Ask HN: Chicken and egg problem in a community startup with a slow velocity?
Here is my startup, Fridge to Food. It is crowd sourcing for recipes: http://www.fridgetofood.com
A couple of months ago I posted this and got great feedback. I've been through quite a few iterations since then and have what is now a site that is minimally feature complete. I'm beginning to work on the more advanced reputation dependent features, but have a bit of a chicken and egg problem with the community. I have about 150 users, of whom some 20 maybe visit on a regular basis. And a handful post recipes on a regular basis. The site has a pretty slow velocity, because even the most dedicated users only have recipes to post a few times a month.
The issue I'm facing is that I'll need enough of a community to test the reputation dependent features when I implemented them. And I don't really have that right now. Unless I make the reputation threshold incredibly low, which beats the point.
So I'm facing the classic community based chicken and egg problem. I've pretty much mined my solid connection network out. The ones who cook regularly already use my site. The ones who don't, well, don't. I've been working pretty hard on Twitter and the various food-based subreddits to try and draw in some new early adopter users. But I've experienced limited success with that. Those who comment love it, and join. But the slow velocity often prevents them from doing much before forgetting about it. I've been trying to build connections with food bloggers, however, that is slow going. I'm not naturally a marketer type, so I have to spend a great deal of effort doing that. And it takes time away from writing code. I've considered cold e-mailing bloggers with a basically canned e-mail, but haven't tried it much. And when I have, I experienced pretty limited success there too.
So how can I solve the chicken and egg problem? People seem to love the concept of my site, and like the implementation. But the slow velocity and small community is preventing me from... well building a big enough community to have a higher velocity. Also, I'm having trouble just finding ways to get the link to it out there. Despite being pretty active on reddit and twitter I've only garnered about 3,000 unique views in about 1 month and a half. What are some other places I can put it out there?
Comments
It has to be first and foremost useful to people. So IMO you gotta fake it till you make it and here here's my suggestion: create 'fake accounts' and start scraping tons of recipes online to populate your site. Start working the SEO so when people show up, it doesn't look like the site is dead.
You have to invest time into the bloggers and try to incentivise then to join your site. You can start by listing the food bloggers that you like on the site (do follow) and slowly build up a relationship with them by regularly commenting on their posts.
Your first 1000 active users are going to be super important and will set the culture for the next 1000000 users. So even if the the current marketing efforts dont 'scale' very well, you still need to put in the grunt work to get escape velocity and some level of critical mass in your community.
How about going to events where there might be many of your target audience present to establish comms with them as well?
While Im at it, I think your homepage doesnt have a clear message. I can guess what the site is about from the food pictures but as Steve Krug says, what make me think?
Clickable link: http://www.fridgetofood.com