I think to be successful steemit needs to fix the "Content Discovery" problem.
For minnows currently it is either get lucky and get noticed by a whale or invest some money so that you get curation power which will drive people to good posts written by you.
I believe in future of steem and hence invested whatever I could. I will be increasing that over the time. Now that I have invested money, I am planning to invest more time on the platform to make it better.