Ask HN: How do you start a website that requires user contribution?

I believe the story with Yelp is that they paid people to write reviews in the beginning.

I definitely feel you, I have had similar struggles. I made a site that had some limited traction, mostly my friends used it. I think if your close friends are actually in the demographic you are looking for, then that is a great place to start.

Something else I try to consider is to make a site that strives to serve millions of users but can be useful to far less. I've been working on a locally focused, social network and I am creating it in a way that even if 10 people are using it, as long as they goto the same places, it should be useful. 10 people in the same area would be worth 1000 people strewn across the globe in my case.

But I do believe that it is a problem that has a solution which differs greatly from case to case. It's certainly a chance to show your creativity and hustle, I suppose. :)

Let's take an automotive analogy.

Supposing you wanted to have a Q+A site for people wanting to get the most out of their Model T Ford cars, get writing and become the authority on the subject. Don't shy away from injecting a bit of personality in there and use your superior web-saviness to get better SEO, page-load times, responsive-ness and so on than what others already writing on the subject can do. A simple blog will suffice for the purposes of getting initial interest.

After a while a regular audience will materialize and they will start talking to each other in the comments. Some might even start offering spare parts to one another, uploading pictures and posting links to videos. Ideally they are drawn to your site to see what you have to say this week however they stay for the comments.

For this automotive analogy you would probably want real world community things, e.g. meet ups, galleries, a way for people to enable film-makers to hire their Model T's, a supplier's directory, a 'wiki' and so on.

Once enough 'user generated content' arrives you can move the 'forum' (or whatever) to the homepage and relegate your original articles to some archive buried somewhere in the site. By now some users might have branched out from 'Model T' to things like 'Fordson Tractors' and make the site the place for discussing everything 'Fordson'.

The need being met might be people wanting to show off their cars to others that truly appreciate such things combined with a need for people to get specialist parts. This arrived at set of needs is very different to what the site started as, e.g. the best resource on the topic. A deliberate pivot is made and the original specialism broadened.

There are many sites that have grown with a variation of the above. Cult of personality works for many writers, rock stars, diet experts, politics pundits, celebrity bloggers and probably even z-grade porn stars. Assuming you are none of those things and don't have a fan club, just by writing stuff people enjoy reading you could create a name for yourself to be someone in your field. You could become the expert in Model T Ford cars, respected for that for people that care about that particular car. Clearly in this example the market is only so big so interest might not be exactly huge, however the principle is the same. Just serve a poorly served niche with something better and grow from there.