Startups Stack Exchange Archive

How to overcome the chicken and egg problem in user generated content startup?

• posted by: Community on 2014-12-30
• tagged: website, chicken-egg, content
• score: 6

Since some websites base their content on what people build for them while they use the site, how do they deal with having no content at the beginning of their existence?

Websites like chictopia or others don’t have much “user on-boarding” or content strategy towards explaining how it works and the benefits of it, they just have the UGC there working as the only content.

Answer 1805

• posted by: Okyasoft on 2014-12-30
• score: 6

It is indeed a challenge to bootstrap a user generated content (UGC) based website. It takes a lot of effort to build an engaging community. In the early days, if people do not see any content on your website they will not contribute and may leave. So you have to seed some initial content on the website. There is an interesting video about "Growing Reddit" where they explain how Reddit used fake user accounts initially to generate content. Other techniques often used are :

• Create artificial scarcity of user accounts by rolling out a limited number at a time
• Incentivize early adopters by offering privileges
• Creating a gamification platform based on content submitted with badges and awards
• Start with a core group of contributors and open to everyone at a later date

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