We on Steem don't offer luxury services or products such as... lambos.
If you make lambos, you're ok to sell a limited amount, because they are so price exclusive.
But Steem, while not free, it's freemium, which is not an exclusive club, not even a premium one. And that's not meant as an insult, it's a fact and we need to act accordingly.
We cannot grow if we don't grow our userbase, if we don't attract more people to Steem.
The problem is, how do you attract more people to Steem? Do we invite family and friends? Sure that might work to some extent. Do we advertise? It works under the right conditions and appropriate campaigns, but enough to create a movement? I doubt it.
What we need is to look at it and do it the other way around. Expand Steem outside its natural ecosystem and attract from the places where we expand to.
This expansion has started already if you haven't looked at it this way before.
Let's look at the big things first.
Steempress goes deep into the blogosphere, allowing Wordpress bloggers to post their blogs on Steem, and now to integrate the other way around, comments and upvotes from Steem on their Wordpress blog, for their readers to see and, if they are or become Steem users, to engage with them and vote on the spot, without needing a separate platform.
Share2Steem facilitates you to share your posts from other social media accounts like Instagram, Twitter, Twitch and Medium on Steem. To share a tweet for example, you need to include the #share2steem hashtag (after you link your Twitter account obviously). Your readers on that particular platform might be curios what that share2steem is, and join Steem once they find out.
SteemHunt wants as a next step to appeal to product makers and interest them in the ReviewHunt module, where they would receive honest and useful feedback for their products from interested hunters. SteemHunt also already struck a deal to list their HUNT token on a Korean exchange, once it is out, which would make it a direct pair for fiat (which STEEM doesn't have yet).
SteemMonsters has great strengths to attract more people. It's gaming, a big, technology savvy niche. It's collectors, another niche. And you can pay with credit card / paypal, which suites very well to many on the internet that are not in the crypto world. All while needing a Steem account to do everything else, which is created within the price of their initial purchase of a starter pack.
Curiously, all start with "S" so far... Here's one that starts with "A".
Actifit moves forward steadily with its activity rewarding apps. Now with the integration of Fitbit wearables in the Android app version, this app opens up to a huge market outside of Steem. And they haven't started marketing outside Steem as far as I know yet.
And that's not all. The deeper we look the more we can see.
SMTs in their full form are on hold, and only a lite version is still scheduled by Steemit Inc. for now, but I've read of at least 3 alternatives that can be used for tokenization purposes on Steem, when they are ready (let's wait for delivery though).
On the micro level, Steem is expanding too. I know of enough incipient e-commerce initiatives that involve STEEM. Some involve fiat too. Right now, from what I can see everything is still in infancy. And the market conditions don't help speed things up, but they are moving. In a way, many small wins are much better than one big win.
And every such initiative involving Steem, especially if it has a built up community already, has a high chance to attract more people to Steem. Advertising by showing use case. Outside Steem.