The Leo community is in my opinion one of the best expressions of Hive to date, closely followed by 
One of the most visible aspects of both communities is their enhanced "front-ends", and not just websites but mobile apps.
While it is simple enough for an individual to build their own website around Hive as a CMS (see my tutorial series Part 1 Part 2) it is quite a different level of undertaking for something of the scale of these communities, and that requires a different scale of thinking.
In a comment, 
"The community is a tiny niche on a small blockchain, can't justify spending $20K+ on a website under those conditions."
In my day job, I am heavily involved in the WordPress open source community. We see time and again how much of the heavy lifting is done by solo individuals who see a need then proceed to fill it, and at the other end of the scale huge companies invest their own resources because they need a thing.
This seems wonderful until you realize there is a wide gulf between the two of abandoned projects, bug fixes, documentation, and other needs not being met because the people who need the thing don't have the skills and big wallets don't want to invest in the thing.
Perhaps, though, within the Hive community, we have other options?
How can interested parties in the Hive community get something big off the ground without investing fiat dollars, or getting the Hive funding through the proposal process?
I am writing this as a challenge to the community to come up with ideas, so please add your thoughts in the comments - but it would be wrong of me to start this conversation without offering some ideas of my own.
Delegation as Salary
The main problem with fiat, or payment in Hive, from the investor point of view is that money, or those tokens, leave your wallet and go into the other person's wallet. That would be "buying" a thing, which is fair but goes back to the status quo where things are not being funded.
A step away from "paying Hive" is to delegate during the period of the work. When the delegation is over, the work finishes and vice versa.
While the person giving the delegation has an opportunity cost, they don't get the benefit of those HP doing their work, it's a lever that can be pulled in both directions.
This is, in fact, something that already happens, which is why I listed it first.
Tokenomics
Several projects have been proposed where anyone who invests then gets a percentage of the rewards proportionate to their investment.
Like the delegation, this investment can be revoked, but unlike delegation, there is some speculative risk/reward.
For one scenario, imagine a project DAO where a movie, music album, book, game, or whatever is crowd-funded. Anyone with a holding of the coin, NFT, whatever is eligible for rewards. You can keep holding or you can sell all or a portion at the new price.
This is a bit more clear-cut where something creative would be made and then sold, either one-off launch or ongoing. A little less clear when it is what sparked this idea in the first place, building a community technology foundation, but I still think it applies.
STEMGeeks has a token called STEM. If the STEM community grows, that token will rise in value. Perhaps people who work in the community can be paid in STEM coins, knowing that the value is worth $0.N but the work might raise the value to $N. Today the only thing that is rewarded is content, but proof of brain doesn't necessarily have to only apply to writers.
Beneficiaries
A community such as Leo, Ecency, STEMGeeks, have people posting through their front-end. Today I am posting through Leo and I might post via Ecency. When STEMGeeks gets Hive Keychain integration I will likely post there too.
When you post you have the option of setting a beneficiary instead of or shared with yourself. Communities with a front-end can force you to share some of your rewards with the community.
One of the uses of this feature can be funding new developments on behalf of the community. Clearly, the easiest implementation would be the beneficiary be a "community fund" but with a more bespoke front end, you could have a round-robin of beneficiaries (agreed on in advance of course) who would then benefit from the community generating rewards.
Not all posts will generate significant rewards, obviously, but as well as being a form of payment, the community might be more invested in generating engagement too.