

Ask HN: How do you overcome the chicken and egg problem? - jwwest

You're building a community driven site that relies on member generated content. Potential users don't want to participate unless there's content. What do you do?
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veb
Make 20 different user accounts. Create 20 different pieces of content, from
20 different people. Rinse and repeat.

To a new user, it'll look like there's some serious activity, and they'll join
in.

I believe this is what Quora did.

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rcavezza
I would create two separate services for each side - services that doesn't
require the "egg" or "chicken".

Once you hit critical mass, you can start integrating the futures.

Let's say you want to create a "find a cofounder website".

=====Very Specific Example Here =====

For tech entrepreneurs, you might create a tool that helps with adwords or
business development. Maybe a directory of similar startups in their niche &
pre-typed business development sample emails.

For business entrepreneurs, maybe create a lean website testing quick app that
will test if their idea is viable. Idk, fake pricing page, fake screenshot,
and they'd put in their prices, features, and sales copy.

Maybe you can go even simpler and create one of those dumb quiz sites: Are you
a tech cofounder or a business cofounder quizzes - make it funny and you can
get email addresses on both sides of the coin. Just getting the email
addresses alone can potentially help solve the problem.

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keiferski
This isn't the answer you're looking for, but I'll give it anyway:

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.

Obviously this probably won't work for your site, but maybe it's just a useful
thought exercise.

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asanwal
In general, you to have seed one side.

Would also recommend checking out this HBR paper - Strategies for Two-Sided
Markets. It's talk of the "money side" and "subsidy side" is quite good.

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antidaily
The Reddit guys faked submissions for months until the site caught on.

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solipsist
As other people have already posted, the founders of Quora and Reddit have
admitted to generating "fake" content on their own to attract users to the
site. Reddit supposedly did this for the first few weeks until it got going. I
also remember reading that Quora put in a lot of hours generating the "fake"
content, but it has seemed to pay off quite well.

When looking at your community, find ways that you and your friends/cofounders
can easily generate lots of hiqh-quality content. It's important to set the
tone of the site when you're generating the content. If you make lots of spam
or low-quality content due to time constraints, the site will get a poor
reputation and new users will continue the trend of making bad content. So
make sure you generate the content wisely from the beginning :)

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Swannie
Find another source of this same content.

Based on the licensing of it either: use it directly, quote and reference to
it, approach the best contributors and offer to pay peanuts for their content,
approach the site and pay for a bulk license.

Or just outright steal it and deal with the repercussions later :-O (It
worked, albeit indirectly, for YouTube etc.)

Or if you wish to go the normal route, add an incentive. Free "pro" accounts
to the top contributors, ad-revenue share (with a minimum payout set to
something sensible, like affiliate programs, so you only deal with the best
contributors). Or something as simple as a points system (works well at
somewhere like HN & StackOverflow).

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jonafato
Depending on the type of content you need, you could try leveraging Mechanical
Turk. Or, as others have said, fake it. Also, posting a link here couldn't
hurt (providing it is live).

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kongqiu
I'm tackling this problem at my startup, ParkGrades.com, by: 1\. Seeding the
site with as much quality information as I possibly can (given my limited
resources); 2\. Incenting users to add content through giveaways; 3\. Testing
the giveaways to see which incentives work best.

Once a given area/topic has a certain amount of information, it's then much
easier to promote that area/topic with additional marketing and incentives.

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derrida
Have a conversation with yourself and 100's of usernames. Worked for me first
time I made a forum in the late 90's Within a couple of weeks the site
membership was exponentially increasing and out of control.

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catshirt
am i the only one who cringes at the thought of faking users?

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Mz
Do you have a specific situation you are considering? If so, may I ask what
kind of content it involves?

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catshirt
regardless of the content, it _feels_ like cheating. for whatever that's
worth. "cringe" was admittedly an exaggeration.

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Mz
No, I agree with you. Just wondering if I might be able to help you overcome
an issue. If there's no issue you are working on, no big. We are in agreement.

~~~
derrida
How do we know hacker news isn't faking all this? Am I speaking to myself?

~~~
Mz
Don't be silly. I am the one speaking to myself. Really, extremely advanced
case of multiple personality disorder.

(Please lead me not into humor temptation. Jokes of this sort are discouraged
here and I hate when my other selves downvote me.)

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Mz
I think that depends in part on what type of content you are aiming for.

I did gather a few links to previous discussions on this topic (and a couple
of related articles) here:

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

