This litterally needs one whale dedicated to upvoting people bringing new users in. It is probably worth trying some sort of trial for a month, but it will be very difficult to get many people using it, let alone get new recruits. I guess if you publicise this long enough and to the right people you can have a launch recruitment week where everyone starts recruiting together at the same time. thisway you may not have an immediate results, but will be able to build up to the big even on steemit. if that is successful, I am sure it will get significant traction then, and maybe even a modification built into the steemit interface in some way.

At the moment all i do is tell people i speak to that I will upvote them if they join and mention my name in their intro blog...