I have all the plans of somebody with no experience in digital marketing whatsoever.
Before all this kicked off, I mentioned on poa.st that I would guarantee this forum three months of my personal investment. We're now roughly halfway through that period. I need to start thinking hard about ways to make this place self-sustaining. I don't even know if Xenforo has built-in monetization options, but I would never go with anything intrusive anyway, so my options are fairly limited. Who knows, maybe the next thread here will be a 'how to self-fund' thread. Something like Patreon is a potential option, but I'm not sure if they'd demand content restrictions.
But how this ties back into growth and membership is simple; more people join, give more exposure, so more people join. I don't want to be a huge soulless enterprise, but I don't believe in gatekeeping beyond making it absolutely transparent what kind of community we are and telling people that we expect them to assimilate with us instead of the other way around.