Ask HN: Chicken and Egg Problem

[navdeep]

Hi,

Need some ideas on solving the chicken and egg problem. How can you get enough traffic towards a community based website. Any examples as to how startups are dealing with this situation today will be very helpful.

Thanks

[antidaily]

Tough one... I know that Reddit faked all their submissions (eg submitted their own links) early on. Helped them get going.

[navdeep]

Is it legal to fake users?

[stc]

All is fair in love and internet

[messel]

Howdy. I wrote down a few ideas about this topic this morning. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2382448

You're going to have to identify the influencers/experts in the community you wish to serve, and then come up with a compelling reason for them to contribute.

[navdeep]

Great Tips. Do you have any suggestion on mixing Social Networks with the power of viral Marketing to bring ample traffic to the site for conversions.

[keiferski]

I posted this awhile ago on a similar Ask HN. It's probably not relevant if your site is really community-driven, but it might be worth thinking about.

---

Reframe your site so that you don't rely on the community to power it -- make it so each user can use the product to its fullest extent without a single other user.

We had this same problem during the early planning process for our (currently just my) startup. Ultimately we realized that we were looking at the problem the wrong way. Instead of making the tool community-powered, we made it individual-user-powered. This lets us be "successful" with far, far less users.

[navdeep]

Well my site will be solely driven by users interacting with other users. I was wondering if the Hacker News community can provide some valuable insight into a viral marketing strategy to focus on niches and then expand.

[triviatise]

For any burgeoning community, the hard part is to get people to come back. Apps like vbulletin are great when you already have people, but seeding them is hard. If you can create a mailing list which automatically posts to the messageboard and all messageboard posts go to the mailing list you will have a good start as it will be much easier for a small number of people to engage. As the volume picks up, people will digest or go to the site directly to read.

[rosenjon]

One of the first projects I ever built for myself was a wiki website for the Motorola RAZR v3m cellphone. This particular version of the phone was sold by Verizon, and had been locked down at the firmware level to prevent the addition of third party applications that could run on other, unlocked version of the RAZR.

There were many customers who were unhappy about these restrictions, and lots of talk on various forums about how much it sucked that Verizon locked down the phone. There were also other forums where people shared their knowledge on how to unlock the phone using various software applications and a < $10 cable you could buy online.

However, most of the talk about this subject was spread across a variety of forums, and not well organized. There were golden nuggets of info spread amongst posts about how various techniques didn't work or how the user couldn't figure out how to complete the process. The bottom line was that it would typically take a new user hours just to compile the information they needed to successfully unlock their phones.

So I decided to build a wiki website to aggregate all this data. I put up an instance of my favorite wiki variety, and added a couple placeholder pages. I then added one page that described all the steps in detail to unlock the phone, from my own experience. This wiki page could then be changed to incorporate other people's experiences and tips.

I went to all of the forums where I had learned this info in the first place, and pasted links to my wiki, saying that we should collaborate and create an easy to follow set of instructions all in one place. The community thought this was a good idea, and effectively built the site for me.

Within 3 months, the site had gone from being nothing, to having 4000+ registered users and sometimes getting 50k+ hits per day. I ended up having to move the site from Bluehost to a VPS because my BH account kept getting turned off due to excessive traffic and CPU load.

The reason I tell this story is that I think it's really valuable to target a community that has a specific pain point, and then go where that community hangs out on the Internet. While social networks will work, it may be even better to go to a place where you can dialog a bit more with users (i.e. a niche forum), and tell them why your solution is better than what they are using now. Of course, it actually has to be better than what they are using now. But if it is, you should be rewarded with adoption. This method also happens to be free in most cases.

[navdeep]

Very Valuable advice. Thanks

[wordchute]

I think my site works well for individual users, but would work even better within a community of users. My problem seems to be in making it clear what the benefits of the site are compared to similar sites out there. I get quite a bit of traffic so I guess I have a good starting point, but now I need to convert that into registered users.

From what I am reading, that has been the big hurdle for just about every startup out there. To your point, antidaily, having more users, real or otherwise, does seem to have a snowball effect in terms of traffic and users. It would be nice if all of my users were the real sort with their own ideas and content.

[triviatise]

What kind of conversion rates are you getting? What do they get for registering?

Could you post a link?

[wordchute]

The conversion rate is embarrassingly low right now, but to be fair its only been live for a few weeks so maybe I'm just being impatient. I don't think so though, or at least I don't think its ever too early to start tackling the problem.

Anyway, as far as the single user is concerned, it is a free feed management site - maybe a bit unexciting, but I think the features are an improvement some of the other options out there. Where it gets cool though, and this goes back to what I was saying about the social-networking aspect, is how users can share and redistribute content. This is the exciting stuff that seems hard to convey to my visitors in the few seconds they're engaging. I know how impatient or hurried I can be while browsing, so I am not entirely surprised by the problem.

I've place a link below if you are still intersted in having a look.

[wordchute]

http://www.wordchute.com