Ask HN: Generating content and Bringing Users to website

[Veera]

When you build a website (for example, a site to connect sellers with buyers) which mostly relies on user generated content, how do you tackle with the below situation?

"User will not be coming to your site when there's less/no content. But, Content will not be generated when there's less/no user."

What would be the approaches to grow content/user base?

[jaddison]

If the content/information exists elsewhere but just needs aggregation, you need to massage/import in order for it to be useful to you future users - so take the plunge and import it so that users will find your service useful, even if this costs you some money up front!

If it's a matter of requiring users to generate your content for your site (like www.reddit.com), then definitely as other users have said... fake it.

[jonafato]

This kind of questions gets asked a lot here. The common response is "Fake it." Follow reddit's lead and generate content yourself until others catch on. You also might try mechanical turk, though I have no experience with this myself. Also, post a link. You'll get better advice if you supply more detail about your site or the actual site to look at.

[Veera]

The live site is not ready yet. Since, the problem seems to be more generic, I posted the question here.

If the same topic had been discussed in old threads, can you please share the link? I would be interested to read that discussion too!

[imkevingao]

Sign a few sellers, and give really good offers for them to use your site. Then help those sellers advertise. Do it again. & Again

Keep building the snowball until it's big. It's not easy, but that's one possible one. It should much much easier nowadays with all the social networks, but nothing is easy. Just a lot of hard work and convincing.

[anujkk]

I asked a similar question on LinkedIn few months back and got some good replies. Here is the link to that discussion -

http://www.linkedin.com/answers/startups-small-businesses/st....

I think it may help you.

[Mz]

I recently gathered a few links, mostly to previous discussions on the topic, in a post here that you might find helpful:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2126209

I actually have a track record of promoting conversation traction in online forums. But I don't know how those principles would be applied to the kind of site you are asking about. I am interested in getting a better understanding of such things in part because while I seem perfectly capable of increasing traffic (and thus membership) on someone else's discussion board where there is already a certain number of members (but discussion is anemic), my own email lists and websites lack traffic (and members). :-/