
I built it but they wouldn't come! - hashbucket
I wrote a "social" site but I'm having a hard time attracting users. What your experiences with promoting your site? Have you successfully started a forum before, and if so, how?
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hooande
I have been owned a social site that started from zero and grew to hundreds of
thousands of users. Here is the brief rundown of how it happened:

~ 3 months in: We used some "unconventional methods" (that I won't mention in
detail) to attract a few initial users.

~ 7 months in: We had a breakthrough with google (we still aren't sure exactly
what it was) and we started to get a ton of search traffic

~ 10 months in: from here, traffic was all from word of mouth and referrals.
This was by far the major segment. The first two combined up to maybe 40,000
users...everything from there to 300,000 was primarily driven by word of mouth

After that we had some deals, etc, but most of it was just surviving until
things picked up on their own.

I can tell you that we tried anything and everything to get even a little bit
of attention in those days. I can't point back to one thing and say "that's
what really got it started"...I think it was just a combination of keeping
ourselves out there until we were in the right place at the right time.

And now I have to do it all again.

~~~
shiranaihito
> We used some "unconventional methods" (that I won't mention in detail) to
> attract a few initial users.

That sounds like you used some "morally questionable" methods.. ?

Maybe you'd care to elaborate?

~~~
hooande
I don't want to go into details, but I'll say what we didn't do. We didn't
spam and we didn't do anything that we wouldn't want done to ourselves. We
just got creative with advertising.

I agree with zkinion, many startups use "legal spam". Our site was around
before MySpace became the social networking behemoth that it is today. They
used to make fake accounts on our site all the time. And we would do it back
to them.

You don't read about it much in the stories in Founders at Work, but from what
I've seen a lot of very successful sites did whatever they had to do to win.
If your product is truly disruptive you shouldn't have to do much at all to
advertise it. But there are a lot of social sites out there, and a lot of them
play dirty.

~~~
Mistone
"If your product is truly disruptive you shouldn't have to do much at all to
advertise it" - this is a the exception - in almost all case you have to so a
lot to get the word out - it does not have to be traditional advertising but
reaching your audience requires continues effort.

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oldgregg
Getting to critical mass is _the_ issue with social sites, so you probably
should have thought about it before you built your field of dreams. Three
basic ways:

The honest way: Find a way to deliver value to the user that doesn't require
them recruiting everyone they know before they are able to benefit from the
site. WHY ARE YOU UNIQUE? Start small and think about each individuals
experience vs. big numbers.

The usual way: Seed the site with fake profiles and activity then spam the
hell out it. Can be effective as long as you are offering something unique.
(not Tagworld)

The probable way: Fail like 99% of the social sites out there. Path of least
resistance baby.

~~~
gaika
You should change it to "honest and the most painful" way. I'm going through
it right now, would not recommend it to anybody looking for a quick return.

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sanswork
In the social sites I've worked on the first core group of users were always
friends/associates of the creator. Get your friends(like 50+) using it to give
you a base of people then start trying to attract the unknowns.

~~~
SwellJoe
"Get your friends(like 50+) using it..."

I see what you did there. Nerds don't have 50 friends.

~~~
sc
Is commentary like this really necessary? Can't we save these for Reddit?

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SwellJoe
My most humble apologies, sc. Thanks to your patient guidance I now understand
that business is serious business and should be taken seriously.

~~~
sc
I understand, you mean "lighten up." I come here more for the information and
insight than the humor, and a lot of that information lives in the comments.
We already have Reddit for fluff and everything else, so why clone that here?

I just think sarcasm (like your comment here) and certain strains of humor
(the replicating meme, for example) are counterproductive, though I don't by
any means wish to discourage original/well-thought-out humor.

~~~
SwellJoe
Ah, yes, it's good to keep things very concise, and only comment when it adds
something of value to the thread. One wouldn't want to muck it up with
sarcasm, tired old nerd humor, or pointless whinging in response to a good-
natured one-line attempt to subtly point out amusing contradictions endemic in
concepts like "social news software".

Good thing we've nipped that sort of thing in the bud, so the beautiful signal
can shine through unhindered by noise.

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parker
When building the userbase of a site I managed, I found that the largest
growth periods were caused by events largely out of my control: the attraction
of social super-nodes.

First, someone started participating who had a massive following on YouTube,
and basically jetissoned over his entire auidence to our site. That doubled
our traffic overnight.

A few weeks later, someone with influence in a massive forum community posted
something about us, and that was an even larger traffic boost. Essentially,
people from that forum site started spending their time on our site.

Putting email scrapers and all that stuff to get people to spread word about
you is nothing compared to what a few social super-nodes can do for you. Once
you attract those people to start evangelizing your product, you have
increasing chances to attract even more super nodes.

The problem is attracting those super nodes in the first place. Build
something that people can form an opinion about. Super nodes want to put their
hat on something, their seal of approval. Generic does not get approval, I
assure you. Stand for something, and imbue your product with that ethos. As
sparse as reddit looks, you can bet that there's something identifiable about
that site.

~~~
pchristensen
Textbook Tipping Point behavior:

<http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/0316346624/pchristensen-20>

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gaika
As somebody running a site very much like yours, let me tell you:

Pick a place for your fight where you have an advantage: social news has clear
leaders and network effect working against you.

Pick a tool for your fight: web site that is looks and feels like any other
site is not enough (even if it has 10x better tech behind it)

Pick your friends, who are for the long run: talk to your best users, make
friends. Talk to your competitors too, news.YC is a great place to make it
happen (I'll be happy to chat to you).

Learn from the mistakes of others: there have been plenty of personalized news
sites that failed before, what have you learned from their mistakes?

~~~
hashbucket
Yes, let's chat. You can email me at hashbucket@10gic.net

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timcederman
I know I'm repeating what other people have said but the fundamentals are
simple:

\- make it compelling \- manually invite a core group \- take note of
feedback, keep improving, keep advertising

In my first project (from way back in 2001), it involved 6 months of hard work
in advertising, telling everyone about it, getting people to sign up. It was
50% selling, 50% content. And then bam, I didn't have to do anything anymore.
After that initial push momentum took hold and that was it. Any additional
advertisement increased numbers, and stopping the advertisements dropped
traffic, but the core numbers never diminished.

~~~
timcederman
Some specific feedback:

Make it easier to get information about the stories. It's very hard to browse.

The "related similar save hide report" menu is terrible. It looks like a tag
cloud or keyword highlighting. Don't forget usability heuristics!

When trying to get critical number other than conversions, don't make people
sign up to use features (like the stars).

Keywords aren't as interesting as a snippet.

When people click on a link for registered users, make the default a signup
form rather than a login form.

Don't fall for the hype of the current Web 2.0 square boxes and olive green
look. It will look like 70s fashions in a few years. (okay, that is extremely
subjective). Make the page, or at least the header more compelling.

~~~
gaika
Hey, we can really use your feedback too (link in my profile)!

Our site has not reached critical mass yet, but we're pretty close. Same
space, different approach. Would be very interested to hear what you have to
say about us.

~~~
timcederman
Hi gaika,

I really like the layout and how clean it all is. I also like the fact that
you take some design cues from Google with your logo/search box (nothing wrong
with using design patterns!). I also liked the consistency when you clicked on
a link - ie, the header and title didn't move.

Is that "What is Jaanix?" always the default link at the top? If so, great! In
these nascent stages you should definitely be accommodating people with
questions and establishing what it is you do. When Digg first came out people
had a lot of questions about how that worked as well.

The tuners are great. I really dig how they're analogue - a lot of people make
the mistake of stepping sliders for "tuning" functionality.

Such a small thing, but any chance of making the comment box slide out rather
than pop out? Everything else looks so slick it was the one thing that stood
out to me. Actually I also noticed videos seemed a bit clunky (click on one
and then scroll to see what I'm talking about).

What would be great in terms of functionality is an Audioscrobbler style thing
- name a few blogs and have the tuners get set for you.

Also have you done the pre-requisite widget for people to embed into their
blogs, etc?

Not sure what other advice I can offer to be honest, you guys seemed to have
nailed your concept quite nicely.

~~~
gaika
Thanks! Who needs "unconventional methods" when you can get feedback like
this? :)

Will be fixing the things you've mentioned, hope to see you on our site more
often, let's continue the discussion there.

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tak111
Can you tell us in two sentences what your site does? other than submitting
links? I have problem understand the niche compare to others similar sites?

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hashbucket
A related question: does anyone know how reddit/digg/facebook/myspace gained
their initial traction? Facebook couldn't have been very useful with all of 5
people on it. How did they gain their initial group of users?

~~~
mynameishere
OTTOMH:

reddit: PG and Joel Spolsky talked about it. facebook: Zuck acquired the main
harvard email list and spammed everyone. myspace: The parent company spammed
all its users. digg: ?

I think spamming is almost inevitable. The plentyoffish guy spammed myspace (i
think) and made lots of female sockpuppets.

~~~
dhotson
From what I remember, Digg first became popular when Paris Hilton's phone got
hacked. They were one of the first sites to break the news with the leaked
phone numbers.

~~~
Tichy
So she will actually go down in history for some noteworthy event :-)

~~~
SwellJoe
I predict here today that Paris Hilton's fame will outlast Digg by many, many
years.

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trekker7
Well, the social news sites I already frequent have some central theme. Reddit
is for general purpose news (so the most generic theme is already covered),
Programming Reddit is for programming and technical articles, and Hacker News
is for interesting articles and startup related links. What's the theme for
your site?

To be honest the site lost me in the first minute because it didn't seem like
I'd be interested in it. The theme wasn't apparent in the first 10 seconds. If
it was a slickly designed site where people could upvote/downvote cool
pictures of exotic sports cars, then maybe I would have stayed. There has to
be a niche.

Plus, since there are a lot of other social news sites out there, and I
already visit a bunch of them, it's going to be really tough to pull me to a
new social news site. Perhaps try building something in a domain that nobody
has really ventured into yet? We already have social video sharing, social
image sharing, social news, and social profile databases. Maybe there's some
new _category_ of social websites that you and I haven't considered yet? Your
chances in that new category might be better than with a new instance of the
social news class.

"I built it but they didn't come" is probably the leading complaint for the
large percentage of startups that fail. You just have to be brutally, brutally
honest and straightforward when analyzing your site. Put yourself in the shoes
of an average visitor to the site: what does she read that catches her
attention? How does she tell you apart from all the other sites on the Web
that are similar to yours? Are you solving some burning need for this user
that no other site can solve? What are you offering her that's going to make
her bookmark your site and keep coming back? It's a really hard thing to do.

I'd suggest not just building one thing and waiting for people to show up.
Rather, build a hundred things, each of which you think are pretty good, and
then maybe 2 - 3 of them will become amazing hits.

~~~
hashbucket
Well, the problem is that my site is supposed to do exactly what reddit does.
In fact, it was inspired by complains on reddit that an influx of new users
buried the old interesting content. You do bring up a good point, however.
I'll think more about differentiating!

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mosburger
I'm thinking about trying out starting a social site soon... I've got a big
chunk of it coded already. My tack was going to be to first create a site with
aggregated content, a la popurls, try to get some regular visitors, then
introduce social aspects to it if/when that gets any traction.

I think this is the approach that original signal took. I have no idea whether
it will work, the aggregated content will have to be damned compelling to make
it better than a plain on RSS feed. Chances are I'll ever even finish the
damned thing anyway. :/ But I figured it'd be worth a shot, if for no other
reason than to learn some new stuff and to have a hobby!

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cousin_it
Same problem here, and my project isn't even social - it's a clone of MS
Photosynth. I'm having a very hard time determining why they aren't coming.

~~~
Dylanfm
The linking of images is fairly tricky. I would love a way to move around the
whole image I am trying to link to. Also, I'd love to be able to browse other
existing 'albums'.

~~~
cousin_it
1: OK, it's the third time I'm asked that, will implement. 2: a list of public
albums is on the left, it's still pretty short and I'm updating it by hand.
Private stuff is private ;-)

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Mrinal
LinkedIn started with "friends of the company" of the company too - key is to
integrate a "network effect" and viral loops in the service

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Mistone
focus on an ultra specific niche (facebook: harvard students | YCNews: young
Hacker/entreps | ebay: beenie baby+antique sellers and collectors) build a
service for that niche that the people love - until you've got that done
focusing on the mass audience is too hard / too expensive. This is not easy, I
have not done it, but thats what has worked.

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extantproject
What's the URL?

~~~
mechanical_fish
Seriously, there's a problem with your promotion if you won't give us the URL.

If the URL is too embarrassing to admit to... well, there's your problem!

~~~
hashbucket
That's because I'm not trying to promote my site here, just ask for
information. I've already done that before:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135495> There's a bit more information
here: <http://fyynd.com/FAQ/>

~~~
dreish
My first impression of the site is that no big value jumps out at me when I
look at it -- nothing makes me think, "Hey, this is really a lot better than
trawling Google News and the Yahoo! Most Popular page, plus a few niche sites
I find interesting."

Also, "Interesting things to read" is a little ambiguous, and could use
clarification to emphasize that the site _does_ cover both news and reference
texts. (Or is it even more than that?) With so much flat-looking text, people
are going to read one link and think, "This is just another less-attractive
version of Google News," or, "This is just another link aggregator site, but
without arrows for some reason."

Somehow, you've got to make your front-page impression for non-logged-in users
both provide a little bit of value (but not the many links you're putting up
right now), _and_ immediately and visually demonstrate what makes your site
uniquely valuable.

The list format feels a little oppressive, for some reason. I can't put my
finger on it, but it just isn't ... fun.

Finally, all the links I see initially are about equally interesting to me --
they're all fairly heady math/computer geek stuff. So I don't even get the
initial reward of trimming away (or the fun of condemning) the really trivial
stuff I wish wasn't in the news. I wonder if someone in the 99% of the U.S.
population that doesn't care about Boltzmann machines would even try to push
past that.

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rrhyne
Blog. When you do, link to other blogs in your segment, they'll link to you.
Comment on other blogs, become a valuable member of the community.

Then convert traffic from your blog to your network.

~~~
tx
I've said it before and I'll do it again: a successful blog is a project on
it's own with exactly the same kind of problems: attracting users, being
relevant, being original, etc. You're offering him to double his working hours
only to have two (2) identical problems at hand.

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gahahaha
Myspace started out spending big on advertising in mainstream media.

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agentbleu
This is a problem I envisage for a new project I'm working on. I don't trust
the blogsphere enough to rely on editorial. Nor do I see any way to win in the
search engines for specific terms as its an original concept. Normally I just
seo my sites to hell and rely purely on organic search traffic. But what to do
when that wont work and the blogsphere is so fickle. It's a good question and
when you find the solution let me know as I'm going to face the same.

