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Ask HN: Question aboout Community Websites Traction

by johnfelix on 12/18/10, 6:22 AM with 10 comments

• by ankeshk on 12/18/10, 11:04 AM

  Most people over estimate the minimum number of people needed to make a site look busy. Its around 20-30 [1]. Can you get about 20 zealous people to participate on your website everyday?

  [1] I've moderated private invite only forums with 20 members that generated 12-15 threads everyday! And yes - these threads were busy. 20 people were easily spending a total of more than 10 hours on the forum everyday.

  Action Summary:

  - Find 20 people who like your concept and invite them to participate before you launch. Make them your beta testers and ask them for their input. Give them non-monetary rewards (tshirts etc is a good idea). Let these folks populate your site and make it look busy.

  - Then on launch day, have a strategy in place that does generate 500-1000 visitors per day. Thats probably about $50-100 in ad expense per day if you don't have a viral aspect to your social website and your users don't drive traffic.

• by cloudwalking on 12/18/10, 7:24 AM

  At startup school, Adam D'Angelo (Quora founder) said they spent days at the beginning asking and answering questions on Quora. Sometimes you have to jumpstart the community with efforts that don't scale.

  It might be interesting to hear how HN started gaining traction. I know the old YC application asked about your Slashdot profile, so I imagine a group of people there felt there was a need for new community.

• by pankratiev on 12/18/10, 10:36 AM

  This question is actual for me. On week ago I've launched community for programmers which have a new approach to organizing content. It allows users share their posts using tags. And as you noticed - there is minimum content for now. So on this early stage people don't understand why my site can be useful for them. Another problem isthat I am not native speaker, so probably my explanations can be unclear. Anyway I am working on several articles about the idea of my site and will submit it on HN, Reddit. Also I am trying to write posts, submit links, add code snippets on the site. At least - in this case the site looks like alive and not empty.

  So, I can say that everything depends on the community niche, main idea of the site and what problems of users it can solve. You must have a good understanding of people who can be interested in your site and have a set of ideas how you can motivate them to start using your community. Anyway on the early stage you should at least make the site look alive.

• by bignerds on 12/21/10, 6:49 AM

  Mixergy has had some good interviews about how sites have built communities over time. As I recall, the interview with the founder of wallstreetoasis.com spent a lot of time talking about techniques he used to build his community from nothing. It might be worth checking out.

• by Mz on 12/18/10, 1:13 PM

  Some of the (more active/largish) online communities I have participated in either started as spin-offs of existing communities or started with a website that provided niche information. In one case, my understanding is that initially there was no ability to engage in discussion, that was added later and then the discussion part took over the site and the links section stopped being maintained.

• by supermanwillfly on 12/20/10, 2:38 AM

  Building a two-sided market it tricky but early on (as I've read) it takes a lot of non-scalable seeding. If you read up on Reddit and AirBnb, both attacked the problem by going out and manually adding content. In Reddit's case, they were adding the majority of content early on. Re: AirBnB they travelled and found early adopters.

  You have a link I can pass around to send some folks your way to check it out?