In your comment to @stellabelle you said;

Imagine a steem based yelp, where users get curation-rewards for their comments from a restaurant with enough steem power

That is one of the best ideas I have heard of on Steemit. My sales background coupled with this idea has me thinking of new ways to sell the Steemit platform and recriut new users. I'm going to process this some more and would like to get back with you on this.

I know I can recruit people, but I agree with @steelabelle when she says,

I am glad someone is doing this. On a deeper level, before you address all the work that needs to be done to recruit more people, is the fact that most people who bother to join and write posts end up leaving. This has to be tackled first. If you get a bunch of people recruited, signed up, then most leave, recruitment seems like futile task

We may be jumping the gun in recruiting the masses at this point. They need an easier experience with the UI before we target them in any great numbers or they will leave and it will be more difficult to gain them back or build momentum.

Your idea of an academy for Steemit users along with @sykochica who's project I have contributed to, is something I've been working on as well. I'm polling new users asking them what's their most challenging issues using Steemit. Their answers are suprising. If you're interested you can find them on my profile.

I can make video tutorials that can walk through the process of getting up and running. The one's I have seen can be improved upon. But that's not going to address the issues that inexperienced bloggers are facing. The UI needs to be dumbed down before the masses are going to jump on board.

To someone more tech savvy, writing in markdown, hosting images on another server etc,. is a piece of cake. The larger demographic is not going to stand for it. Forcing it on them before they can easily assimilate it is

Your idea of selling it to restaurants would work, For example,

• a restaurant owner with a marketing budget starts a Steemit account
• redirects their advertising budget to buying steem power
• posts that they except Steem in their restaurant to attract Steemians,
• patrons get Steem for leaving a good comment
• restaurant owner upvotes the customers comment to reward them

I believe we should talk more about the ideas we're having here. Are you on Steemit Chat?