tech-company, mobile-apps, crowd-fundingI plan to start my dating app, which is sort of a community site. Users would expect to find there other users also in first time at launch ling the app. How would you provide this expectation? Should I hire some ‘built in’ :-) user who treat more user profile, and answer questions in the first time, when crowed is not yet exist? Do you have experience?
Some of the ideas given in this answer are relevant to you as well :
- 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
My suggestion would be to start locally, build an app for dating in your own city/community. As your app grows you can expand to other markets.
Sorry for the short answer but I think it gets the point across.
As I understand the dating industry, it’s possible to buy user profiles from some of your competitors. They’re technically “not real” users in the sense that they actually signed up to your site, but they’ve expressed an interest in being part of a dating site at one point, the profiles are genuine or based on genuine data, and it most certainly gives the instant impression that there are lots of users around.
Also look into doing what Reddit did, i.e. have a few employees masquerade as active users to encourage newcomers to stay long around enough for it to matter.
As you do, work out key metrics that matter for your site. In the case of social networks, for instance, the key reportedly is to have 10 friends or contacts – that’s enough for users to stay around. Find out what your equivalent milestones are and gear your efforts to make your users achieve them in order to grow.
I just don’t see the value in faking users for a dating site. I don’t know that you have to publish how many users you have yet. But if you think about user satisfaction, a user is much more satisfied to find nobody yet in their area than they are to send out a bunch of requests to connect with people and have them all be ignored because they are bots/employees/empty.
Instead I would saturate the forums/sites/advertising places relevant to your community with invites and promote the fact that it is new. Encourage people to be the first to come check out your new site. The fact that isn’t packed full of stale profiles should be a bonus.
I would also consider crossing over into non-web space by hosting some speed dating events or other things to get signups. Maybe start a “meet up” for singles in the area and use that to encourage people to come mingle.
Lastly, you can engage in a dialogue with new users. If you have so few that you can afford personal attention it will mean a lot. Encourage them to work on the quality of their profile/etc.
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