1. Doing things that don't scale. We have a community of fans following local scores and we wanted to get people to crowdsource scores. Initially that meant us seeding the community and then finding ways to onboard folks to scoring games. 2. There was an existing community of people who cared about local sports and with the death of newspapers we thought there was a chance to get them to crowdsource and share the information with others. 3. We made a lot of tools that created incentives for folks to score games and share that information with others. 4. We did a lot of partnerships with potential consumers of the score data which made an incentive for folks to share scores to highlight their teams.
Ultimately one thing that we thought that would motivate people was money, fame and narcissism and since we didn't have a lot of money we focused on the other two.
It's been fun seeing it grow and there are a ton of other good thoughts from others in this post. Thanks for posting...great to see others experience.