Here is the first of the witness interviews. All the witnesses will answer the same questions. Today, Howo, co-founder of 
I'm Martin Lees, I'm a software engineer from France. I have been working for a large telecom company (Orange) for the past 3 years and have been fascinated by blockchain tech for quite some time. I made a few applications using bitcoin and ethereum but I really started to dive into blockchain programming a year ago when I started to blog on steem.
It's a really cool tech which, if adoption actually comes, might revolutionize a lot of the services we currently use. Although the current greed following the last bubble is leaving me a bit uncertain, I see too many people wanting to get rich quick and not enough people actually caring about "the big picture".
About 15 months ago, I actually don't really remember haha, I have always kind of wanted to have a blog and jump into the social media thing but never really got the time to do it and seeing steem I was like "sure let's try it". I was very motivated at the beginning and didn't care at all about the money, Even if I had like 1 cent on my article or one comment I was happy.
What really attracted me to steem was it's model where anyone with enough stake can effectively "create" money. Which was a very powerful idea because it opened so many applications.
We decided to become a witness quite some time ago actually but we launched it only now because we wanted to make sure we were prepared for the job and that we had something to really show to everyone like "vote for us this is the future and you want to support the future".
As the lead dev behind SteemPress I found that it's very difficult to get started on the steem blockchain.
thus I made a huge collection of snippets so that people can easily go "I want to case a vote" and instantly get a snippet associated : https://github.com/drov0/steemsnippets
I was also frustrated by having to constantly convert sbd and claim rewards, so I made a bot to handle that : https://github.com/drov0/Steem-reward-manager
As a team with
And finally we started working on SteemPress. By far our biggest project to date. It's a wordpress plugin to allow wordpress bloggers to connect their blogs to steem. We believe that it is going to create an incredible virtuous circle, as I described in a previous interview with 
The grand vision is to have a two-way integration bring steem onto the wordpress blogs as well...I'm talking upvote button, payout, comments from steem etc
All interaction like on steemit.com or busy. So suddenly you no longer go on steemit.com or another front end to consume content, you do that directly on the blog itself!
You can just browse the web and upvote what you like!
Which breaks the whole current situation where STEEM is in a closed environment.
Imagine yourself as a blogger, you see another blog and can't help but wonder what those payout values are. And soon enough you'll join the movement. As a SteemPress blogger, you can incentivize your users to do meaningful comments by upvoting them yourself and thus improve your viewership and get some more reoccurring readers/commenters.
As a normal commenter, you will end up wondering why you are making comments that don't bring you anything when others do earn money...and soon enough they will join too!
That's the grand idea for SteemPress. Have Steem as what it deserves to be, a token powering the web.
Cool aspects :
Steem is way too centralized, almost all the apps rely on the same node (steemit's one). We rely way too much on steemit inc for blockchain development. Almost all the interactions are happening on the same platform (steemit) which is controlled by steemit inc.
Also we don't flag enough, which makes sense because there is no incentive to flagging. I am strongly advocating for a flagging pool so that we can counter the abusers without paying for it (as you don't earn curation rewards by flagging).
There are a looot of unknown variables including the price which is something that drives adoption a lot so I won't try to make predictions, but hopefully the vision for steempress I defined above will come true and take steem to the top with it.
Better content discovery, better interactions (comments, votes etc) I feel like everyone is writing and nobody is reading.
Better curation (50/50 for instance) to incentivize voting more. Right now voting for curation rewards is simply stupid when you can get almost 100% return on your votes with bidbots or clever self voting.
Wake up every day thinking "what are the roadblocks for steem massive success/adoption" and work to fix them.
Engage with people, This is a social platform, go to steem.chat and various discord servers and chat with people. It's much more important than what you might think.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to answer these questions !
Link to your witness intro https://steemit.com/steempress/@steempress/steempress-vision-2018-roadmap-going-full-time-and-launching-witness-steempress
Want to delegate more or less or any amount in between what we propose ?
Just copy and paste the link below, taking care to change the amount of SP you want to delegate at the end of the URL :
https://steemconnect.com/sign/delegateVestingShares?delegator=&delegatee=ivoted&vesting_shares=YOURAMOUNT SP
