Steemit: Attractive Service to introduce Newbies into Cryptoworld
I certainly agree with you Steemit is an interesting service for newbies to the crypto world to enjoy the crypto world without needing to know a lot of cryptoland. Steemit requires a couple of changes to make the usr experience better, but agree, the basics is there and Steem is one of the few (maybe the only?) crypto currency that actually has a service that is quite easy to use by non-crypto people.

Marketing
I also agree that Marketing is a need! And fortunately Steemit is getting this higher on the list. When executing Marketing and further simplification of the user experience of Steemit in parallel, we may indeed be able to get to a (moderate) growth of Steemit in number of active users and number of posts/comments and hopefully in interactions; Interactions will create the value of Steemit, otherwise it'll almost like a library or Wikipedia, and information source rather than a learning source. The later, the learning part, maybe the USP for Steemit.

Businesses
I think some relatively near future, Steemit needs to start attracting businesses. You are right in saying that business wil come to a community by itself, when the community is interesting enough for them. But, what to think of onboarding businesses, and let them do (part of) the marketing by showing the non-crypto business world what can be achieved by entering the crypto world? I can think of at least 2 or 3 Dutch digital newspapers that could be very interested to be part of Steemit, but they don't know Steemit (can be solved by Marketing, but I beleive in 1-on-1 sales more at this stage than marketing to businesses), Steemit is not providing the right tools to them and us (the users) to actually get them onboard and have a good user experience for us users, and get some fiat money from them to kick-start a monetisation model for Steemit.

Way Forward
I see a couple of things to be done in parallel (maybe slightly shifted in time); in summary.

• get the basics right (in terms of power and reward mechanism/distribution
• marketing towards potential bloggers, professional and non-professional (the mass if you will)
• create more advanced user interface, with more fine grained personalised filtering, integrate Wiki/Help/App sections into Steemit UI
• create tools for business to help them on-boarding in technical terms
• start on-boarding businesses by 1-on-1 sales