I found Steemit in July 2016.
I have seen people come and go; I am still here, still voting manually.
I never invested money and yet I am sitting on 50k HP.
This is my story on Hive.
As explained in the last part, I got really upset, when I did not get enough votes on my posts.
I had gotten some random upvotes for memes (lol), but nothing substantial for my main posts, at all.
I started aggressively promoting my content everywhere, but got no further votes.
The most infuriating moments were, when someone would comment my post, but not leave a vote. I wrote a whole blog post about that subject. I finally snapped after I started translating an old German book into English and got 0.18$ for my 3 hours of work.
I got however -completely out of the blue- a vote by 
and that was worth 95$. For a single sentence. I was so happy.
btw: I wrote this quick script to find the post:
from beem.comment import Comment, AccountPosts
from beem.amount import Amount
account = 'felixxx'
check_value = Amount('30.000 HBD')
for comment in AccountPosts(account = account, sort = 'comments', limit = 10000000):
c = Comment(comment)
reward = Amount(c.reward)
if reward > check_value:
print(reward, comment)
# checks a users' comment history for comments' reward > check_value
These few lines of code would have been exactly the content that would have gotten me paid extremely well in those days, but I had no idea, how to even install Python. If you needed some inspiration to pick up coding, this is it; It's mostly practice, so just get to it.
I can be creative, but I had a hard time squeezing out good posts on demand, when all of a sudden sudden inspiration struck me; On the 17th of August 2016, I had a an idea:
@felixxx/if-i-had-a-million-usd
I wrote a post about what I would do, if I had 1,000,000 US$ in cash.
It is a cute thought experiment, anyways -engaging content- and my answer was pretty good. I garnished the post with little self-drawn MS Paint pictures to not infringe any copyrights. With that, I took heavy inspiration from 
After I had finished the post, I kept refreshing steemstats (wish that was still working) and waited for my big votes and after a while, 
Payouts were working differently back then, but my first payout (there were 2 payout periods per post back then) would be 982.30 $ before curation rewards (25%).
I will forever be thankful :D
The early dolphins ignored my post, of course.
I got some followers from it though, and below the post you can see some people commenting, who I interact with to this day.
It took my 2 hours to make the post and (almost) 1000$ for that meant a 500$ hourly pay.
This was the exact moment, I got hooked to Steem, which is now Hive.
I instantly swapped my SBD and staked everything.
I was sitting on maybe 300 Steem Power and those were worth like 800 $.
But it wasn't the amount of money, but how I got it, that fascinated me;
I got paid for an idea, a little bit of creativity - And there were other posts - Everybody was trying things out to see what woud amuse the whales. I was browsing new posts constantly and there was a lot of refreshing content. A lot was different than anything I had read before.
There were just a lot of intelligent, inspired people.
Soon I would meet some of them...
Next episode I am going to write about the first ever steem meetup.