Rate My Startup - Slap A Story

I like the site, so I have no criticism. I'll just give you some ideas you can possibly use to promote the site:

1. When people write a story, add a very prominent field with space for email addresses of friends and family who will be interested in reading the story. You may want to use the google API to get contact information from the persons friends, allowing an automatic sending to ticked friends

2. Add a photo or avatar of the user beside the story. On the fp, add a bunch of faces of recently logged in users. It will instantly feel more like a community, and if you encourage people to use their real photo, things will stay very civil

3. Make a weekly competition. Make it prominent on the frontpage, and make the payment amount very small. For example, $10 by paypal. This is just $40 a month. Encourage people to invite their friends to come and vote for them. The best story each week wins the $10 and so on.

4. Find your target audience. Post on forums that do the same stuff

5. Allow people to write serials. For example, for a long time I used to write the fictional account of a soldier at war. I did this over years. Each entry was a short story, but together they formed a long narrative. Such long running narratives build fans

6. Allow pictures in stories

7. Here we will become a bit unethical - search usenet for an obscure but funny story. Add it to your site. Link it from reddit and digg. Alternatively, search scribd or any other document site for the most popular documents of all time that are stories. Addd to your site and do stumbleupon on that

8. Add a 'whacky' category where strange stuff is added. This stuff is more likely to be linked to than the serious stuff you want, but will drive traffic to your main site

9. Don't let your users drop off. If I sign up once, I have to get regular notifications about something, so I get invested in the site

10. Everybody just wants to have fun. You're entertainment first, don't forget that.

Wow, this is fantastic, we are working on some of the ideas you mention, the others we will need to add to our list.

Thanks heaps and keep them coming.

I've done NaNoWriMo once, and plan to do it again this year, I think. And a big part of that experience is the "shared misery", or "in the trenches together", vibe that the whole project engenders. November is coming up fast...you might consider sending a note to the fine folks who run that project, asking how you could make your site work well for NaNoWriMo participants. The worst they can say is "no" (or maybe the worst they could do is re-implement your idea themselves...they do seem to be hackers themselves, but that's an unlikely scenario).

It could give you a huge influx of users for the month of November...and some of them would stick around. I no longer write much fiction outside of that month (I do so much technical writing for my startup that I don't seem to have the drive for it outside of work), but I know a lot of the participants are frequent writers.

Getting publishers involved somehow would also be a good direction. Many print-only publishers are trying to figure out how to deal with this new-fangled (less than twenty years old...clearly unproven!) web thing...perhaps you can help them. I don't immediately see the connection, but perhaps user-created and user-edited books are the wave of the future. Somehow applying the reddit/digg model to fiction seems at least an amusing thought exercise.

awesome idea and site.

Only recommendation I can think of is... have the votes collect into points for authors. So then you can show 'top writers' and have competitions etc.

Thanks for the advice, I will be in touch with NaNoWriMo people see what they say.

Thanks Again