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Many of us want to support smaller members of the community in a meaningful way. The issue is that by doing so 2 problems tend to arise. Time is the one thing that every human on earth has exactly the same amount of each day. Rich or Poor we each have 24 hours to use. 

This post will give some background into my thought process on a project and also an announcement at the end of the post...feel free to skip to the end if you can't wait. 

![business-man-3160009_1280.jpg](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmRsMnpLLhYHZfRyYtd1KLriGLjevivYAX2D92sXrLK62i/business-man-3160009_1280.jpg)
<sub>Source: Pixabay CC0 Image, No Attribution Required.</sub>

### Time
As someone that is knee deep in supporting Redfish with @pifc's curation contest I fully understand the time commitment that it takes to do this. Even with a team of people curating and another amazing team of judges it still is very time consuming. So much so there are many weeks that my personal account is more or less ignored as my commitment to what we are doing with @pifc takes priority. Supporting Redfish, good ones that are producing original content, takes time that many of us just don't have. 

Automation to many simple tasks helps us be more efficient. It's why we use autovoters for some of our favorite authors or organizations. The vote is cast at exactly the time you want and it happens no matter what. This allows us to have continued support for others without it becoming a job.

### Grow to Give More
Many times as we are sacrificing our time and resources to help others it slows our own personal growth. While most of us rationalize this loss with the good we are doing for others now we forget about those in the future who we could be helping in a bigger way.

See as our accounts grow we have more voting power and earnings to use to help others down the road in a more meaningful way. By making sure we continue to grow our own accounts while helping others we are preserving our ability to provide even more assistance down the road. 

### Automated Redfish Support
What I wanted to figure out was a way to support of a large number of Redfish and do it in a meaningful way. Something that would actually help these redfish become Minnows over time. But at the same time I was worried about continuing the growth of my personal account. 

My resources didn't allow for long term support in terms of time or voting power. Talking with others showed me that a lot of people were in the same boat wanting to help grow the newest members of steemit but just weren't able to due to lack of resources.

Automation was key as time was going to be the biggest hurdle, but how to make this automation available to others? At first I was thinking of just setting up a Trail account and then visiting account giving a vote and triggering the trail of votes for those that wanted to help. This sounded good, but it has massive flaws for those who are regular active users. The loss of voting power at times which are outside your control can drastically effect your ability to function on steemit. Add in the resource credit issue and casting a large number of small votes each day only works for large accounts.

Maybe worse is that those in the trail don't tend to get any sort of account benefit. The first larger vote in a trail eats up the curation rewards and the smaller votes are just giving. There needs to be something in return for a lasting mutually beneficial relationship. Give and Take, you never can Give, Give, Give, and Give some more without at some point feeling used.

### Minnow Builder was born
<div class="pull-right">https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmZ3cPKphNvvmz6f7cpWAmLxMhzvX2hiuMvxbadxyNwWgN/MB.PNG</div>
The idea for @minnowbuilder was born as a way to create a win-win symbiotic relationship. Give upvotes to a manually curated group of redfish who are creating original content and shown they are powering up their rewards while still allowing those who support the redfish to gain and grow their own accounts. 

To do this we created Minnow Builder. This program allows someone to buy shares which will give a daily upvote to themselves and to the manually curated group of redfish. To accomplish the goals of the program and take redfish from wherever they are in their growth and build them to Minnow status we created 6 accounts. This will allow 60 different redfish to be supported at any given time while still casting daily upvotes for the supporters that is equal to or greater then 5 times larger then they could have gotten by self voting on a daily basis. 

Grow your own account faster and help others. That is Minnow Builder at it's simplest form. 

### MinnowBuilder3 Share Sales
Today @minnowbuilder3 has opened up [Round One](https://steemit.com/minnowbuilder/@minnowbuilder3/round-one-share-sales-status-open) of share sales. Find out the details of the program in that post.

If you are looking for a way to increase votes on your own posts and also interested in helping smaller manually curated Redfish be built into Minnows then this program is at the very least something you should look into. If you have questions please let me know either below in comments, on the share sale post, or on discord. 

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