In your opinion, what is the biggest mistake new members make?
giving up so early on

Yeah have to agree on this point, luckily for me, I manage to get some of my real life friends onto Steemit and between the couple of us we try and motivate each other to go on, which does help a bit.

Did you financially invest in the platform, did you work your way up from zero or both?
I started from scratch

I invested into Steemit, but only profits from other crypto I had already. I decided a while back to take small amounts each month and invest in crypto and grow where I can. Almost like giving myself a crypto allowance, if I can call it that. I have never went as far as investing huge amounts of money yet. I did however had some luck and made a fair amount of profits with the little I invested so far.