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Take a minute and treat yourself to this new Steem Monsters animation.  In the not too distant future I hope to see it as cut scenes in the game and a cartoon for the community.

# Steem Blast

@timcliff is running a Steem Blast promotion.  I'd like to echo some of the points that he's made.  I get to do this from a couple of spots that I think not many folks get to experience.

I started 2 years ago knowing absolutely nothing about crypto.
I blogged heavily and consider myself a content creator for about a year and a half.
I ran a witness campaign and started the largest off chain community for the platform.
I cofounded Steem Monsters.

I generally describe there being 4 key stake holders to the Steem Blockchain 
Steemit Inc
Devs
Merchants/Businesses
Content Creator

Despite not actually being a coder I'm going to count being an elected witness as being in the Devs catagory and share some perspective about Steem.  This puts me in 3 of the four major stakeholder groups.

# This place

This place is nothing short of incredible.  It's resilient, filled with talent, lots of people posting every day, lots of people interacting every day, the chain is fast and freemium, and with tokens coming businesses are going to come flocking.

Steem Monsters has really only been around 3 months.  We've sold just shy of 200,000 booster packs for $350-400k.  That's not equity we gave up.  That's product we sold!  This is a project that's showing off so much of what Steem is good at and how you can tap into it as a business.

We did it with a developer who is a web developer and not a blockchain centric developer and a people person.  Speaking in broad buckets Yaba interfaces with the computers and I interface with the humans.

When we started-
We didn't have to build a tool to accept different kinds of crypto.  We tapped into blocktrades.  
We didn't have to launch a blockchain.  It was already here.  
We didn't need to build a new marketing system, the posting work I'd already done got us going and we got paid for content marketing.
We didn't have to find people to come to our project, they were already here.
I didn't have to find writers, musicians, and artists to work for my crypto.  They were already here.
We didn't have to learn C++, Yaba could just do the same web development he's done for 20 years.
We didn't have to waste thousands of dollars and years of work to reinvent the wheel.  We just tapped into Steem.

# Success

$300k in sales later, thousands of players later, fighting around the corner, and a kickstarter starting tomrrow to help bring in the masses, and the only thing I really feel right now is enormous gratitude to this community.

This is my home.  I love it here, and I'm gonna keep making shit until Steem is on everyone's lips.  I'm not saying there aren't problems.  I've been pissed about distribution here since 2 months in, but this place keeps going despite that.  We're so close to critical mass even in this down turn.  Rain or shine I'll be here, and I know many others who feel the same way.

So, I'm grateful for the success of Steem Monsters.  I'm committed to giving back to this community.  I feel hopeful and excited to see it grow, and I'm extremely confidant that more people are going to keep coming, and more projects are going to be built to keep them here.

## An ask 

The kickstarter starts tomorrow.  I think it's great for the chain as a whole for this to be successful. "Steem Blockchain project raises $1M through Kickstarter" is a hell of a story for the chain.  Please make it a point to grab a reward when we open it up tomorrow, and please share this video with friends and family to show how we're growing on Steem.