What is life like for @aggroed doing Steem full time now? In this second part of the interview, we talk cryptocurrency revolution, using bidding bots on Steem, @minnowsupport project, success on Steem via helping others, and tips for new authors/witnesses!

In our previous post which is part #1 of this interview we discussed @aggroed's transition out of the corporate world into doing Steem full time, earning as an author on Steemit, serving as a witness, and our purpose for growing Steem together in peace, abundance and liberty, alongside @minnowsupport and http://minnowsupportproject.org.

This blog post is the second part of the interview and you may watch the video at the end of it if you wish.

Jerry Banfield's Vision for Steem

What I think Steem might actually help us a lot with, is show us more accurately the world we are in whereas things like Facebook and Google, we kind of have this inaccurate view of the world. We think things are one way, but it really works differently behind the scenes.

We have proof of that because almost no one at Google or Facebook ever wants to talk about how the inner workings of things like demonetization or banning, and censorship work, and the money flow is not obvious to the average user either where an advertiser drops in millions of dollars, you can see the ads, but you can't see how much money is moved.

What I like on Steem, and it's one of the things that aggravated my wife about Steem, is you can see how all these money transactions are working and it's right out in the open, which then people can get really angry and upset with it, and actually see it because it's out in the open.

It's not clear to the average user who is trying to eat food and diet, how the government's health regulations are based on huge amounts of money by certain types of food producers, and then those are in the official recommendations regardless of whatever the data shows that the food is actually good for you, that doesn't matter. When you pay enough money, you can get it on the table and the official recommendations.

I like on Steem that we can see exactly where the wealth is and if we don't like it we have a place we can talk about it.

Aggroed:

Yes, Steem is an amazing place. The only thing that made me hesitate to quit my gig was my wife and my dad being a little nervous about it, but otherwise, I'm jumping in with two feet.

I want to leave that entire world behind. I just think it's really important not to give it any of my attention. I don't want to give it any of my money, any of my attention, any of my force, and part of being able to do that is if there are no alternative and I just say, "I'm going to stop using the US dollar," then what?

How do I eat?

How do I get money?

How do I do things?

How do I have commerce?

I know people that couch surf forever, but that's not really realistic when you are already married and have two kids. Steem is a remarkable thing for me because it's not a hundred percent there. I still convert some money out to dollars and I still pay down my house mortgage and things, but eventually I think that we will get strong enough where the next step is that the banks will just start accepting cryptocurrencies as currencies rather than the stupid property thing, but they will recognize that it's a currency and they will take them to pay down debts.

The main thing that's cropping up in all these nation states is basically two things, a military and a printing press, and because the cryptocurrencies are such stronger currencies, so much better currencies where all the people that are involved with them without actually having removed the US dollar, printing press, we effectively do that because people aren't going to want to hold that.

You have to be insane!

If you are sitting on a million dollars, you have to be insane not to put that into a crypto.

That is freaking printing 160 million dollars a day. That's an enormous amount of inflation and it's completely unsustainable. We have doubled the amount of currency in circulation since 2008 and it's absurd. If you want to know what the shittiest investment you can make is, just hold a US dollar. It's not even stable, the value of that keeps going down.

Whereas all these cryptocurrencies not only are you getting at least a stable value, except in the cases where the chain dies or there's some technological threat, but outside of that existential threat of, "Will the chain even exists," those things are just worth so much more because they are either deflationary or practically deflationary, and they work better.

They go across these fiat imaginary lines that they keep drawing on maps and it's a much more liberated and private view that there's just infinitely more to like about them and as a consequence everybody that's holding these highly inflated pieces of shit fiat paper have every piece of incentive to get rid of them to move into crypto.

For a part of those reasons I just keep seeing that the crypto space is not going to grow, I think it is going to exponentially explode as more people realize just how freaking good it is here.

You have governments that are banning cash and that's miserable. Try to ban Bitcoin in those countries, see how that goes, and you have anonymous transactions where anybody can hop on from anywhere in the web. We can just circumvent any of the stupid rules that men with guns want to create for us.

That's what I'm about. That's what I'm trying to do.

I think most of part of what we like, or saw some overlap on, is a worker program, and I have mixed feelings about it. I don't want to force people to pay a worker program because that starts feeling like taxation. I do think that there is an aspect where every single post that's out here is effectively a worker program. We already have a worker program that's infinitely large, but I do think that trying to find a way to funnel money to doing projects that are very specific to help the ecosystem grow is good for the Steem ecosystem.

I haven't sent out another post to really push this or do something because there were a number of people that came back to me and said, "Well, what if I don't want to do that? What if I don't want my money going to those projects? It starts feeling like taxes."

There are parts of this that I like and there are parts that make me nervous, but finding ways to get funding and eyeballs on good projects, I do think is something that you had originally talked about that made me think, "Alright, I'll give this guy more of a chance."

But I also think that there are parts of it that even after I've supported it, I have to look back and say, "Alright, well, I can see what some of these detractors are saying."

It feels like there are some elements of taxation to a worker program that maybe they don't want to support that I don't know how I feel about that. It makes me less gung-ho about it entirely.

Jerry Banfield:

I'm grateful with these voting bots that we have found a way to use the votes from voting bots to essentially make a budget funding system for workers that then is completely optional. If you don't use the voting bot or if you don't delegate to the voting bot, then you don't have to participate in it.

I've launched the voting bot and the funding system for the budget proposal, so I've already paid out a few worker proposals and funded some more.

As for Steem, I'm planning contests that will be pretty huge with that soon too. I'm grateful on Steem we have got room to innovate things like this today that you can do just by supporting them directly without having to make everyone participate in it.

Aggroed:

Yes, I do think that was a good solution.

I co-own that Steem Bot Tracker website. I run two bid bots and I used them all the freaking time. I think that they are great equalizers and I think they are unprecedented opportunities for marketing.

I've been in higher Ed, and higher Ed has to do enormous amounts of marketing, and those professors get so saturated. In all of those cases, I've had to pay money to market and I never got any of that money directly back.

Here it's entirely unique in that I am able to use a bid bot to go market my post, and then at the end of the week they say, "Okay, here's your money back," and that's astounding for marketing. There's nothing like that anywhere else on the planet that I know of that exists, but that's how bid bots function.

Maybe one day they will get so popular that we are no longer talking about, "Well, you get all your money back," but until then, this is an unprecedented opportunity to both market your content, typically not make money and oftentimes making a return.

My best post using a bid bot, I put a 30 SBD bid down and I think it was through @appreciator and it doubled. That's remarkable, right?

I think it was $300 at the time.

Here's $300, great!

Let me market your content.

All right. Well, we marketed your content, here's $600 back.

Where else does that exist?

I know that some bid bots make people frustrated or they feel like they skew the reward system or something, but I think that they are a great equalizer and in part what we want is whales having the ability to invest in the platform without simply upvoting shit comments that they are making on their own walls.

This presents a fantastic opportunity so that a whale can say, “I want to invest here, but I don't want to post here and make so much money that a post on here isn't even worth my time, but I want to be able to get some passive investment for this voting power thing that you're giving me.”

I think that bid bots make a great investment and that they are useful for the platform. I think sometimes they are abused, but as long as good people are using them, it makes it so that it's much harder for shit posters to use them.

I don't know exactly what our topic is here.

Again, this is part of the Steem ecosystem and creating abundance.

A bid bot actually creates abundance for basically everybody involved. It's creating it for the whale and it's creating it for the user.

Maybe it causes some amount of pain to the reward pool in general for everybody, but again vote-buying existed before these things already existed. It just happened privately in direct messages.

Now, it's this open transparent thing that anybody can participate in. I think that's better and ultimately I think that the amount of benefit provided by providing a marketing service to everybody and an investment opportunity for whales is driving more growth than the cost that it is to take some of the money out of the pool because that money could have been spent anyways.

They could just be spending that furthering themselves and crap content. Instead, they're doing this thing that actually has some benefits for the community. As far as I'm concerned they are helpful and I do think that the project to use Jerry Banfield, the @jerrybanfield account, as a worker service is good.

That's part of why I look forward to it and actually use the @jerrybanfield account, because I do think that having a voluntary worker program is helpful.

I guess overall what I've recognized is that Steem is a remarkable opportunity to go spread the values of peace, abundance and liberty.

I've been able to make an enormous amount of money doing that. I've been able to delegate and give away an enormous amount of money without it really costing anything. I've lost some opportunity cost, but I've been able to go help literally thousands of people.

If you look at the @minnowsupport account, it will show you that there's like a hundred and ten or a hundred and twenty thousand comments around now, and that's because we voted on a hundred and ten thousand posts by probably fifty, sixty or seventy thousand different people.

So to that end, I feel like the work that I'm doing is not only spreading this message and helping this place grow, but we are making economic differences for the people all over the world and I'm directly participating in that.

I don't know, if you like this message I would say, "Please come delegate to the @minnowsupport bot, because we are helping a lot of people and that's one of most direct ways that I think that you can help, especially the brand-new members on this platform to start to find some success here and start to make some rewards."

There are a lot of people that use the @minnowsupport account as the initial jumping-off point. I think people eventually sort of walk away from it and say okay I don't need to use this anymore, but that's actually a sign of success and health not of, it doesn't matter.

It's more like, "Alright I've grown out of needing this," and that's exactly what we are trying to do, to get new users to the point where they don't quite need that service, but now they have more of a community around them, more support, more followers, more upvotes and a more sustainable income when they are posting.

Jerry Banfield:

Hundreds of thousands of votes on posts, it's incredible. I just saw an article that says basically in many countries you only need a couple of dollars a day, that's the poverty line. You can survive off of just a couple of dollars a day.

Then, when we have got the Minnow Support Project as a part of everything else we have on Steem, I feel like it's very realistic to expect, and you mention seven cents on a few posts, that with continued contributions to Steem an author could easily expect to earn at least two dollars a day every single day.

Aggroed:

On like two posts, yes, especially with a high SBD.

The other debate that I've been able to partake in a lot is, what should we do with the SBD?

My response is, help it be as high as possible because this is good for the platform. Steem will reward the investment holders, but SBD is rewarding all of the active users, and so having a high SBD has helped explode the platform, but it also helps in that very situation where you have a lot of third worlders that are getting a $1 post.

That $1 post has 0.4 SBD on it and that 0.4 SBD is now worth $4. That one post that they are making might not have a ton of rewards for an American, but now it starts looking like a daily income. Now, it starts looking like you are doing well and that's remarkable.

I think we help with that because the Minnow Support Project can put, I don't know, right now even at low VP, we are still able to put like $10 on a post.

I don't know what our 1% vote is doing. It's been a while since I've actively been using it because I haven't needed it, but even if we are at 25 cents or something, that ends up being quite a bit of money, especially when we are doing that a thousand times a day.

We are distributing wealth to the users all over the world and especially those that either need it the most because they are the most impoverished, or need it the most because they are just beginning their journey on Steem and they need that small amount of income to increase their reputation, to make some friends, to get at least a little post value out of this or something so that they don't feel so entirely lost.

That's what we are doing and so far it's working out pretty well.

Jerry Banfield:

Thank you very much @aggroed because I see on a lot of your posts you have used the voting bot of mine, and if we look at Steem World, you can see that you have made $35,000 worth of Steem Backed Dollars and Steem, the current price being in the last 30 days.

It says you joined in August 2016, that must have seemed like a complete fantasy or ridiculous that within a year and a half you could be making more money than most people get in half a year or a year of work.

Aggroed:

That money is certainly inflated because I use bid bots all the time. Again, I think using a bid bot is good. Since I delegate all my Steem Power, I feel like I want to give back to the people that are voting for my posts, so I like to vote out. I like to use a bid bot after a lot of people have voted and that's a way that I can sort of hit them with curation rewards for having been paying attention to my post.

Every now and then, I want to go send one up into "Trending," so lots of eyes get on it. I did that for the, "Hey, why don't we stop for a second and thank Steemit for helping us get up to $8 Steem."

I guess it was even $9 or something. What I'm saying is, don't look at that number and be like, "Wow. Aggie is actually making all of that."

That number is at least half-inflated by bots because I used them very frequently to large amounts in part to reward people and part to stop shit posters, part because it's fun and sometimes because it's rewarding.

Like I said my best one yet, was a 30 SBD vote that ended up turning into a 60 SBD vote.

Who knows?

Maybe I will catch some more of those, I use them quite a bit, but I am not making 35,000 SBD per year. That number might be how much I earn entirely, but it's not what I'm actually making from doing this.

Jerry Banfield:

Yes, that's just the raw number. You have got 5,000 Steem Dollars in the last 30 days 1,900 plus Steem Power from author rewards. That doesn't include your costs essentially that you have probably put thousands of Steem Dollars through the voting bots in order to turn those Steem Dollars.

Aggroed:

That's correct.

Jerry Banfield:

Including funding projects like the worker proposal system I have and including any other projects that are funded through voting bots as well.

Aggroed:

Yes, I have two of them.

One of my voting bots is @lovejuice and it allows me to go pay brand new authors $20 worth of Steem or SBD to go author with us.

That's another way because I have a steady income from that I can go give it back to the community and that's pretty rewarding. I've been doing that and that's one of the projects that I think I can use bid bots to help, and then the other one is @msp-bidbot and that one is neat because anybody can delegate to it and they can start getting rewards from it.

So the people that are brand-new, minnows that have been on the platform a bit, maybe they have to step back for a month or two, or maybe they don't like posting, but they like reading, but somehow they have some or they have invested a bit, but at only a thousand Steem or something, it's not really worth running your own bid bot, so here's a way that people can go sort of delegate to this thing and get small returns back for it.

Five percent of it will go to @minnowsupport, and that's a way we are able to grow the minnow support account a little bit too. It's like one SBD a day or something, but that's a way that we can grow that account, and again use it to go help new minnows and new members of the Steem community, to start to have success here.

Jerry Banfield:

Thank you for explaining about the bots because each of these bots essentially pays out different investors or operators, and I like to choose the bots based on who I want to earn essentially.

It's nice to build a list of them.

The @msp-bidbot gives back and the @lovejuice bot also gives back. So, I know if I promote a post with that, I'm also doing some good.

I noticed you said, you just kind of quickly mentioned it in terms of, giving back feels good.

What I've noticed is that a lot of us underestimate how important that is. We think that making a bunch of money will make us happy, but according to the data once we have got enough to be comfortable, which in the USA is about $70,000 a year, no extra money adds anything to happiness, but doing something that gives back like charity work or funding new authors on Steemit, paying out worker proposals or whatever it is, that can help us greatly increase our happiness much more than just earning money.

Well, no more money after you have got everything to be comfortable, money doesn't buy any more happiness after comfort, but generosity does give a whole lot more happiness.

Aggroed:

Yes, and from that perspective, I'm an incredibly happy person. I don't know if it's every month, but around the holidays I did a Thanksgiving scavenger hunt. I did a Christmas scavenger hunt. I think I'd given away maybe 400 Steem. That was probably around five bucks. I mean, that's a lot of money, that's two thousand dollars that just went out.

But again, this platform gives me lots of Steem, so to me it's just paying it forward and just trying to help. A big part of how all this happened was @kaylinart who resteemed one of my posts talking about how to make a good post mimicking her style, she resteemed me and as a consequence of that my followers grew, and lots of people started paying attention and I thought, "Oh, that's how this whole thing works. All right. Now I get it."

At that time, it was just a resteem, but honestly it had been months and months in the working of building up an audience, and then using her audience to go help me, which at the time cost her nothing, but getting to that took her forever.

But now I realized, "Oh, I can go use all this work that I've put in, I can use to help other people get started," which is why if you look at my wall it's filled with having resteemed other people.

I try to resteem a couple of people every other day or something. Sometimes when I have more time to curate you will see three or four.

When I was doing the "Santa Aggroed" or when I did the "Thanksgiving Resteem" I asked people to resteem me first and maybe they'd resteem me to 60 people or something, and then I'd resteem them later and have that go out to like 10,000 people.

I think stuff like that helps brand new users get started and situated, and actually @ausbitbank was kind enough to go over and follow the people that I had resteemed, to go hit them with some couple dollars worth of votes here and there.

So, between us with this community we have some power to go help new users get started, maybe even stick around and maybe even eventually invest and feel like, "Alright! Well, maybe I can't make a fortune posting, but I can go buy some Steem and watch this currency go moon."

I feel like we have done a lot of good on this platform and I just look forward to doing more. People have said, "Alright, you quit your job. What changes?"

It's like, if the big picture doesn't change, the mission is still to spread the values of peace, abundance and liberty, help grow the Steem ecosystem and help train and retain minnows on the platform, but now there's just new ways and more time to do that through curation, and other things. Like I said, I'm building a studio or trying to build a film studio so that I can do more on the radio, do more by actually doing like a broadcast production that's like a TV or film.

I just see this thing growing and I see it where more people are able to get hit with a message that didn't come from a government speaker or a government agent, but came from people that are woke, thoughtful and willing to talk about, "Hey, you know there's a different way that we can all choose to live. Let me show you how that can be done and if we all decide to do this, then maybe we can finally have nice things again."

Jerry Banfield:

I'm very grateful that you consistently reiterate the mission. I've found that's very helpful to focus on what the big picture is and in that sense maybe you could answer some questions like, how can I be successful on Steemit?

After looking at your account, you have been successful at the things most people might want to try doing: that's publishing as an author, getting followers and top twenty witnesses.

What tips do you have for new authors?

New or just struggling authors or witnesses?

Aggroed:

If you are brand new as an author, then spend most of your time writing really short form posts. Don't be spending five hours at a time, because you don't have enough followers to spread the message, it's likely not going to resonate.

It is as important on this platform to have good content as it is to have a good network. You should be building both your content and your network, and that's part of why I built the Minnow Support Project and have a 7,000 Steemian community.

It's hard to do that directly on Steem just by writing pen pal-style notes, but when you can have a direct conversation or a voice conversation or a video conference, you can do a lot more to make friends, and I think that helps build what you are capable of doing on the system.

Spend less time authoring, spend more time commenting because commenting can catch you votes, but it also gets you followers, and then spend your time working in the Minnow Support Project, other Discords or Telegram, or anything else that you can find where some Steemian's have gathered.

I know there are a couple of Facebook groups, @acidyo runs a Reddit page. Go work with these folks and work in the different communities to find a community that you like, that you fit into, and then I think you need to help other people rather than coming to us and say, "Hey, follow for follow," vote begging, or anything else… the latest joke was "Witness for Witness."

None of that is good.

What you really want are people that believe in you, believe in your content, that think you are a friend and what you have done, the best way to do that is to help other people.

So, think about what skills you have. If you are an artist, make some art. If you are a musician, make some music for somebody and say, "Here's some music. I made it for you."

Because who doesn't like people that show up with gifts and say, "Hey, I'm grateful to be part of this community. I'm looking forward to helping even more. This is what I can think to contribute now."

The people that come to me and say, "Hey Aggie, will you resteem this?"

It's like, "Oh xxx!"

The people that come up and say like, "Hey, here's the way that I think I can help this community."

Well, I will actually pay attention to that. I'm not looking at the follower count at that point.

I'm looking at:

Do I think this person is going to follow through?

Do I think that they have good morals and a good mission?

Do I think that they are good for this ecosystem?

If the answer to those things is yes, then I'm happy to help.

That's what I would say for that.

In terms of being a new witness, the most important thing is that you got to love Steem because ultimately being a witness is hard. It took me months to get anywhere, months and months of work and constant work.

I built the four thousand person organization and I was still like number 60 at one point. It's hard to get noticed. It's hard to build things. It's hard to provide a lot of benefit for this platform in a way that looks meaningful and tangible because there are a lot of smart people with a lot of money that you are competing against for that same attention.

You have to be patient, you have to have a neat project. Don't just do it to witness, do it because you love Steem, and do it in a way that you are providing benefit back to the platform.

What are you doing to try to make this place better?

How do you spend your days growing this ecosystem?

What are you doing to change the value of the platform and to make people have a better experience?

There are lots of ways to do that, there's not just one. The simplest version of this I can think of is that when you move into a neighborhood in the Midwest, your neighbors go and bake you a pie and they say, "Welcome to the neighborhood."

When you live in New England, when you buy a new house typically you are the one that's supposed to bake pies for all your neighbors.

I think Steem as a community is much more like New England where if you want to be accepted with good graces, like the Steem community doesn't need any more pumps or assets from other platforms, what we want are good people.

So, if you can come in and show that you are good people, show that you are generous and show that you have the right mindset, this community will support you. If it's not that, then it won't go as well.

Jerry Banfield:

So, to summarize in very quick generic terms, focus on helping others and understand that most of the time, for both authorship and witness, or any similar things like building followers or whatever it is, email subscribers, whatever we are trying to get for ourselves in it essentially or get as proof of our work, it may take a while and it might not look like we are making any progress, as we are launching our witness posts and we don't get hardly any votes, or post after post like you said, seven or something posts made seven cents, it might look like we are not getting ahead.

What I've noticed as a reader too, lots of times someone will have made a post months ago that actually converts me to a follower. So, especially those first few months, realize it might take a lot longer than it looks like and the people who are ahead of you are actually there to help. They are not there to be competition essentially, but we are really working on this together.

Aggroed:

Yes, right.

Honestly, Ron is here right now. He's the general manager of the MSP-Waves broadcast station and we are going to go look at my basement to see if we can refinish it to make a mini film or production studio out of it. He just showed up at my house, so I think I got to go.

Jerry Banfield:

Well, @aggroed, thank you very much for doing this today, I will share it and I appreciate this time with you.

Have fun with your studio.

Aggroed:

Yes, this was awesome. I appreciate your time, Jerry, and it's good to get some face time with you. I know it's only one way here, but I will reveal my face soon enough, I'm not in the corporate world.

But in the meantime, it was good to talk to you. I look forward to talking to you some more and I don't know, we will try to find some more overlap between ways that we think we can help this community and hopefully we can support one another doing that.

Jerry Banfield:

Absolutely.

Well, have fun and I will see you on Steem.

Aggroed:

Sounds good. Talk to you soon. Bye.

Jerry Banfield:

Thank you very much for being with us, this was an interview with @aggroed on Steem. If you'd like to find him, would you please go to https://steemit.com/@aggroed?

You can also find his projects there. He's one of the founders of the Minnow Support Project at http://minnowsupportproject.org and there's also the @minnowsupport on Steem.

Aggroed, I would imagine, would appreciate your witness votes although he's pretty high up there. I'm sure he would appreciate your witness votes even if they are voting and supporting newer witnesses. I know Aggroed would appreciate your participation in the witness voting system.

Thank you especially to @aggroed for making these voting bots possible. My voting bot and worker proposal system are possible because @aggroed and @yabapmatt collaborated on making this bid voting bot system possible.

Thank you very much for reading this post or watching this interview in the video below. If you found anything useful, would you please leave a like or an upvote on it because that will help more of us enjoy the same benefits out of it?

I love you.

You're awesome, and I will see you on Steem.

Final words

Thank you for reading this blog post, which was originally filmed as the video below.

If you found this post helpful on Steem, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?

Love,

Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk on the transcript from @deniskj

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