You should absolutely prepopulate your site with data, IF: 1. The seed data is already public anyway.. e.g. It is public information who teaches at which scho

You should absolutely prepopulate your site with data, IF: 1. The seed data is already public anyway.. e.g. It is public information who teaches at which schools. 2. The seed data adds value to your users.. e.g. Seeding with school and teacher data is useful, but adding school district demographics (even though publicly available) might be a waste of your time. 3. The seed information isn't too personal. By that I mean, can the information be used to harass the user. e.g. In your case, an teacher's work address is probably ok, emails and phone numbers are probably not. It's a judgment call - and the situation is obviously different for a site that lets people share information with teachers than for a site that lets people rate restaurants. 4. The seed data isn't too transient. In your case, probably not an issue, since school information doesn't change often. So, my recommendation is to definitely seed. Don't expect new users to your site to be entering in all of this for you. And you can't launch a site with nothing to look at -- people won't return for a second look.