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.

Thanks

[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.

[tapiwa → ankeshk]

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.

[tapiwa → ankeshk]

About the visitors on launch day ... It really depends on your community niche. When you have absolutely run out of ideas, hire people on MechanicalTurk to post on your site. Be warned though that most of the posts will be rubbish, and of the "Hi, I'm new here" variety.

[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 → cloudwalking]

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

[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 → pankratiev]

yea...thats a very good point..

[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.

[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.

[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?