There are a lot of things but more users will be the only guarantee for success. The main problem is the same that it has always been. HIVE is not user friendly. Most people will give up long before they get to the level that they can see success on the chain.

Marketing is important but needs to be targeted at developers or for parts of the hive eco-system that can bring new users in and hold them. LEO, splinterlands ect.

For this to work we need better tools to make it a simpler experience to get involved on the chain. Over time they can dive deeper but to start they need an app to join, be noticed and get some tokens.

I think that tribes would be a key part of this if developed to the right level. The ability for any existing and knowledgeable user to create, modify and moderate a tokenized tribe would be great to bring in more users. If every current community on hive could do this for a couple of hundred HBD and then market that tribe to outside people and have an economy tied to hive you could see our userbase expand massively in a short period.

It would definitely take light accounts with twitter, facebook, google sign-up.
Ad revenue to fund the token.
Evergreen content would be a huge bonus, a way to reward infinitely.
A way to buy/sell to fiat maybe with a digital debit card.

The closer that you could get them to web2 sites the better, just tokenized and immutable.

From a developer side, having tools to build or run an app on hive simply and cost effectively would be the selling point. Fast, free transactions are the key with an existing community to jump into any new project being a huge bonus. What ever tools they need to get started should be ready and waiting to be integrated so that they can standardize the build and cut out a lot of the heavy work where they need to build from scratch.

They should be able to start designing an app while having lite accounts ready to plug in, different log-in methods ready to plug in, a hive based wallet and token ready to plug in. Have the building blocks at their disposal so that everybody doesn't have to waste time and money building the same things over and over again. Speed it up and reduce the costs by having the code ready for new apps to run with.