Hi, I've tried starting multiple projects that faced this chicken and egg thing.
While I wouldn't call ourselves really successful, our latest venture, Fork the Cookbook succeeded by having what we call "single player mode". We had initially got people to add their favourite recipes into Fork the Cookbook (and in the last 5 days or so, this has come back to bite our asses), and thus, the 'single player mode' is essentially letting the users achieve something that can be done on their own (i.e. beautiful looking recipes for their personal collection)
Now after some amount of recipes, we're only starting to actively promote the community features (like forking a recipe).
All these came from our past experience in failing to gain enough traction on community sites. See my profile for more of my failed projects (there are a lot more listed on my latest blog entry where I was feeling rather blue).
Comments
Hi, I've tried starting multiple projects that faced this chicken and egg thing.
While I wouldn't call ourselves really successful, our latest venture, Fork the Cookbook succeeded by having what we call "single player mode". We had initially got people to add their favourite recipes into Fork the Cookbook (and in the last 5 days or so, this has come back to bite our asses), and thus, the 'single player mode' is essentially letting the users achieve something that can be done on their own (i.e. beautiful looking recipes for their personal collection)
Now after some amount of recipes, we're only starting to actively promote the community features (like forking a recipe).
All these came from our past experience in failing to gain enough traction on community sites. See my profile for more of my failed projects (there are a lot more listed on my latest blog entry where I was feeling rather blue).
This feels like a nice honest way to build a community. I like it.