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?
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?