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How will you acquire your first batch of enough users to reach critical mass, where the site becomes an interesting destination rather than a ghost town? This w

How will you acquire your first batch of enough users to reach critical mass, where the site becomes an interesting destination rather than a ghost town? This will be your biggest challenge by far. Your competition is not only existing blogs, newspaper comment sections, and discussion forums that already host socially-oriented debate, but also any other place where people spend their free time: Netflix and XBox. How will you reach the people who would be interested in participating in such a forum? When you do reach them, how will you overcome the initial "ghost town" chicken-and-egg problem, where nobody will want to use the forum unless lots of other people are using it already?

SherlockeHolmes 11y ago
Thank you for bringing up more highly relevant questions for our company! Our idea does indeed face a chicken-and-egg problem. The following strategies will be implemented to address concerns mentioned above - i) We will aggressively market toward a niched group to find early power users. This group can be college students. A higher proportion of all college students are likely to resonate to Agora/Dais. This will be enormously valuable for the company during the early stage to a) fight off "ghost town" issues, b) gain feedback for iteration. ii) Early employees, all with equity stake in the company, will be encouraged to regularly participate in the social network. We hope to make debating a part of company culture. This will also fight off "ghost town" problem. iii) We aim to funnel the constructive and creative energies currently visibly abundant yet mostly wasted across social sites, blogs, comment sections, and discussion forums. We are similar to hacker news in this sense, that it is the first and most uniquely designed forum for hackers (in the broader meaning of the word). Agora/Dais aims to be such a thing for debaters of sociopolitoeconomic issues. iv) Effective marketing of our values will help us find users who share the spirit of debating. Our challenge is to show that Agora/Dais can add value to the user's life by being able to talk about issues that affect them directly, and by being able to share in each other's knowledge on specific topics. Our "north star", the thing that gives value to our users, is each time a user gets a response. This is our metric of interest.
- SherlockeHolmes 11y ago
  I wish to take the liberty to clarify myself, since the down vote is worrying. My post, at its surface, appears full of "marketingspeak" and cliched language. But in essence, each of the points are directly implementable solutions that address the challenges raised by HN user in parent comment. i) I provide a viable (albeit well known, but this doesn't make our strategy weaker) early growth strategy that targets a specific user group. ii) Another well known but nevertheless essential custom for early startups. I understand that mentioning such basics may take away from my credibility, but we must realize that startups often fail because they forget the basics. iii) I suspect this comment can be deemed too vague. It is encompassing the uniqueness of Agora/Dais, and expressing it by invoking comparisons to hacker news. My purpose is not to cozy up to the user base here, but to state the truth. Hacker news is highly unique in how well its content is organized and displayed. HN is also unique in how its user base interacts (content-oriented as opposed to profile-oriented). Agora/Dais respects HN and will learn from her best points. But we are not direct competitors. Targeted social capital of our product, its UI, and the targeted user base are all differentiated substantially. iv) This point states a fundamental company operating principle. The vision of Agora/Dais is to dramatically improve the quality and quantity of debates held online and offline on relevant topics, and to see our platform become a facilitator for improved quality of life among our users. This is a very important point that will be highly featured in all of our presentations to VCs.
  - pjlegato 11y ago
    This is indeed pretty vauge. The question was, "how will you acquire users?" and the reply was "We have a way to acquire users." OK, what is that growth strategy?
- pjlegato 11y ago
  i) What exactly will be involved in this aggressive marketing to a niche group? That's a very broad statement, and a very difficult task. Do you have specific plans for how to do this? ii) Are the employees expected to do this as part of their regular job? Writing enough content to overcome the ghost town effect is a fulltime job in itself, for a whole team of people. ii-B) Is your pitch to investors that they should give you a ton of money to hire people to write content to make your site interesting? How will you identify such people? iii) How will you do this funnelling? Why should people who debate sociopolitoeconomc issues care about your site versus the many existing blogs, forums, newspaper comment pages, and so on that they use now? It's all well and good to say you'll design it just for them, but what exactly does that mean? Why are the existing solutions not good enough?

SherlockeHolmes 11y ago

Thank you for bringing up more highly relevant questions for our company! Our idea does indeed face a chicken-and-egg problem. The following strategies will be implemented to address concerns mentioned above - i) We will aggressively market toward a niched group to find early power users. This group can be college students. A higher proportion of all college students are likely to resonate to Agora/Dais. This will be enormously valuable for the company during the early stage to a) fight off "ghost town" issues, b) gain feedback for iteration. ii) Early employees, all with equity stake in the company, will be encouraged to regularly participate in the social network. We hope to make debating a part of company culture. This will also fight off "ghost town" problem. iii) We aim to funnel the constructive and creative energies currently visibly abundant yet mostly wasted across social sites, blogs, comment sections, and discussion forums. We are similar to hacker news in this sense, that it is the first and most uniquely designed forum for hackers (in the broader meaning of the word). Agora/Dais aims to be such a thing for debaters of sociopolitoeconomic issues. iv) Effective marketing of our values will help us find users who share the spirit of debating. Our challenge is to show that Agora/Dais can add value to the user's life by being able to talk about issues that affect them directly, and by being able to share in each other's knowledge on specific topics. Our "north star", the thing that gives value to our users, is each time a user gets a response. This is our metric of interest.

SherlockeHolmes 11y ago
I wish to take the liberty to clarify myself, since the down vote is worrying. My post, at its surface, appears full of "marketingspeak" and cliched language. But in essence, each of the points are directly implementable solutions that address the challenges raised by HN user in parent comment. i) I provide a viable (albeit well known, but this doesn't make our strategy weaker) early growth strategy that targets a specific user group. ii) Another well known but nevertheless essential custom for early startups. I understand that mentioning such basics may take away from my credibility, but we must realize that startups often fail because they forget the basics. iii) I suspect this comment can be deemed too vague. It is encompassing the uniqueness of Agora/Dais, and expressing it by invoking comparisons to hacker news. My purpose is not to cozy up to the user base here, but to state the truth. Hacker news is highly unique in how well its content is organized and displayed. HN is also unique in how its user base interacts (content-oriented as opposed to profile-oriented). Agora/Dais respects HN and will learn from her best points. But we are not direct competitors. Targeted social capital of our product, its UI, and the targeted user base are all differentiated substantially. iv) This point states a fundamental company operating principle. The vision of Agora/Dais is to dramatically improve the quality and quantity of debates held online and offline on relevant topics, and to see our platform become a facilitator for improved quality of life among our users. This is a very important point that will be highly featured in all of our presentations to VCs.
- pjlegato 11y ago
  This is indeed pretty vauge. The question was, "how will you acquire users?" and the reply was "We have a way to acquire users." OK, what is that growth strategy?
pjlegato 11y ago
i) What exactly will be involved in this aggressive marketing to a niche group? That's a very broad statement, and a very difficult task. Do you have specific plans for how to do this? ii) Are the employees expected to do this as part of their regular job? Writing enough content to overcome the ghost town effect is a fulltime job in itself, for a whole team of people. ii-B) Is your pitch to investors that they should give you a ton of money to hire people to write content to make your site interesting? How will you identify such people? iii) How will you do this funnelling? Why should people who debate sociopolitoeconomc issues care about your site versus the many existing blogs, forums, newspaper comment pages, and so on that they use now? It's all well and good to say you'll design it just for them, but what exactly does that mean? Why are the existing solutions not good enough?