Steem's First Freelancing Marketplace is Online at www.steemj.com!

Will you join us in celebrating the launch today of Steem's new freelancing website at www.steemj.com because we can use this to help earn money with our skills and hire each other to do the work we need? Thank you very much to @sarasate for building https://www.steemj.com and agreeing to continue development on it based on what we ask for!

Today I sent the prize I offered of 2,000 Steem to @sarasate for creating the first working version of SteemJ first based on the original post at https://steemit.com/steemj/@jerrybanfield/2000-steem-prize-develop-steemj-com-for-steemit-freelancing.
If you have not read this already, would you read it because it explains in detail my long term vision for SteemJ which I think has the ability to add massive value to our community here on Steem?

To summarize, freelancing online is a $10+ billion dollar business that Steem has the perfect opportunity to innovate in because of our profiles which act as a resume and our payment system with instant transfers and transparent wallets. Building an exciting freelancing platform with Steem specializing in services related to cryptocurrencies gives us the opportunity to bring potentially millions of new freelancers onboard and to increase our ability to make meaningful purchases with Steem.

We did this together because of the support of 1073 upvoters on the announcement post at https://steemit.com/steemj/@jerrybanfield/2000-steem-prize-develop-steemj-com-for-steemit-freelancing which helped pay almost half the cost to fund the development of SteemJ! The top 10 upvoters for SteemJ are @hendrikdegrote, @transisto, @fabien, @teamsteem, @nanzo-scoop, @geoffrey, @craig-grant, @livingfree, @sweetsssj, and @gigafart. Thank you each very much for giving enough to launch this first version of SteemJ and also to @o5faruk who has been working on his own version of SteemJ!

What are the key features available on SteemJ?

On https://www.steemj.com/ today we have the ability to search through job posts made to Steem including @steemgigs, peer to peer exchange, research, writing/editing steem posts, marketing, programming & tech, translation, graphic design, and video production. We also will soon have a working post feature to make posting a job in the right place easy! If you would like to hire for one of these kinds of jobs, would you please post on SteemJ because this will help us find your job?

My longer term plan for SteemJ is explained at https://steemit.com/steemj/@jerrybanfield/steemj-for-freelancing-week-1-update-key-features-income where I hope to use SteemJ to make it easy for us to connect with any of our services and hiring needs in one place because this will help us spend our Steem and earn more Steem using our skills! While Steem is planning communities in future interface releases, I believe SteemJ will be most effective in both bringing new freelancers to Steem directly via SteemJ and offer the best marketplace to view and browse all current Steem jobs especially when combined with all the existing posts from @steemgigs.

Growth Proposal Format

1. Positive feedback! 1501+ upvotes total on the first two SteemJ idea posts (which were not correctly tagged with "growth-ideas") along with nearly 500 comments totaling over $1,000 in rewards.
2. Summary! Our blogs with Steem present the perfect resume to show what we can do. How much value would making an online freelancing platform using Steem add to our community if we made it easy to hire contractors and get hired as a freelancer here?
3. Problem! Currently to get freelance work online takes going to Upwork or Fiverr or Craigslist or another third party website that requires starting essentially from zero. Getting the first job is really hard and often linking to a website like Steem is not allowed. Meanwhile, we have thousands of people interested and available to be hired here plus hundreds of clients like me that need help with our businesses already using Steem. Today making the connection is very difficult because there is no easy way for the workers to connect with the clients. Even adding communities might make it possible for certain specialized groups to form like "Steem Freelancers" but these will still be ineffective to actually attract freelancers to join Steem just for the ability to earn as a freelancer.
4. Solution! We are in the perfect position to make the best freelancing platform in the world because where else can we actually get paid to build our resume? All we need is an interface to bring all of the freelancers and clients together. SteemJ is my attempt to produce that for us.
5. Outcome! In five years, I would like to see the majority of the world's freelancers being hired on our Steem blockchain and receiving payments in Steem. Having the world's top freelancing platform on Steem would guarantee a Steem price of $10 with as high as $100 possible as Steem became the first cryptocurrency adopted by the masses globally for making person to person transfers. Bitcoin by comparison is still not even close to main stream with almost no one in normal life I know offline ever having bought or sold any Bitcoin. In the short term, giving every Steem user an easy option to post a job and to browse all the existing jobs on Steem helps us build deeper relationships with each other. In three months, I would like to be able to count on SteemJ to help me hire anyone else I need to work with for my business. Within a year, I would like to be running ads on Facebook and YouTube to bring freelancers and clients to Steem.
6. Cost! To make building our freelancing platform a reality, we need a developer to consistently be available to maintain and improve the code. For this service, would we be willing to give @sarasate 5,000 Steem a month to be the lead developer because he has already committed to continuing to make consistent improvements after proving that within a month of starting he was able to build the entire https://www.steemj.com from nothing? Within a few months, we would expect to have active jobs in every category plus consistent transactions from existing Steem users giving SteemJ a try and from the existing activity in @steemgigs matching with our efforts? Within six months, we would hope to be ready to launch video advertising campaigns on Facebook and YouTube in the same format I have already done on two previous ad campaigns to bring in thousands of new Steem users directly through SteemJ with a budget of 5,000 Steem a month? Our potential gain within a year is significant increases in the price of Steem as thousands more users join Steem to use our marketplace while existing users build deeper relationships with others and make more peer to peer Steem transactions.

What do you think?

Would you like us to continue developing SteemJ as a growth project under the "Crowdsourced Marketing Protocol: Ideas, Proposals, Projects" as explained at https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemitblog/crowdsourced-marketing-protocol-ideas-proposals-projects because we will need further development and advertising funding to make this truly a valuable contribution to Steem? What key features would you like to see in order to become active on SteemJ? How important do you think it is we continue to improve this and bring more people into Steem this way?

Thank you very much for collaborating with me to make SteemJ a reality today within two months from the day I announced it! Are we ready to keep making SteemJ better and begin using it today to connect?

Love,
Jerry Banfield