

Ask HN: How to beat the chicken egg situation with user-content driven website? - dzlobin

We’re working on capitalizing on craigslist’s weaknesses, and while we have a good grasp on what we’re doing; we aren’t sure how to attract users to a fresh classifieds website. Users tend to leave when they see a website without much there, and obviously new ads won’t list themselves. How can we go about creating real incentive for sticking around when there are still not many listings?
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gkoberger
You won't make any friends at craigslist (in fact, they'll probably block
you), however you could try "importing" craigslist ads (of course, credit and
link properly). I don't know if I'd suggest it, but it's a route you could
consider. The founder of Lyrics Wiki ( <http://lyrics.wikia.com/> ) indexed
other lyrics sites, and eventually was bought by Wikia.

Also, look at a few of the paid craigslist alternatives- they might be willing
to give you listings if you send traffic their way.

I asked this same question to Jimmy Whales a few months ago. Wikipedia started
as a paid service, where professionals were paid for their work. It never got
big, so they changed their business model. For them, the already-made articles
were enough of a jumping point.

Side note: craigslist already has many, many more-featured competitors. Do you
have a theory as to why craigslist is still the most popular software? Make
sure you do before you bother creating a craigslist competitor.

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dzlobin
thanks for the input! I think we wouldn't want to link to craigslist ads, or
any other craigslist-esque websites, because we are trying to fundamentally
change the way ads are served; rather than aggregate more listings.

This is why we're not too worried about the (mostly really bad) more-featured
craigslist-clones because we're not in it to tack-on extra unnecessary
features.

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mrphoebs
You need to seed content first. That's how reddit got started with the
founders submitting stories under different user-names. Take offline ads(news
papers) and list them online (throw in some OCR software like ABBY to scale
it). It should get you started.

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mrduncan
It might not be helpful advice in your specific case (or that of craigslist
type sites), but make it useful even if there aren't any other users. If I
remember correctly this is the advice I've always seen from the Reddits on how
to solve the problem.

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imok20
The trouble with that is that the sole purpose of our product is to facilitate
connections between people selling or offering goods and services. Without
people and the stuff they want to sell, we've got nothing.

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minalecs
you can pay users, or offer incentives give aways or prizes. If they like the
site, they will stick around.

