6 ms·

I built it but they wouldn't come!

44 points by hashbucket 18y ago

I wrote a "social" site but I'm having a hard time attracting users. What your experiences with promoting your site? Have you successfully started a forum before, and if so, how?

hashbucket 18y ago
A related question: does anyone know how reddit/digg/facebook/myspace gained their initial traction? Facebook couldn't have been very useful with all of 5 people on it. How did they gain their initial group of users?
- pius 18y ago
  I was one of the first couple hundred people on Facebook (and one of the first 30 people at MIT on it). Zuckerberg started it at Harvard. It spread like wildfire at Harvard because it was highly useful and then he opened it up to MIT. And then Yale. And then UPenn. And so on and so forth. I think the takeaway there is to try niching to a manageable segment of the user population at first.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
  - jacobolus 18y ago
    “I was one of the first couple hundred people on Facebook (and one of the first 30 people at MIT on it).” I hate to rain on your parade (and this is admittedly extremely nit-picky), but those two statements are incompatible, unless you had email addresses from both institutions. Something like ten thousand students from Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, and Yale had joined the site before MIT was added.
    - pius 18y ago
      Hmm. If you're right, I feel like a bit of a doofus. That's not as I remember it, but I don't have evidence to back up my point except my (probably flawed) memory. I will, however, stand by the weaker statement of being one of the first few from MIT. And don't worry, that's not much of a parade to rain on. ;)
- mynameishere 18y ago
  OTTOMH: reddit: PG and Joel Spolsky talked about it. facebook: Zuck acquired the main harvard email list and spammed everyone. myspace: The parent company spammed all its users. digg: ? I think spamming is almost inevitable. The plentyoffish guy spammed myspace (i think) and made lots of female sockpuppets.
  - paulgb 18y ago
    IIRC, Kevin Rose promoted digg during his TechTV gig. I think Facebook started as a hot-or-not clone. Zuck went around to the college residences to scrape the pictures from the residence's face books.
    - ojbyrne 18y ago
      For posterity - digg on TechTv: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1_YoG7lqI4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1_YoG7lqI4
  - dhotson 18y ago
    From what I remember, Digg first became popular when Paris Hilton's phone got hacked. They were one of the first sites to break the news with the leaked phone numbers.
    - Tichy 18y ago
      So she will actually go down in history for some noteworthy event :-)
      - SwellJoe 18y ago
        I predict here today that Paris Hilton's fame will outlast Digg by many, many years.
    - ojbyrne 18y ago
      True. We were chugging along, growing about 20% a month, 4 months in, when that story appeared on digg and then got indexed by yahoo (we were no.1 and no.3 for the search "paris hilton phone"). Traffic doubled instantly. That should underline the importance of SEO. Get your friends to link to your site.
- subwindow 18y ago
  Myspace gained their initial traction with pseudo-spam. I'd suggest not following by their example.
- KiwiNige 18y ago
  I have a plan to start a game of some sort, get a local computer store to sponsor it with a new PC as the prize. Maybe sell local advertising on the site as much to spread awearness as anything. If it goes well then find a bigger sponsor and do another game, slightly less local next time around....
- jacobolus 18y ago
  Facebook gained its initial user base by recruiting a huge percentage of the Harvard student body: “Today, two weeks after its inception, thefacebook.com has blossomed from about 650 members early last week to a network of over 4,300 student, alumni and faculty subscribers as of yesterday.” http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=357543 http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=357543 “‘I have no idea why it’s so popular,’ said thefacebook.com creator Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06. ‘I was pretty surprised.’”
- agentbleu 18y ago
  Myspace was a well known spam outfit with a history of spamming for a living and a very large database of emails.
- nostrademons 18y ago
  According to interviews the Reddits have given, they (& friends & fellow YC founders) basically submitted everything themselves for the first 2-3 months. Any time they ran across something interesting on the net, they threw it on Reddit. I remember checking it out the day it launched and leaving because it wasn't very interesting. I came back in October (about 3-4 months later) and it had some minimal traction. IMHO, the critical factor was that they added comments and people had started commenting on links. Facebook was pretty well-established when I joined (fall 04, about 8 months after it started). People were using it as an address book - meet someone at a party, you instantly had all their contact info once you knew their name. And since there were pictures and it was organized by college, you could often pick out who they were from first names alone. There weren't many social features back then; IIRC, it just had Poke and the Wall.
extantproject 18y ago
What's the URL?
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  Seriously, there's a problem with your promotion if you won't give us the URL. If the URL is too embarrassing to admit to... well, there's your problem!
  - hashbucket 18y ago
    That's because I'm not trying to promote my site here, just ask for information. I've already done that before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135495 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135495 There's a bit more information here: http://fyynd.com/FAQ/ http://fyynd.com/FAQ/
    - Tichy 18y ago
      I remember that and I think it is interesting. I have bookmarked it, but somehow I did not check back often. For one thing, I am busy keeping up with Hacker News. But maybe there are other things at work - perhaps you just need to improve the design a bit, and give it more of a community feel (ie make it clear what it is all about)?
    - dreish 18y ago
      My first impression of the site is that no big value jumps out at me when I look at it -- nothing makes me think, "Hey, this is really a lot better than trawling Google News and the Yahoo! Most Popular page, plus a few niche sites I find interesting." Also, "Interesting things to read" is a little ambiguous, and could use clarification to emphasize that the site _does_ cover both news and reference texts. (Or is it even more than that?) With so much flat-looking text, people are going to read one link and think, "This is just another less-attractive version of Google News," or, "This is just another link aggregator site, but without arrows for some reason." Somehow, you've got to make your front-page impression for non-logged-in users both provide a little bit of value (but not the many links you're putting up right now), _and_ immediately and visually demonstrate what makes your site uniquely valuable. The list format feels a little oppressive, for some reason. I can't put my finger on it, but it just isn't ... fun. Finally, all the links I see initially are about equally interesting to me -- they're all fairly heady math/computer geek stuff. So I don't even get the initial reward of trimming away (or the fun of condemning) the really trivial stuff I wish wasn't in the news. I wonder if someone in the 99% of the U.S. population that doesn't care about Boltzmann machines would even try to push past that.
sanswork 18y ago
In the social sites I've worked on the first core group of users were always friends/associates of the creator. Get your friends(like 50+) using it to give you a base of people then start trying to attract the unknowns.
- SwellJoe 18y ago
  "Get your friends(like 50+) using it..." I see what you did there. Nerds don't have 50 friends.
  - eru 18y ago
    You do not need RL friends, fortunately.
    - eru 18y ago
      I mean - general you do not want to miss them. But for populating your ghost town you can just as well persuade 'virtual friends'.
  - sc 18y ago
    Is commentary like this really necessary? Can't we save these for Reddit?
    - euccastro 18y ago
      Yes, s/reddit/digg/ and you're done.
    - SwellJoe 18y ago
      My most humble apologies, sc. Thanks to your patient guidance I now understand that business is serious business and should be taken seriously.
      - sc 18y ago
        I understand, you mean "lighten up." I come here more for the information and insight than the humor, and a lot of that information lives in the comments. We already have Reddit for fluff and everything else, so why clone that here? I just think sarcasm (like your comment here) and certain strains of humor (the replicating meme, for example) are counterproductive, though I don't by any means wish to discourage original/well-thought-out humor.
gaika 18y ago
As somebody running a site very much like yours, let me tell you: Pick a place for your fight where you have an advantage: social news has clear leaders and network effect working against you. Pick a tool for your fight: web site that is looks and feels like any other site is not enough (even if it has 10x better tech behind it) Pick your friends, who are for the long run: talk to your best users, make friends. Talk to your competitors too, news.YC is a great place to make it happen (I'll be happy to chat to you). Learn from the mistakes of others: there have been plenty of personalized news sites that failed before, what have you learned from their mistakes?
- hashbucket 18y ago
  Yes, let's chat. You can email me at hashbucket@10gic.net
Mrinal 18y ago
LinkedIn started with "friends of the company" of the company too - key is to integrate a "network effect" and viral loops in the service
hooande 18y ago
I have been owned a social site that started from zero and grew to hundreds of thousands of users. Here is the brief rundown of how it happened: ~ 3 months in: We used some "unconventional methods" (that I won't mention in detail) to attract a few initial users. ~ 7 months in: We had a breakthrough with google (we still aren't sure exactly what it was) and we started to get a ton of search traffic ~ 10 months in: from here, traffic was all from word of mouth and referrals. This was by far the major segment. The first two combined up to maybe 40,000 users...everything from there to 300,000 was primarily driven by word of mouth After that we had some deals, etc, but most of it was just surviving until things picked up on their own. I can tell you that we tried anything and everything to get even a little bit of attention in those days. I can't point back to one thing and say "that's what really got it started"...I think it was just a combination of keeping ourselves out there until we were in the right place at the right time. And now I have to do it all again.
- shiranaihito 18y ago
  > We used some "unconventional methods" (that I won't mention in detail) to attract a few initial users. That sounds like you used some "morally questionable" methods.. ? Maybe you'd care to elaborate?
  - zkinion 18y ago
    Probably some kind of "legal spam". You'd be surprised how many startups do this.
    - kyro 18y ago
      Honestly, if that's one of the methods one chooses to get a startup off the ground, I have no problem with it. It's a small moral price a startup has to pay to get some momentum going, and without initial momentum, you really can't go anywhere. Sure, it's an annoyance on the user end, but if it's a truly useful service, I see no problem. Every user, especially in the initial stages, is valuable.
      - deleted 18y ago
timcederman 18y ago
I know I'm repeating what other people have said but the fundamentals are simple: - make it compelling - manually invite a core group - take note of feedback, keep improving, keep advertising In my first project (from way back in 2001), it involved 6 months of hard work in advertising, telling everyone about it, getting people to sign up. It was 50% selling, 50% content. And then bam, I didn't have to do anything anymore. After that initial push momentum took hold and that was it. Any additional advertisement increased numbers, and stopping the advertisements dropped traffic, but the core numbers never diminished.
- timcederman 18y ago
  Some specific feedback: Make it easier to get information about the stories. It's very hard to browse. The "related similar save hide report" menu is terrible. It looks like a tag cloud or keyword highlighting. Don't forget usability heuristics! When trying to get critical number other than conversions, don't make people sign up to use features (like the stars). Keywords aren't as interesting as a snippet. When people click on a link for registered users, make the default a signup form rather than a login form. Don't fall for the hype of the current Web 2.0 square boxes and olive green look. It will look like 70s fashions in a few years. (okay, that is extremely subjective). Make the page, or at least the header more compelling.
  - gaika 18y ago
    Hey, we can really use your feedback too (link in my profile)! Our site has not reached critical mass yet, but we're pretty close. Same space, different approach. Would be very interested to hear what you have to say about us.
    - timcederman 18y ago
      Hi gaika, I really like the layout and how clean it all is. I also like the fact that you take some design cues from Google with your logo/search box (nothing wrong with using design patterns!). I also liked the consistency when you clicked on a link - ie, the header and title didn't move. Is that "What is Jaanix?" always the default link at the top? If so, great! In these nascent stages you should definitely be accommodating people with questions and establishing what it is you do. When Digg first came out people had a lot of questions about how that worked as well. The tuners are great. I really dig how they're analogue - a lot of people make the mistake of stepping sliders for "tuning" functionality. Such a small thing, but any chance of making the comment box slide out rather than pop out? Everything else looks so slick it was the one thing that stood out to me. Actually I also noticed videos seemed a bit clunky (click on one and then scroll to see what I'm talking about). What would be great in terms of functionality is an Audioscrobbler style thing - name a few blogs and have the tuners get set for you. Also have you done the pre-requisite widget for people to embed into their blogs, etc? Not sure what other advice I can offer to be honest, you guys seemed to have nailed your concept quite nicely.
tak111 18y ago
Can you tell us in two sentences what your site does? other than submitting links? I have problem understand the niche compare to others similar sites?
rrhyne 18y ago
Blog. When you do, link to other blogs in your segment, they'll link to you. Comment on other blogs, become a valuable member of the community. Then convert traffic from your blog to your network.
- tx 18y ago
  I've said it before and I'll do it again: a successful blog is a project on it's own with exactly the same kind of problems: attracting users, being relevant, being original, etc. You're offering him to double his working hours only to have two (2) identical problems at hand.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
cousin_it 18y ago
Same problem here, and my project isn't even social - it's a clone of MS Photosynth. I'm having a very hard time determining why they aren't coming.
- hashbucket 18y ago
  Maybe you should submit it to some more social news sites. I personally found it to be very interesting!
  - cousin_it 18y ago
    Thanks for your suggestion, man. I gave it some thought and ended up on the front page of Reddit: http://reddit.com/info/6fusw/comments/ http://reddit.com/info/6fusw/comments/
- Dylanfm 18y ago
  A hurdle in contributing to this site is that I can't do anything right now. I will need to take photos in a slightly different way. I'd love to take part, but can't right away. Edit: scratch that, I was able to contribute to Piazza di San Pietro, Rome.
- Dylanfm 18y ago
  The linking of images is fairly tricky. I would love a way to move around the whole image I am trying to link to. Also, I'd love to be able to browse other existing 'albums'.
  - cousin_it 18y ago
    1: OK, it's the third time I'm asked that, will implement. 2: a list of public albums is on the left, it's still pretty short and I'm updating it by hand. Private stuff is private ;-)
  - cousin_it 18y ago
    I've implemented #1.
oldgregg 18y ago
Getting to critical mass is the issue with social sites, so you probably should have thought about it before you built your field of dreams. Three basic ways: The honest way: Find a way to deliver value to the user that doesn't require them recruiting everyone they know before they are able to benefit from the site. WHY ARE YOU UNIQUE? Start small and think about each individuals experience vs. big numbers. The usual way: Seed the site with fake profiles and activity then spam the hell out it. Can be effective as long as you are offering something unique. (not Tagworld) The probable way: Fail like 99% of the social sites out there. Path of least resistance baby.
- gaika 18y ago
  You should change it to "honest and the most painful" way. I'm going through it right now, would not recommend it to anybody looking for a quick return.
trekker7 18y ago
Well, the social news sites I already frequent have some central theme. Reddit is for general purpose news (so the most generic theme is already covered), Programming Reddit is for programming and technical articles, and Hacker News is for interesting articles and startup related links. What's the theme for your site? To be honest the site lost me in the first minute because it didn't seem like I'd be interested in it. The theme wasn't apparent in the first 10 seconds. If it was a slickly designed site where people could upvote/downvote cool pictures of exotic sports cars, then maybe I would have stayed. There has to be a niche. Plus, since there are a lot of other social news sites out there, and I already visit a bunch of them, it's going to be really tough to pull me to a new social news site. Perhaps try building something in a domain that nobody has really ventured into yet? We already have social video sharing, social image sharing, social news, and social profile databases. Maybe there's some new category of social websites that you and I haven't considered yet? Your chances in that new category might be better than with a new instance of the social news class. "I built it but they didn't come" is probably the leading complaint for the large percentage of startups that fail. You just have to be brutally, brutally honest and straightforward when analyzing your site. Put yourself in the shoes of an average visitor to the site: what does she read that catches her attention? How does she tell you apart from all the other sites on the Web that are similar to yours? Are you solving some burning need for this user that no other site can solve? What are you offering her that's going to make her bookmark your site and keep coming back? It's a really hard thing to do. I'd suggest not just building one thing and waiting for people to show up. Rather, build a hundred things, each of which you think are pretty good, and then maybe 2 - 3 of them will become amazing hits.
- hashbucket 18y ago
  Well, the problem is that my site is supposed to do exactly what reddit does. In fact, it was inspired by complains on reddit that an influx of new users buried the old interesting content. You do bring up a good point, however. I'll think more about differentiating!
agentbleu 18y ago
This is a problem I envisage for a new project I'm working on. I don't trust the blogsphere enough to rely on editorial. Nor do I see any way to win in the search engines for specific terms as its an original concept. Normally I just seo my sites to hell and rely purely on organic search traffic. But what to do when that wont work and the blogsphere is so fickle. It's a good question and when you find the solution let me know as I'm going to face the same.
mosburger 18y ago
I'm thinking about trying out starting a social site soon... I've got a big chunk of it coded already. My tack was going to be to first create a site with aggregated content, a la popurls, try to get some regular visitors, then introduce social aspects to it if/when that gets any traction. I think this is the approach that original signal took. I have no idea whether it will work, the aggregated content will have to be damned compelling to make it better than a plain on RSS feed. Chances are I'll ever even finish the damned thing anyway. :/ But I figured it'd be worth a shot, if for no other reason than to learn some new stuff and to have a hobby!
gahahaha 18y ago
Myspace started out spending big on advertising in mainstream media.
Mistone 18y ago
focus on an ultra specific niche (facebook: harvard students | YCNews: young Hacker/entreps | ebay: beenie baby+antique sellers and collectors) build a service for that niche that the people love - until you've got that done focusing on the mass audience is too hard / too expensive. This is not easy, I have not done it, but thats what has worked.
parker 18y ago
When building the userbase of a site I managed, I found that the largest growth periods were caused by events largely out of my control: the attraction of social super-nodes. First, someone started participating who had a massive following on YouTube, and basically jetissoned over his entire auidence to our site. That doubled our traffic overnight. A few weeks later, someone with influence in a massive forum community posted something about us, and that was an even larger traffic boost. Essentially, people from that forum site started spending their time on our site. Putting email scrapers and all that stuff to get people to spread word about you is nothing compared to what a few social super-nodes can do for you. Once you attract those people to start evangelizing your product, you have increasing chances to attract even more super nodes. The problem is attracting those super nodes in the first place. Build something that people can form an opinion about. Super nodes want to put their hat on something, their seal of approval. Generic does not get approval, I assure you. Stand for something, and imbue your product with that ethos. As sparse as reddit looks, you can bet that there's something identifiable about that site.
- pchristensen 18y ago
  Textbook Tipping Point behavior: http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/0316346624/pchristensen-20 http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/0316346624/pchristensen-20

44 points by hashbucket 18y ago

I wrote a "social" site but I'm having a hard time attracting users. What your experiences with promoting your site? Have you successfully started a forum before, and if so, how?

hashbucket 18y ago

A related question: does anyone know how reddit/digg/facebook/myspace gained their initial traction? Facebook couldn't have been very useful with all of 5 people on it. How did they gain their initial group of users?

pius 18y ago
I was one of the first couple hundred people on Facebook (and one of the first 30 people at MIT on it). Zuckerberg started it at Harvard. It spread like wildfire at Harvard because it was highly useful and then he opened it up to MIT. And then Yale. And then UPenn. And so on and so forth. I think the takeaway there is to try niching to a manageable segment of the user population at first.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- jacobolus 18y ago
  “I was one of the first couple hundred people on Facebook (and one of the first 30 people at MIT on it).” I hate to rain on your parade (and this is admittedly extremely nit-picky), but those two statements are incompatible, unless you had email addresses from both institutions. Something like ten thousand students from Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, and Yale had joined the site before MIT was added.
  - pius 18y ago
    Hmm. If you're right, I feel like a bit of a doofus. That's not as I remember it, but I don't have evidence to back up my point except my (probably flawed) memory. I will, however, stand by the weaker statement of being one of the first few from MIT. And don't worry, that's not much of a parade to rain on. ;)
mynameishere 18y ago
OTTOMH: reddit: PG and Joel Spolsky talked about it. facebook: Zuck acquired the main harvard email list and spammed everyone. myspace: The parent company spammed all its users. digg: ? I think spamming is almost inevitable. The plentyoffish guy spammed myspace (i think) and made lots of female sockpuppets.
- paulgb 18y ago
  IIRC, Kevin Rose promoted digg during his TechTV gig. I think Facebook started as a hot-or-not clone. Zuck went around to the college residences to scrape the pictures from the residence's face books.
  - ojbyrne 18y ago
    For posterity - digg on TechTv: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1_YoG7lqI4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1_YoG7lqI4
- dhotson 18y ago
  From what I remember, Digg first became popular when Paris Hilton's phone got hacked. They were one of the first sites to break the news with the leaked phone numbers.
  - Tichy 18y ago
    So she will actually go down in history for some noteworthy event :-)
    - SwellJoe 18y ago
      I predict here today that Paris Hilton's fame will outlast Digg by many, many years.
  - ojbyrne 18y ago
    True. We were chugging along, growing about 20% a month, 4 months in, when that story appeared on digg and then got indexed by yahoo (we were no.1 and no.3 for the search "paris hilton phone"). Traffic doubled instantly. That should underline the importance of SEO. Get your friends to link to your site.
subwindow 18y ago
Myspace gained their initial traction with pseudo-spam. I'd suggest not following by their example.
KiwiNige 18y ago
I have a plan to start a game of some sort, get a local computer store to sponsor it with a new PC as the prize. Maybe sell local advertising on the site as much to spread awearness as anything. If it goes well then find a bigger sponsor and do another game, slightly less local next time around....
jacobolus 18y ago
Facebook gained its initial user base by recruiting a huge percentage of the Harvard student body: “Today, two weeks after its inception, thefacebook.com has blossomed from about 650 members early last week to a network of over 4,300 student, alumni and faculty subscribers as of yesterday.” http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=357543 http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=357543 “‘I have no idea why it’s so popular,’ said thefacebook.com creator Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06. ‘I was pretty surprised.’”
agentbleu 18y ago
Myspace was a well known spam outfit with a history of spamming for a living and a very large database of emails.
nostrademons 18y ago
According to interviews the Reddits have given, they (& friends & fellow YC founders) basically submitted everything themselves for the first 2-3 months. Any time they ran across something interesting on the net, they threw it on Reddit. I remember checking it out the day it launched and leaving because it wasn't very interesting. I came back in October (about 3-4 months later) and it had some minimal traction. IMHO, the critical factor was that they added comments and people had started commenting on links. Facebook was pretty well-established when I joined (fall 04, about 8 months after it started). People were using it as an address book - meet someone at a party, you instantly had all their contact info once you knew their name. And since there were pictures and it was organized by college, you could often pick out who they were from first names alone. There weren't many social features back then; IIRC, it just had Poke and the Wall.

extantproject 18y ago

What's the URL?

mechanical_fish 18y ago
Seriously, there's a problem with your promotion if you won't give us the URL. If the URL is too embarrassing to admit to... well, there's your problem!
- hashbucket 18y ago
  That's because I'm not trying to promote my site here, just ask for information. I've already done that before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135495 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=135495 There's a bit more information here: http://fyynd.com/FAQ/ http://fyynd.com/FAQ/
  - Tichy 18y ago
    I remember that and I think it is interesting. I have bookmarked it, but somehow I did not check back often. For one thing, I am busy keeping up with Hacker News. But maybe there are other things at work - perhaps you just need to improve the design a bit, and give it more of a community feel (ie make it clear what it is all about)?
  - dreish 18y ago
    My first impression of the site is that no big value jumps out at me when I look at it -- nothing makes me think, "Hey, this is really a lot better than trawling Google News and the Yahoo! Most Popular page, plus a few niche sites I find interesting." Also, "Interesting things to read" is a little ambiguous, and could use clarification to emphasize that the site _does_ cover both news and reference texts. (Or is it even more than that?) With so much flat-looking text, people are going to read one link and think, "This is just another less-attractive version of Google News," or, "This is just another link aggregator site, but without arrows for some reason." Somehow, you've got to make your front-page impression for non-logged-in users both provide a little bit of value (but not the many links you're putting up right now), _and_ immediately and visually demonstrate what makes your site uniquely valuable. The list format feels a little oppressive, for some reason. I can't put my finger on it, but it just isn't ... fun. Finally, all the links I see initially are about equally interesting to me -- they're all fairly heady math/computer geek stuff. So I don't even get the initial reward of trimming away (or the fun of condemning) the really trivial stuff I wish wasn't in the news. I wonder if someone in the 99% of the U.S. population that doesn't care about Boltzmann machines would even try to push past that.

sanswork 18y ago

In the social sites I've worked on the first core group of users were always friends/associates of the creator. Get your friends(like 50+) using it to give you a base of people then start trying to attract the unknowns.

SwellJoe 18y ago
"Get your friends(like 50+) using it..." I see what you did there. Nerds don't have 50 friends.
- eru 18y ago
  You do not need RL friends, fortunately.
  - eru 18y ago
    I mean - general you do not want to miss them. But for populating your ghost town you can just as well persuade 'virtual friends'.
- sc 18y ago
  Is commentary like this really necessary? Can't we save these for Reddit?
  - euccastro 18y ago
    Yes, s/reddit/digg/ and you're done.
  - SwellJoe 18y ago
    My most humble apologies, sc. Thanks to your patient guidance I now understand that business is serious business and should be taken seriously.
    - sc 18y ago
      I understand, you mean "lighten up." I come here more for the information and insight than the humor, and a lot of that information lives in the comments. We already have Reddit for fluff and everything else, so why clone that here? I just think sarcasm (like your comment here) and certain strains of humor (the replicating meme, for example) are counterproductive, though I don't by any means wish to discourage original/well-thought-out humor.

gaika 18y ago

As somebody running a site very much like yours, let me tell you: Pick a place for your fight where you have an advantage: social news has clear leaders and network effect working against you. Pick a tool for your fight: web site that is looks and feels like any other site is not enough (even if it has 10x better tech behind it) Pick your friends, who are for the long run: talk to your best users, make friends. Talk to your competitors too, news.YC is a great place to make it happen (I'll be happy to chat to you). Learn from the mistakes of others: there have been plenty of personalized news sites that failed before, what have you learned from their mistakes?

hashbucket 18y ago
Yes, let's chat. You can email me at hashbucket@10gic.net

Mrinal 18y ago

LinkedIn started with "friends of the company" of the company too - key is to integrate a "network effect" and viral loops in the service

hooande 18y ago

I have been owned a social site that started from zero and grew to hundreds of thousands of users. Here is the brief rundown of how it happened: ~ 3 months in: We used some "unconventional methods" (that I won't mention in detail) to attract a few initial users. ~ 7 months in: We had a breakthrough with google (we still aren't sure exactly what it was) and we started to get a ton of search traffic ~ 10 months in: from here, traffic was all from word of mouth and referrals. This was by far the major segment. The first two combined up to maybe 40,000 users...everything from there to 300,000 was primarily driven by word of mouth After that we had some deals, etc, but most of it was just surviving until things picked up on their own. I can tell you that we tried anything and everything to get even a little bit of attention in those days. I can't point back to one thing and say "that's what really got it started"...I think it was just a combination of keeping ourselves out there until we were in the right place at the right time. And now I have to do it all again.

shiranaihito 18y ago
> We used some "unconventional methods" (that I won't mention in detail) to attract a few initial users. That sounds like you used some "morally questionable" methods.. ? Maybe you'd care to elaborate?
- zkinion 18y ago
  Probably some kind of "legal spam". You'd be surprised how many startups do this.
  - kyro 18y ago
    Honestly, if that's one of the methods one chooses to get a startup off the ground, I have no problem with it. It's a small moral price a startup has to pay to get some momentum going, and without initial momentum, you really can't go anywhere. Sure, it's an annoyance on the user end, but if it's a truly useful service, I see no problem. Every user, especially in the initial stages, is valuable.
    - deleted 18y ago

timcederman 18y ago

I know I'm repeating what other people have said but the fundamentals are simple: - make it compelling - manually invite a core group - take note of feedback, keep improving, keep advertising In my first project (from way back in 2001), it involved 6 months of hard work in advertising, telling everyone about it, getting people to sign up. It was 50% selling, 50% content. And then bam, I didn't have to do anything anymore. After that initial push momentum took hold and that was it. Any additional advertisement increased numbers, and stopping the advertisements dropped traffic, but the core numbers never diminished.

timcederman 18y ago
Some specific feedback: Make it easier to get information about the stories. It's very hard to browse. The "related similar save hide report" menu is terrible. It looks like a tag cloud or keyword highlighting. Don't forget usability heuristics! When trying to get critical number other than conversions, don't make people sign up to use features (like the stars). Keywords aren't as interesting as a snippet. When people click on a link for registered users, make the default a signup form rather than a login form. Don't fall for the hype of the current Web 2.0 square boxes and olive green look. It will look like 70s fashions in a few years. (okay, that is extremely subjective). Make the page, or at least the header more compelling.
- gaika 18y ago
  Hey, we can really use your feedback too (link in my profile)! Our site has not reached critical mass yet, but we're pretty close. Same space, different approach. Would be very interested to hear what you have to say about us.
  - timcederman 18y ago
    Hi gaika, I really like the layout and how clean it all is. I also like the fact that you take some design cues from Google with your logo/search box (nothing wrong with using design patterns!). I also liked the consistency when you clicked on a link - ie, the header and title didn't move. Is that "What is Jaanix?" always the default link at the top? If so, great! In these nascent stages you should definitely be accommodating people with questions and establishing what it is you do. When Digg first came out people had a lot of questions about how that worked as well. The tuners are great. I really dig how they're analogue - a lot of people make the mistake of stepping sliders for "tuning" functionality. Such a small thing, but any chance of making the comment box slide out rather than pop out? Everything else looks so slick it was the one thing that stood out to me. Actually I also noticed videos seemed a bit clunky (click on one and then scroll to see what I'm talking about). What would be great in terms of functionality is an Audioscrobbler style thing - name a few blogs and have the tuners get set for you. Also have you done the pre-requisite widget for people to embed into their blogs, etc? Not sure what other advice I can offer to be honest, you guys seemed to have nailed your concept quite nicely.

tak111 18y ago

Can you tell us in two sentences what your site does? other than submitting links? I have problem understand the niche compare to others similar sites?

rrhyne 18y ago

Blog. When you do, link to other blogs in your segment, they'll link to you. Comment on other blogs, become a valuable member of the community. Then convert traffic from your blog to your network.

tx 18y ago
I've said it before and I'll do it again: a successful blog is a project on it's own with exactly the same kind of problems: attracting users, being relevant, being original, etc. You're offering him to double his working hours only to have two (2) identical problems at hand.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

cousin_it 18y ago

Same problem here, and my project isn't even social - it's a clone of MS Photosynth. I'm having a very hard time determining why they aren't coming.

hashbucket 18y ago
Maybe you should submit it to some more social news sites. I personally found it to be very interesting!
- cousin_it 18y ago
  Thanks for your suggestion, man. I gave it some thought and ended up on the front page of Reddit: http://reddit.com/info/6fusw/comments/ http://reddit.com/info/6fusw/comments/
Dylanfm 18y ago
A hurdle in contributing to this site is that I can't do anything right now. I will need to take photos in a slightly different way. I'd love to take part, but can't right away. Edit: scratch that, I was able to contribute to Piazza di San Pietro, Rome.
Dylanfm 18y ago
The linking of images is fairly tricky. I would love a way to move around the whole image I am trying to link to. Also, I'd love to be able to browse other existing 'albums'.
- cousin_it 18y ago
  1: OK, it's the third time I'm asked that, will implement. 2: a list of public albums is on the left, it's still pretty short and I'm updating it by hand. Private stuff is private ;-)
- cousin_it 18y ago
  I've implemented #1.

oldgregg 18y ago

Getting to critical mass is the issue with social sites, so you probably should have thought about it before you built your field of dreams. Three basic ways: The honest way: Find a way to deliver value to the user that doesn't require them recruiting everyone they know before they are able to benefit from the site. WHY ARE YOU UNIQUE? Start small and think about each individuals experience vs. big numbers. The usual way: Seed the site with fake profiles and activity then spam the hell out it. Can be effective as long as you are offering something unique. (not Tagworld) The probable way: Fail like 99% of the social sites out there. Path of least resistance baby.

gaika 18y ago
You should change it to "honest and the most painful" way. I'm going through it right now, would not recommend it to anybody looking for a quick return.

trekker7 18y ago

Well, the social news sites I already frequent have some central theme. Reddit is for general purpose news (so the most generic theme is already covered), Programming Reddit is for programming and technical articles, and Hacker News is for interesting articles and startup related links. What's the theme for your site? To be honest the site lost me in the first minute because it didn't seem like I'd be interested in it. The theme wasn't apparent in the first 10 seconds. If it was a slickly designed site where people could upvote/downvote cool pictures of exotic sports cars, then maybe I would have stayed. There has to be a niche. Plus, since there are a lot of other social news sites out there, and I already visit a bunch of them, it's going to be really tough to pull me to a new social news site. Perhaps try building something in a domain that nobody has really ventured into yet? We already have social video sharing, social image sharing, social news, and social profile databases. Maybe there's some new category of social websites that you and I haven't considered yet? Your chances in that new category might be better than with a new instance of the social news class. "I built it but they didn't come" is probably the leading complaint for the large percentage of startups that fail. You just have to be brutally, brutally honest and straightforward when analyzing your site. Put yourself in the shoes of an average visitor to the site: what does she read that catches her attention? How does she tell you apart from all the other sites on the Web that are similar to yours? Are you solving some burning need for this user that no other site can solve? What are you offering her that's going to make her bookmark your site and keep coming back? It's a really hard thing to do. I'd suggest not just building one thing and waiting for people to show up. Rather, build a hundred things, each of which you think are pretty good, and then maybe 2 - 3 of them will become amazing hits.

hashbucket 18y ago
Well, the problem is that my site is supposed to do exactly what reddit does. In fact, it was inspired by complains on reddit that an influx of new users buried the old interesting content. You do bring up a good point, however. I'll think more about differentiating!

agentbleu 18y ago

This is a problem I envisage for a new project I'm working on. I don't trust the blogsphere enough to rely on editorial. Nor do I see any way to win in the search engines for specific terms as its an original concept. Normally I just seo my sites to hell and rely purely on organic search traffic. But what to do when that wont work and the blogsphere is so fickle. It's a good question and when you find the solution let me know as I'm going to face the same.

mosburger 18y ago

I'm thinking about trying out starting a social site soon... I've got a big chunk of it coded already. My tack was going to be to first create a site with aggregated content, a la popurls, try to get some regular visitors, then introduce social aspects to it if/when that gets any traction. I think this is the approach that original signal took. I have no idea whether it will work, the aggregated content will have to be damned compelling to make it better than a plain on RSS feed. Chances are I'll ever even finish the damned thing anyway. :/ But I figured it'd be worth a shot, if for no other reason than to learn some new stuff and to have a hobby!

gahahaha 18y ago

Myspace started out spending big on advertising in mainstream media.

Mistone 18y ago

focus on an ultra specific niche (facebook: harvard students | YCNews: young Hacker/entreps | ebay: beenie baby+antique sellers and collectors) build a service for that niche that the people love - until you've got that done focusing on the mass audience is too hard / too expensive. This is not easy, I have not done it, but thats what has worked.

parker 18y ago

When building the userbase of a site I managed, I found that the largest growth periods were caused by events largely out of my control: the attraction of social super-nodes. First, someone started participating who had a massive following on YouTube, and basically jetissoned over his entire auidence to our site. That doubled our traffic overnight. A few weeks later, someone with influence in a massive forum community posted something about us, and that was an even larger traffic boost. Essentially, people from that forum site started spending their time on our site. Putting email scrapers and all that stuff to get people to spread word about you is nothing compared to what a few social super-nodes can do for you. Once you attract those people to start evangelizing your product, you have increasing chances to attract even more super nodes. The problem is attracting those super nodes in the first place. Build something that people can form an opinion about. Super nodes want to put their hat on something, their seal of approval. Generic does not get approval, I assure you. Stand for something, and imbue your product with that ethos. As sparse as reddit looks, you can bet that there's something identifiable about that site.

pchristensen 18y ago
Textbook Tipping Point behavior: http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/0316346624/pchristensen-20 http://www.amazon.com/o/asin/0316346624/pchristensen-20