
Ask HN: Chicken and Egg Problem - navdeep
Hi,<p>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.<p>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>

