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Ask HN: How do you prime/start a community for your site?

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Ask HN: How do you prime/start a community for your site?

#1

Post by jmilinion »

I once built a Q&A site for advance technical questions. It didn't work out. It ended up having an overwhelming amount of bots instead of people using it. A while later, Stack Overflow came online and it became a success. While it was more advanced than what I had, it wasn't too different in concept from what I made.

Looking back, it was pretty obvious what Stack Overflow had that I didn't - a following. Joel & Jeff's blog attracted a ton of readers over the years and those readers turned Stack Overflow from nothing into something.

I'm not someone who has the talent to write continually write insightful blog posts nor do I have the mindset to hype things up in forums. I'm not sure what kind of options there are for someone like me to get those first few users.

How do you prime a community for your service?

Re: Ask HN: How do you prime/start a community for your site?

#2

Post by chewxy »

Hi, I've tried starting multiple projects that faced this chicken and egg thing.

While I wouldn't call ourselves really successful, our latest venture, Fork the Cookbook succeeded by having what we call "single player mode". We had initially got people to add their favourite recipes into Fork the Cookbook (and in the last 5 days or so, this has come back to bite our asses), and thus, the 'single player mode' is essentially letting the users achieve something that can be done on their own (i.e. beautiful looking recipes for their personal collection)

Now after some amount of recipes, we're only starting to actively promote the community features (like forking a recipe).

All these came from our past experience in failing to gain enough traction on community sites. See my profile for more of my failed projects (there are a lot more listed on my latest blog entry where I was feeling rather blue).

Re: Ask HN: How do you prime/start a community for your site?

#6

Post by peachananr »

I was able to prime a community once with my first startup, MyColorscreen.com.

Here're what I did:

I attached myself to one of the already well known forum (XDA-Developers.com) and post regularly with a link back to my service showcasing how my service was better than what people were doing on the forum.

Since I am the user of my own service, I also keep feeding new content regularly to fake that there was activity.

If you are the user of your own service, it is easier to ask yourself "where would I be socializing", and "what kind of content I would like to see".

Ask these questions and fake it until you make it. :)

Re: Ask HN: How do you prime/start a community for your site?

#9

Post by orangethirty »

You fake it until you make it. Hire some interns and have them develop the community. Then market the hell out of it and watch it grow. Works really well. It also works with offline businesses. I know of a person who bought a couple of used cars and parked them in front of his store. Had someone come in and move/wash them every week. People always saw that the place was packed and stopped to see why.
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