was started because each day I would see people who needed more support on their posts. People who were out there producing original content yet not getting enough support on their posts to grow. It's frustrating to see people put in the effort and not get the rewards.

Then more and more I thought about how Steemit needs a real middle class and how the smallest members were not getting enough support it became clear that something had to be done to help speed up the growth of smaller steemit members who are adding to the community in a positive way. They needed to be supported to help them grow faster and help keep them interested in producing content.

At the same time so many people had shown an interest in helping smaller members when I would mention this issue, but they would say it's so hard and time consuming to try and find smaller members who deserve support. Also the issue of resources available to them was an issue, that is if we give and give and give our account suffers as the expense of helping others. This is a real issue as most of us here aren't financially independent and need to keep growing our own accounts. Plus more we grow the more we can help others in the future...such a delicate balancing act.

So there was a need for a way to help support the community while at the same time allowing people to grow their own accounts. This is how the Minnow Builder Program was conceived.

Problems need Solutions

Who to support

The first problem of who to support is solved as we manually curate great steemians who have shown to write original content and are powering up their earnings. People that appear to be here for the long term and deserve some support. We also go back and check on those we are supporting to make sure they haven't turned into evil content thieves...lol...but seriously we do watch the accounts we are supporting.

Resources

The problem of resources is solved in the form of maintaining ownership of your Steem and by getting guaranteed daily upvotes worth 5x what that steem would have offered to you based on a single daily self vote. In reality as many people don't post daily we have been able to increase this amount to 10x the amount of a single self vote so that is all of the voting power coming right back to you and you are able to help the community. Plus with serious effort on my end the accounts have had some amazing growth due to post rewards and some well timed SBD conversions. This growth is all owned by the account holders and is purely added value I've provided to help reward those who are helping others.

Who are we supporting?

Currently @minnowbuilder is supporting and helping build 9 steemians into minnows: @tryskele, @headchange, @celinavisaez, @mcnestler, @buckaroo, @cicisaja, @el-nailul, @zorank, & @dipoabasch. This number will be 10 soon, just need to find the right person for the 10th slot. We had 2 people become Minnows recently that were being supported so this opened space for new members to be added.

Now I mentioned we keep an eye on accounts, @headchange hasn't been active but has proven to be a very valuable member of steemit. As we know the personal reason for being inactive we are keeping @headchange's slot in place for now. If we decide to remove them from the program it will be more of a "on hold" situation and they will be added back as soon as an opening is available.

@mcnestler is now 10 days without posting as we are watching to see if this continues. This amount of time away isn't that long, but worth watching to make sure the account doesn't go inactive.

If you have some spare time and voting power please check out the steemians we are supporting and give their most recent post a little boost.