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This was a really big month for my Steem account. I had a lot of fun creating a bunch of videos and seeing some big upvotes from DTube and Utopian. Last week was a little frustrating because I had some problems with my Utopian account and couldn’t get anything to go through. But it’s working again and I appreciated all the support I got from the Utopian devs/mods on Discord!

My goal for this month was to do my best to put myself out there as much as possible without hesitation. This is not something I’m good at — my gut reaction in most cases is to shrink in terror, and then quickly return to a safe place. 🙂

As a result of trying to be more open to saying yes to things, I set myself some pretty big goals. I didn’t quite accomplish them, but I got close and created some stuff I’m proud of. 🎉

The first was to create a Udemy course about learning the basic concepts of Steem. And the second was finishing the site for The Creative Crypto.

I’m really excited about creating the videos for this Steem course. Posting on Steemit/DTube/Utopian is scary enough as someone who has a hard time putting himself out there, but creating the videos for the course was particularly scary because I know this isn’t something I’ve been learning about for years or anything — I’m definitely not an expert. It’s just something interesting I’ve been paying attention to for a few months.

But I’m so glad I did because making this course has been not only a great way to earn STEEM and get some new followers, but also a great way to learn about this platform myself. I’ve really appreciated all the comments from people and the discussions I’ve been able to have to deepen my understanding of how it works and how it can be used.

Also, I actually planned on making a Udemy course about learning Japanese a few years ago, but it never happened. I ended up abandoning the project because I didn’t feel like I knew enough about the language to be teaching it to be people. This is still something I’m trying to wrap my head around, because I’m absolutely not someone who can just brush off criticism, so putting myself out there is scary, but making this Steem course has been a great example of the good things that can happen by just going through with it anyway. It gave me things to talk about for a ton of posts, which brought me new followers, good upvotes, and interesting discussion, and now at the end of it I’m going to have this course that I’m proud of creating. It’s not the most professional thing in the world (filmed on my webcam! :P), but I’m still really happy with it.

The main realization was that if I had a conversation with the me from 3 months ago, I knew there are a bunch of things I’d be able to explain to myself. So I figured I might as well do my best and make some videos to explain things for people who are in a similar place that I was. And now that I have all of these scripts/videos I can improve them and make a better course if I want — there’s plenty of room to iterate. This philosophy is one I’d like to bring over into my coding projects. Instead of sitting on them and fine-tuning to perfection, get them out into the world so I can get feedback and learn from my mistakes.

I also got a lot done on the site for The Creative Crypto. I jumped ahead to learn about React, Redux, and React Router, and have a fully functioning site that just needs to be cleaned up and formatted properly (markdown parsing is much more of a pain than I expected!).

Stats

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Here’s a summary of my running stats since starting at the beginning of January, along with a list of all my posts for this month and how much they earned.

Month	Earnings	Posts	Followers	Reputation	SP
January	$1,160.69	138	150	-	214
February	$842.30	235	221	57	430
March	$992.37	411	424	60	655

Post	Value
My Second Month on Steemit in Review	$24.38
DTube Hit #1 On Hacker News!	$114.62
Video Series For DTube/Steemit Beginners	$60.35
Reward Comparison: 1 DTube Upvote vs. 1 YouTube View	$91.77
What’s The Difference Between Steem & Steemit?	$29.52
Course Blocks - First Post & Back End	$145.87
My Favorite Crypto YouTubers, DTubers & Podcasts	$15.95
Steem is a Game & We’re Mining Upvotes	$17.37
What’s The Difference Between STEEM, SBD & SP?	$33.45
How Do Upvotes Work? When I Upvote Someone Does It Give Them My STEEM?	$59.88
What Are Curation Rewards?	$44.94
What Is The Steem Reputation Score?	$13.03
What Does It Mean To Delegate Steem Power?	$30.05
Creative Crypto - First Commit & Initial Styling	$113.37
Let's Remove The 7 Day Payout Window	$22.64
What Are The Choices For Post Rewards?	$32.26
What Is Voting Power?	$18.09
How Is The Value of a Post Calculated?	$24.98
Creative Crypto - Single Post Route, Price Tickers & Updated Formatting	$89.55
Twitter Auth Server - A Simple Express Server For Twitter API Authentication	$10.30

April Goals

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It hit me last week how much I still need to get done in the web development program I’m doing if I want to finish on time. So for April I’m going to be cutting back a bit on Steem. I’m planning to shift most of my focus to Utopian — coding updates are much faster to make than DTube videos, and they’ve received big upvotes, so it seems like a good place to focus my energy considering I have less time. There are still a few DTube videos I’d really like to make though, so hopefully I can get those recorded in the next few weeks.

I’ve been posting every Monday through Friday since I started in early January. I missed two days last week, and I’m going to relax this goal moving forward. I’ll probably be shooting for three posts a week, but I’m just going to have to see how things go.

Thanks for sticking with me! This whole Steem thing has been an interesting adventure so far. 🙂

Here’s to another month of creating content on Steem!

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