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Ask HN: How would you promote a social network start-up?

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Ask HN: How would you promote a social network start-up?

#1

Post by kuvkir »

Hello all!

My bosses have just bought a social network website with 20K+ userbase and 80K pageviews per day, it is basically a copycat of facebook for Russian market. We have large social networking websites here in Russia like vkontakte.ru, odnoklassniki.ru with tens of millions of users, so the competition is quite high. Our goal is quite ambitious – to get a decent market share and grow our audience at least to 1M users in the first year. The problem is that our marketing budgets are relatively small and absolutely not comparable to those big players.

Ideas that have come to my mind are referral contests like "get more friend signed up and win an iphone", cross-promotion with our friendly websites, sending invitation to users from email accounts, maybe some kind of viral videoclips...

Any more ideas how to promote a website like this?

P.S: I don't have any realworld marketing experience, I'm actually the CTO of the project but would like to contribute to project success as well.

Re: Ask HN: How would you promote a social network start-up?

#6

Post by benwerd »

revorad wrote: post #4

The Vaynerchuks have some very good advice: http://mixergy.com/wine-library-tv-gary-vaynerchuk/ http://mixergy.com/aj-vaynerchuk-vaynermedia/ http://vimeo.com/4671951 In one word, care .

And in another, differentiate. Build something different, or adopt a different focus; don't just be a clone.

Re: Ask HN: How would you promote a social network start-up?

#7

Post by revorad »

benwerd wrote: post #6
revorad wrote: post #4

The Vaynerchuks have some very good advice: http://mixergy.com/wine-library-tv-gary-vaynerchuk/ http://mixergy.com/aj-vaynerchuk-vaynermedia/ http://vimeo.com/4671951 In one word, care .

And in another, differentiate . Build something different, or adopt a different focus; don't just be a clone.

That's true, but it's easy to make something no one wants just for the sake of differentiating. If you care, you differentiate only if it actually matters to your customers.

Re: Ask HN: How would you promote a social network start-up?

#10

Post by rms »

imp wrote: post #8
rms wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely... clone ChatRoulette with additional features is going to be a really viable business for the next 3 months or so.

How? It seems more like a curiosity than a viable business.

Exponential growth first and then new features is normally a viable path for a Web 2.0 business, but the founder of Chatroulette is finding it a bit hard to deal with new features when he has to worry about scaling his exponentially growing site, including limo rides and negotiations with Russian billionares.

To the OP: Isn't the strategy for succeeding at business in Russia to find out how to get in cars with Russian billionares? You would have to be careful though, because the existing billionares that own the social networking sites might not like you much.

This could also work for you as a quick flip, if you can get your page views up in a year and sell, that may be wiser than getting in cars with Russian billionaires.

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Chatroulette would be completely illegal if run by a US founder. People that are under 18 are regularly exposed to live masturbating penises on Chatroulette. US Law is such that if a certain prosecutor was sufficiently morally offended by your existence, the founder of a Chatroulette clone could be charged with Federal Racketeering. I don't think the DMCA would provide any protection for the site operator.

So anyone from a country with rule of law similar to the USA should be really careful about starting a Chatroulette like site.

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