I'd like to chime in and add that the curangel announcement reached 3rd trending before it was featured by steemit solely through organic votes. By coincidence I added one with ~380k stake that was delegated to the project right after that (I didn't expect it to return to me in that moment, perfect timing), but I doubt it would've been necessary for that to happen. If you have some followers and a post that people really see as valuable, there is no need for promotion at all.

Thanks for your tireless engagement smooth!