RE: Dash's Killer App: A Focused Commitment To Simplicity
Businesses and advertisers tend to go where potential customers are. If STEEM can on-board a critical mass of users, business will want to work out how to get a presence of Steemit (or any other social app serviced by STEEM). Just like they have presences on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc, if it meets their demographic. The beauty of STEEM/ Steemit is users have purchasing power right there on the platform, this will be very attractive to businesses.
I agree that improving the foundations and aiding the connection between consumers and producers will help, but far more important is marketing.
The key messages about STEEM/ Steemit are simple and need to be front and centre... 'Get involved and have fun in this social network and earn rewards... The more of a stake you have, the more you influence have over how rewards are allocated.' Etc..
The mechanics about how STEEM's foundations can be improved need to be more 'back office'. It's like advertising the inner workings of a combustion engine, when most people are just interested in driving the car.
Hopefully communities will help new joiners enjoy the platform by steering them to areas of interest, whilst allowing those inclined to peak 'under-the-hood' of STEEM to do so. However those looking at the engine of 'STEEM train' and thinking 'it could be better' should not lose sight of the fact that most over cryptos are riding around on horseback!
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.