

Ask HN: Question aboout Community Websites Traction - johnfelix

I have a doubt. All the community driven websites would have initially had no content at all. At that time, How did they manage to gain traction, because during the early days there would have been zero or minimum content.What would have been the factors that would have influenced the early stage users to ask question, submit links.<p>Thanks
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ankeshk
Most people over estimate the minimum number of people needed to make a site
look busy. Its around 20-30 [1]. Can you get about 20 zealous people to
participate on your website everyday?

[1] I've moderated private invite only forums with 20 members that generated
12-15 threads everyday! And yes - these threads were busy. 20 people were
easily spending a total of more than 10 hours on the forum everyday.

Action Summary:

\- Find 20 people who like your concept and invite them to participate before
you launch. Make them your beta testers and ask them for their input. Give
them non-monetary rewards (tshirts etc is a good idea). Let these folks
populate your site and make it look busy.

\- Then on launch day, have a strategy in place that does generate 500-1000
visitors per day. Thats probably about $50-100 in ad expense per day if you
don't have a viral aspect to your social website and your users don't drive
traffic.

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tapiwa
This is true. So very true.

Another rookie mistake to avoid, is fragmentation. Say you want to start a
forum on topic X. Just have a forum for X till you gain traction.

A mistake many people make, is to have subforums X1, X2, X3, etc, from the get
go. It makes what little traffic you have seem even less. Start with one
forum, and then fragment according to the dictates of the main forum. In any
case, the sub forums you will end up with will rarely be the same ones you
envisaged before launch.

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cloudwalking
At startup school, Adam D'Angelo (Quora founder) said they spent days at the
beginning asking and answering questions on Quora. Sometimes you have to
jumpstart the community with efforts that don't scale.

It might be interesting to hear how HN started gaining traction. I know the
old YC application asked about your Slashdot profile, so I imagine a group of
people there felt there was a need for new community.

~~~
johnfelix
thanks for mentioning the video...it was very informative

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pankratiev
This question is actual for me. On week ago I've launched community for
programmers which have a new approach to organizing content. It allows users
share their posts using tags. And as you noticed - there is minimum content
for now. So on this early stage people don't understand why my site can be
useful for them. Another problem isthat I am not native speaker, so probably
my explanations can be unclear. Anyway I am working on several articles about
the idea of my site and will submit it on HN, Reddit. Also I am trying to
write posts, submit links, add code snippets on the site. At least - in this
case the site looks like alive and not empty.

So, I can say that everything depends on the community niche, main idea of the
site and what problems of users it can solve. You must have a good
understanding of people who can be interested in your site and have a set of
ideas how you can motivate them to start using your community. Anyway on the
early stage you should at least make the site look alive.

~~~
johnfelix
yea...thats a very good point..

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bignerds
Mixergy has had some good interviews about how sites have built communities
over time. As I recall, the interview with the founder of wallstreetoasis.com
spent a lot of time talking about techniques he used to build his community
from nothing. It might be worth checking out.

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Mz
Some of the (more active/largish) online communities I have participated in
either started as spin-offs of existing communities or started with a website
that provided niche information. In one case, my understanding is that
initially there was no ability to engage in discussion, that was added later
and then the discussion part took over the site and the links section stopped
being maintained.

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supermanwillfly
Building a two-sided market it tricky but early on (as I've read) it takes a
lot of non-scalable seeding. If you read up on Reddit and AirBnb, both
attacked the problem by going out and manually adding content. In Reddit's
case, they were adding the majority of content early on. Re: AirBnB they
travelled and found early adopters.

You have a link I can pass around to send some folks your way to check it out?

