Is your community a one-sided community, two-sided community, or marketplace? If it is the second or third, you ought to read HBS Professor Andrei Hagiu's case

Is your community a one-sided community, two-sided community, or marketplace? If it is the second or third, you ought to read HBS Professor Andrei Hagiu's case and article about this dynamic: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=24044 http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=24044 Platform Thinking also has a pretty comprehensive article on this: http://platformed.info/seeding-two-sided-businesses-strategy-chicken-and-egg-problem/ http://platformed.info/seeding-two-sided-businesses-strategy... My two cents here is that the best place to start in disrupting the chicken and egg problem is to reduce the number of users you need to get off the ground. Scope to as small a group as possible to demonstrate that the app provides the value you are hoping to provide, and then grow from there. If you're making an app for teenagers, start in one high school. If it works, grow to two, then four, then eight, and so on. You can scope geographically or by affiliation or in any of a number of other ways. Good luck.