Currently it’s not practical because of technical reasons (the way seats are allocated to validators leads to very high entry barrier for new validators). You can keep track of progress of extending number of validators: Increase the number of block producers and subsequent NEP.
At the current moment, Grants program and various DAOs is the best way to kick start the project development and marketing. You can receive a reasonable grant in NEAR which will be comparable to rewards from the validator. Ecosystem Treasury will be allocating funds into the DAOs then will be distributing funds to projects.
For example, it make sense to have a Game Dev DAO that supports game developers both in terms of initial funding, marketing programs, initial users onboarding and more.
I also suggest having streaming payments framework attached to a DAO, which would economically have the same effect as having a validators and receiving reward from inflation.