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I joined Steemit on October 3rd, 2016. That will make exactly 89 days until today. Let's make it 90, I like round numbers.

We're just one day before the end of the year, so I thought it's a good moment to do some stats, pick up some lessons and draw some conclusions.

Statistics

• 700 posts - most of them are comments. I estimate I have around 100 root posts (articles)
• 238 followers
• 8.715 Steem Power
• 67.7 reputation
• 51st position as a backup witness

According to SteemWhales.com I am on the 808th place overall for Steem Power.

I think it's better to let you analyze those numbers. I will focus on the lessons learned below.

Lessons

• As always, consistency pays out. My first writing project on Steemit was a 30 days challenge which, after a week, made me visible to curation projects like @curie. That was a good starting point. I recommend to all new Steemit users to commit for at least 30 ays to the platform if they want to have enough data for pondering if this is a good option for them or not.

• Again, learn and deploy multiple skills is a mantra that served me well. As a witness on Steemit you need to master skills from many areas: server administration, inter-personal communication, coding, auditing, business development, financials. Of course, if you decide to become a witness you can delegate some of them and focus only on what you know to do, but it's always better to have all the skills "on yourself", it gives a much clearer image.

• Pay it forward does pay it quite fast. I recommended the platform to many friends and some of them became regulars. Among them my life and business partner @raluca, who is on her own 30 days challenge now, but also many others. So, by recommending the platform to other people you contribute directly to the quality of the content and to the overall wellbeing of all people involved. And you make money. Directly.

Conclusions

For the last 90 days I spent, on average, 2-3 hours per day on Steemit. The ROI has been significant. There is a financial part of the ROI, that can be seen instantly (I think I withdrew around $150 in total so far) but there is also a part related to knowledge and experience. These 90 days "forced" me to acquire new skills and to deploy them and that will serve me well, whether or not Steemit, as an experiment, will continue to grow.

Inspired by Steemit I decided it's time to finally launch my cryptocurrency project, named Hubcoin. A first experiment has been initiated on the NXT blockchain and it's under active development. This crypto aims at mapping processes visible in pico-economies, like hubs or guilds. After 2 and a half years of running a hub, I identified quite a few processes and I have a few use cases already in place. Right now, Hubcoin is just a rewarding points layer, but if the feedback is good, and if Connect Hub will take over as a franchise, there will be a potential for making Hubcoin fungible and open it for trading outside of the initial community.

One very important thing that needs to be mentioned here is the HF16 moment. After hardfork 0.16.0, Steemit economy changed dramatically, in my opinion in a good way. We're still early in it, but the signs are rather positive and I'm not talking only about the price. The entire community seems to be heading in a clearer direction. I'm really looking forward to the roadmap that has been announced for the beginning of 2016.

All in all, I consider Steemit a successful experiment. Here's why:

1. Steem has a market cap of around $35 million dollars, putting it in the 8th position among all cryptocurrencies. That's very relevant.
2. The community has around 1.000 - 1.500 members active every day. While this is much lower than the official number of accounts, around 115.000, it's still a good number.
3. There is a significant number of apps already built on top of the blockchain. I will mention @greymass Reprint project, which "pulls" your content from Steemit and makes it available on other platforms, like blogs, and @busy busy.org project, along with SteemConnect, which has the biggest potential for growth. There are many more, of course, but those were the most important for me.
4. The price of Steem has been consistently between $0.37 and $0.10 since October, even after the new changes in economy. The fact that after the shortening of power down, from 104 weeks to 13 weeks, we didn't see too much of a selling, means the major stakeholders are not interested yet to sell, only to increase their liquidity. I will speculate that they are waiting for an increase in price in order to get rid of their Steem, which can also mean they are still trusting the platform. Please be aware that's just speculation.

All these are reasons to mark Steemit as a "successful experiment".

But in order for it to grow form the "experiment" stage to the "mature" stage there is still a lot of work to be done.

And that work has to be done by all the people in the ecosystem, since we are all literally owning shares in Steemit.

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.

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You can also vote for me as witness here:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses