I am very impressed with this post and with your analysis of your first month. This is a very interesting experiment. My own experience has had numerous ups and downs and I've lasted through quite a few Forks and Changes to the platform.

To be blunt, I'd like to say that I ABHORE Steem, the Blockchain that is, and I'm even more disgusted with SteemIt Inc for how they launched and promoted their Frankenstein abomination.

Short of Trolling a few people over, like in your case, I have virtually gotten No ONE to come over to the platform willingly. If they try to, they usually lose interest when their account doesn't get approved or they immediately start getting the Spammy Bot Comments from people with Bad English.

On top of that, there is a community of Flaggots who think they're doing everyone a favor by subjecting people to their Auto Flagging Bots, and decry plagiarism or spam... as if it was their business in the first place.

Now, all that aside... I still prefer this platform over the wasteful FaceBook and Twitter networks. Beside having a mechanism for monetization, there is also the very real advantage of NOT having your work buried, blocked or censored. As a publisher, I have to say that the basic storage of Markdown Language on a Blockchain makes for a useful tool.

Though you may have caught a Whale or two early on, I can say from experience to not rely on it. Whales will come and go, but bringing YOUR network over to the platform is more important. I say this because a journalist I follow was recently kicked from his Twitter account of 30K followers with ZERO recourse. Had he brought a lot of those followers over to SteemIt, even 2-5%, the blow wouldn't be so hard. But that is essentially what he gets for leaving control of his content in the hands of Twitter Inc. I expect many more stories like this about FaceBook as well.

In short, Steem and SteemIt Suck Balz! It's a craptastically weak social network with very strange adopters getting an early start on it. BUT, it's the ONLY ONE right now that can work against the censorship and control that you're going to see getting worse on other social networks as time goes by.

I suggest you focus on building your OWN following from places like FB, which I see that you're doing, and in time, your NEWER following will be able to monetize your content to a higher value.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts.
SteemON!