[wuliwong]

One story I've heard is from Alexis Ohanian one of the founderes of reddit.com. He said that in the beginning they created multiple accounts and posted lots of content themselves. So basically, they faked it for a while. :)

I believe the story with Yelp is that they paid people to write reviews in the beginning.

I definitely feel you, I have had similar struggles. I made a site that had some limited traction, mostly my friends used it. I think if your close friends are actually in the demographic you are looking for, then that is a great place to start.

Something else I try to consider is to make a site that strives to serve millions of users but can be useful to far less. I've been working on a locally focused, social network and I am creating it in a way that even if 10 people are using it, as long as they goto the same places, it should be useful. 10 people in the same area would be worth 1000 people strewn across the globe in my case.

But I do believe that it is a problem that has a solution which differs greatly from case to case. It's certainly a chance to show your creativity and hustle, I suppose. :)

[epsylon]

Steve Huffman talks about this in his Udacity course on web development: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmeDzx4SUME

(The whole unit 7 talks a lot about how they built Reddit.)