I'll enter your contest but I was going to reply anyway before I read that you were making this a contest. I'm already following you because of @flyingdutchman and his recent post about good commenters, engagers, posters, you get the drift. Congrats on making minnow. I actually achieved the same accomplishment a few weeks ago. I didn't know there was a forum or community that would want to hear about that.

With that, you're already helping a mini minnow. I will have to check out the Redfish power up league post. Maybe I should've posted there and perhaps met some people sooner.

My biggest challenge in coming on here was trying to understand how to get my account to grow, both in reputation and steem power. I initally learned about this from @clearbluecrypto and I don't know if he even signs in here anymore.

I see automatic upvotes from him so he set himself to make some passive curation on my efforts and perhaps just let this ride as passive income. He was the most helpful initially. Then I had some good help from @brandonfrye and then even my most recent help was from the very person you mentioned, @paulag - so I am finally elevating to getting noticed myself now.

My biggest challenge was learning the bot system and I had to learn that a bit from trial and error. I definitely learned early that you can do some "get in at the final minutes" bidding on steembottracker, but I also learned that you can lose a lot by someone else doing the same thing. I can't say any one person showed me how to get that right. I think I eventually learned to diversify bids over different bots.

The latest advice from @paulag has been huge. Somehow I missed "mentions". I had no idea that I was being mentioned in various postings over the past many months since I've started here. I was keen to the "replies" feature but didn't know about the "mentions". She told me that one of the easiest ways is to use:
https://steemworld.org/@username - (only change the username to your own name). I have been commenting and replying more than ever and people are writing back with me. It's been great. I will look into this make-a-whale program you spoke of and the redfish league. I actually have so many angles so to try right now that I am starved for the time right now to try them all. Upvoted and resteemed. Feel free to follow me if you like, no hard feelings if you don't. I was on the @flyingdutchman list too.