On WPQuestions.com, we corralled our friends and gave them the money to ask some of the first questions. In fact, of the first 10 questions on the site, I think

On WPQuestions.com, we corralled our friends and gave them the money to ask some of the first questions. In fact, of the first 10 questions on the site, I think 6 were from friends of ours. All the same, during the first few hours we were open, we did get one question from a total stranger, and by the end of the day we had revenue of something like $5, which allowed us to joke that we had made more money on our first day than Twitter had made during its first 2 years. And now that we are rolling our software out for others to use, I've been giving the same advice to the people on our waiting list: be ready to line up the first few transactions yourself, because the first few are the toughest. You need to create the momentum yourself. WPQuestions.com has now had 606 paid questions, and we haven't needed to force our friends to post questions since the first week, many months ago. But I think it was essential that we put some friends up to it that first week. Mind you, this wasn't totally faking it, since most of the questions were real questions that our friends were struggling with. One thing I still do (I did it just this morning in fact) is increase the prize for a customer, when that customer has had a problem with the site, and we pay for the increase out of our own pocket. For instance, just today, I added to the prize for this question: http://www.wpquestions.com/question/show/id/1160 http://www.wpquestions.com/question/show/id/1160 . But I do not regard that as faking it, I simply regard that as good customer support and good customer relations.