
Ask PG: How would you have started Reddit/HN without your existing audience? - staunch
Both Reddit and HN were seeded by people who read your essays (I was there for both).<p>How would you have advised "The Muffins" to overcome the chicken and egg problem without the assistance of your audience and YC's press attention?<p>I know they simulated user activity using fake accounts to overcome the "ghost town" effect. How could they have attracted the first critical few thousand users without leveraging an existing audience?<p>From your office hours talk I suspect you may suggest finding an especially enthusiastic niche audience at first. Certainly Reddit was all startup/hackers.<p>The problem is: how do you actually go about getting that targeted audience on the site in big enough numbers to jump-start the virtuous cycle?<p>(I'm <i>really</i> curious to hear PG's answer, but also love input from others as well.)
======
patio11
_How could they have attracted the first critical few thousand users without
leveraging an existing audience?_

Borrow someone else's existing audience.

There are a couple ways to do this. The most straightforward is literally
asking them for it. Somewhat surprisingly, people do say "yes" to this. (Joel
Spolsky had a subreddit back in the early days, to share links with his fans.
</trivia>)

There are various flavors of this in many services. Lady Gaga says all good
little monsters follow her on Twitter, etc.

There are, of course, less savory options. The go-to option for many people is
spamming Craigslist.

~~~
petewailes
This.

When you get right down to it, all marketing is finding an audience that
someone else has, and borrowing it. If I'm buying AdWords ads, it's Google's
audience, if I'm getting press in the NYT, it's theirs, if I'm putting up
billboards in the middle of London, it's the M4's traffic into the city.

The key is threefold: 1. audience interest & profile compatibility, 2. clear
conversion points, and 3. a UVP.

Breaking those down:

1\. What you're pushing out, and the interests of the audience, have to be
aligned. So if you're launching a new HN-style area, you need to know who your
audience are (probably dissatisfied HN-ers, some people from Reddit,
programmers etc), and identify where those people are (HN, GitHub, Engadget,
Bit-tech, Twitter...) and how you can reach them (ad platforms, publicity on
blogs that they read, referrals, recommendations from trusted sources).

Understanding your users is key, both in being able to find them, and being
able to serve them when they reach you.

2\. Know what your points of conversion are. Is it getting someone on to the
site? Is it having them sign up for something? Registering an account?
Downloading something? Leaving comments? Starting threads? All these things
are valid conversions, but it's important to know which ones you want to look
at, and which ones are just going to be distractions.

Also, what are you going to do with this data? How about setting up a notifier
for your first 250 users, when you reach that point, so you can email them all
in person and thank them for coming along? Think about what you want to do
with the data you collect, before you collect it. Data without purpose is just
time invested for no gain.

3\. What's your UVP (Unique Value Proposition)? Why should people come to you
instead of wherever else is available? Audience quality? Signal to Noise
ratio? Curation of content? Design? Features? What's the benefit that you
offer over someone else?

If you can't convey this clearly, you're going to have problems. It's rare to
get something like Twitter's early days where downtime and a confusing message
is overcome by audience enthusiasm and the community doing your messaging for
you. Ensure that you know what you want to tell people, and how you're going
to do it.

Hope this helps.

~~~
ra
That's a great contribution and really worthy of a blog post in it's own
right.

But what's with the first (single word) paragraph? It seemed to me as
particularly arrogant... really threw me off. I'm sure I misunderstood you
intention, but it almost prevented me from reading the rest of what you had to
say.

But I'm glad I got past that.

~~~
danparsonson
"This" as the start of a reply is shorthand for "the comment I'm replying to
makes a very good point that I agree with entirely" (and usually "and here's
my take on what (s)he wrote"), rather than "what you are about to read is the
answer you are looking for".

~~~
ninjaa
"This." is shorthand for "This is how:"

------
ThomPete
I am well on my way to 5000 members on <http://www.weekendhacker.net>

I started by posting it here, forrst, startupguild and HN FaceBook group then
I got picked up by a couple of other places and used that to then ask yet
other places to have a look.

People have so far been very positive and that have helped me gain even more
traction. It also help that I have actually connected all projects in need of
help with someone who have offered to help.

Next step is to write about all the things I have learned from it. I am
working on the website (got people to help me there in the spirit of WH)

What I have learned is 3 things.

1\. Create as little friction for sign-up as possible. Be concise. Be
personal. Be honest. The majority of my signups read the FAQ.

2\. Think about social very broadly. For instance with WH I am sending out a
mail with the projects structured, curated etc. Instead of people having to go
to the website all the time, they receive a mail with the projects. So right
now I am not depending on traffic. I am depending on making sure that everyone
who have a project get offered help. (100% success rate so far). If it works
by mail it will work by other means too.

3\. Create boundaries for what your site is about. WeekendHacker is for very
small projects. It might expand later on but now we are keeping it simple and
exploring how far that will take us.

Hope this helps. I will make a bigger post about it all and then numbers next
week.

~~~
markzzz
How exactly did you learn any of that? Random guesses? Maybe the thing you
should have learned here is to put the FAQ on the same page?

Simply because it is a mailing list at the moment and still chugging along
doesn't mean this is superior. You basically created something naturally
suited to being a website, but forced it into into mailing list form.

As for 'not having to go to the site all the time', there is an established
solution for this. RSS.

~~~
ThomPete
Maybe I have experience, maybe I track things, maybe Email is more popular
than rss. But why the attitude?

------
pg
I probably would have suggested that they get all the other startups in their
batch + a few friends each + more than a few of the Reddits' friends. 20 + 40
+ 30 = 90, which probably would have been enough.

------
markkat
I strongly believe it's a matter of what you offer. You can tell everyone
about your site, but if something of quality isn't there, people have no
reason to stay. There are plenty of options.

My community site (hubski.com) is starting to get some energy after a few
months. Personally, I believe it's because my view of the site has changed a
bit. A bit of digression...: I started the site to teach myself programming. I
grabbed the HN code, figured it out, and began to change it. I was an early
Redditor, have been on HN some time, and I had a number of ideas I wanted to
try. Slowly but surely, I began to build something I personally wanted to
exist. I now know exactly where I am going. As for a seed community, I was
very lucky to have some friends interested in giving feedback and to mess with
it. Some were Redditors too. My wife is a loyal active member as well.

I only have a few months of experience, but IMO best way to build community is
to engage and importantly, enjoy the site. Take the time to post the kind of
things that you really want to see (not just filler content), and definitely
take the time to get to know users. I am glad I did, because I've met some
very cool people in the effort. You can't fake community. Don't waste your
time trying. People can see through it. It's like a restaurant. If the food is
good, people will come back.

I don't know what our trajectory will be, but I don't expect a steep climb.
Actually, if you want a steep climb, you are in the wrong space, as a steep
climb is antithetical to a quality community. At least the type I am
interested in. If you are going to build a community, enjoy the process. -If
you don't, you probably won't succeed.

------
antirez
To start something like HN or Reddit without an existing audience is simple,
since this is the kind of service that you can start enjoying even with 10
selected users.

So if you are an hacker, just invite a few of your friends and start sharing
links, and the community will start growing...

Soon or later I want to create some kind of no profit organization to create
something very similar to HN but with a more open model (not YC focused and so
forth) and with more features that can be interesting to experiment with. For
now I don't have time for family and work issues, but hope to find some time
in the next months.

------
defrost
A lot of the jump starting on Reddit came from irc.freenode.org via word of
mouth about a new aggregate voting site that needed stress testing, while it
was certainly a predominately hacker crowd it wasn't overly dominated by
people that read PG essays, I myself wasn't that aware of the PG connection
until several months later.

petewailes made some interesting comments, in my humble opinion reddit was
likely helped along more by leveraging an existing community that already
communicated well than it was by PG essays - although all things helped and
I'm sure the essays played their part as well.

------
andresmh
Another option, albeit expensive and time consuming, is to start snowballing
by reaching out to users in person. For example, we ran many in-person
programming workshops for kids using scratch.mit.edu and now we have more than
800,000 users.

------
tokenadult
_I'm really curious to hear PG's answer, but also love input from others as
well._

Thanks for emboldening my reply. I am not at all in pg's league as an
influencer of online communities, but I've had a personal website with
information and a point of view since 1995, and have been very active in
online communities since before most members of the general public had ever
heard of the Internet. (I started out on commercial online services.) Any
online community allows an opportunity for a member to become conspicuous by
contributing good content. Quite a few online communities are organized around
an initial common interest everyone has (e.g., homeschooling or education
reform or gifted education in the communities I'm most active in) and every
community broadens its topic scope over time as people form friendships and
share other interests.

Were I to set up a social news forum (presumably as a subpart of my personal
website, to which I have devoted very little maintenance attention for years),
I would announce that first to my 566 Facebook friends, most of whom I have
met in online communities. (Many of them I have since "face met" at
conferences around the country about the issues we all care about.) Many of
them would be good moderators of a forum, and would be happy to help in return
for finding new, good content and sharing that with a broader community of
readers. I'll have to try the experiment, as soon as my busy technical adviser
(my oldest son) squeezes some time together to upgrade my website.

P.S. Is there already a good site of this nature for news and discussion about
education policy, or will I have to build my own? There is no sense in
reinventing that wheel if a good wheel is already available.

------
marojejian
What we are asking here is a subset of the question "how to I advertise?,"
with the condition that we don't have existing users to use as an asset.

Seems to me there are two different issues to deal with:

1) How minimise the negative consequences of not having users ("ghost town
effect").

\- One option is to structure the product so that the number of users is not
obvious. Since at this point there is little value to showing all the users of
the system at once, or highlighting aggregate activity, perhaps it's fine to
not include these features, or at least not make them prominent. So a UI like
StumbleUpon might fare better than one like Digg, where the aggregate activity
is shown prominently.

\- Or, pick another MVP with lower critical mass, and then build the community
later. Delicious was great because it was useful if only you are using it, but
better with others. (though still no where as good as it could be.... Chad, i
wish you luck!).

2) what assets can we use (or create) to acquire users efficiently?

Zince we don't have users to work on word of mouth, you have to have something
else. Some options:

\- A unique value proposition that will excite someone with influence to give
you access to their audience. \- a unique product structure \- a quid pro quo
for the influencer

\- A "story" that will entice a blogger to want to talk about you. \- make it
controversial (e.g. blippy ) \- make it human interest ( e.g. man sells spot
on iPad line using AirBnB).

\- A unique marketing opportunity \- the greatest ever was when Facebook
opened up their platform to intense viral (spammy) promotion. \- You may not
find a gold vein that rich... but there are always more opening up. Perhaps
you were early to find a burgeoning high quality community, and built a
persona there with influence.... \- find a news story and attach yourself to
it. (reputation.com connected with people who had some crazy bad google
results, to the degree they could get into the news. )

\- An asset you have already. OK, you're probably not PG if you are reading
this, but maybe you: \- Know a lot of people in area X (which is why that is
where you should focus your community). \- Have a good story to tell, and can
link it to your product \- Know ONE person who has enough influence to help
you if your pitch is good. As a VC I felt like this was a role central to the
job, whether I planned to invest or not... everyone loves to help someone that
they think should and will succeed.

------
davidw
That 'niche strategy' sounds exactly like the advice from "Crossing the
Chasm", by the way.

~~~
090178
>

Which plateform and theme would HN members recommend for creating a Hackernews
like on a nice subject ?

Pligg ? <http://www.pligg.com>

Anymore suggestions ?

~~~
bhousel
Arc: <http://arclanguage.org/install>

~~~
markkat
This. Or the Reddit source: <https://github.com/reddit/>

------
iamelgringo
Having tried and failed two social news sites, and seeing tons of people try
social related startups via H&F, I think I have a little to add. I wrote my
own niche social news sites (on Django), and they both failed to get initial
audiences.

Cuuute.com was going to be a social news site for cute shit (cat, dog
pictures, etc...). It failed because I created a text based social news site
rather than a image based one, and because after working on it for 4 months, I
couldn't look at a kitten picture without wanting to vomit.

Newsley.com was my second attempt. It started out as a social news site for
financial news. I worked hard at getting an initial audience for about 6
months. Finance types generally didn't want to talk about financial news, they
want the news that's important to them, and they want it now. So, I pivoted to
turn Newsley into a financial news search engine. That was going really well.
Traffic was (and still) doubles every 6 weeks even though it's crap, alpha and
buggy as hell.

<aside>Hackers & Founders started exploding this winter, and we had to choose
either Newsley or H&F. Having a chance to hack Silicon Valley is a bit too
enticing to pass up, so we're focusing on H&F right now. You'll hear from us
soon.</aside>

The large social news sites, Digg, Reddit, HN have all had large geek
audiences at inception. Digg had Kevin Rose's following from TechTV. Reddit
and HN got a _huge boost from the people that read pg's writing.

The only other social news site that I'm aware of that's gotten anything close
to successful has been Tipd.com. That was started by Digg power user refugees,
and focused on a highly monetizeable audience.

Normals don't get social news. They don't get the concept of voting, checking
back on a regular basis, and contributing to the conversation. If you're
approaching a non-geek niche (like I did for both my social news sites),
you're facing an uphill battle. That may change in a year or two as Reddit
grows, but Reddit's a juggernaught right now, and it's done a great job of
sub-reddit communities.

I firmly believe that starting (like I did) with a social news technology, is
the wrong approach. I took a technology and tried to jump start a community
around that technology. What I should have done is to create a community and
then create technology to support and scale that community.

Adam Rifkin is doing that at 106miles.net for the 106 miles meetup. I'd put a
lot of money on him succeeding. Adam has been building the 106 miles community
for 6 years and recently opened it up to the public the last 18 months. His
team only recently started writing code to support online conversations for
that community. Their approach is to build online tools that help their
physical community continue interacting.

Start with the community first, and build the technology to support it.

