

Ask YC: Data building - wonjun

We have recently completed one of the milestones for our web start up, and we are at the stage where we can start entering and building data.<p>Our idea is similar to TripAdvisor or Yelp, and we think we need to have a lot of data before officially launching our site, in order to attract  new users.<p>We were wondering what people usually do in this situation, because manually entering possibly thousands of items (and even fake users) is very time-consuming for two co-founders.<p>Thank you very much, and have a great day, all of you.
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smoody
Have you considered using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service?

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drewp
<http://freebase.com> would probably like to gather and hold your data. They
have a nice GUI for editing it. People are starting to make other sites that
use freebase, e.g. <http://www.dipity.com/>

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mattjung
What about an outsourcing company like <http://www.b2kcorp.com>?

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gexla
For things that need to be manually entered take a look at Odesk and find
someone who will do data entry cheap. I would probably never hire anyone for
anything critical there and I wouldn't post my own services there but data
entry is fine.

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abecciu
What about scrapping data from similar sites?

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wonjun
Thank you all very much.

