growth, social-networkingSuppose I open new web site that is kinda like social media with some specific purpose. Immediately I see big problem - no matter how hard you would advertise your site and how much money you will spend, the guy who goes on your website and sees something like 0-10 users total he will not have any motivation to register there, even if the concept is good, because he expects a lot of different people there with whom he can interact. And registering just with hope that it will be better makes no sense too if site is almost empty, average user don’t expect the site going from 10 users to 10k in a month.
At first I thought of just creating 1000 or so fake accounts, but it would become obvious that they are fake if none of them replies to PM or replies with some generic bot phrases. So this is dead giveaway.
What is the solution for this problem?
What Reddit did was creating fake accounts, and having the founders and employees manually maintain them until there was enough traffic to become sustainable.
Another way to do it is to deliver enough value to the visitors that they’ll basically want to come, register and come back. Your question is too vague to give suggestions of what that might be in your specific case. But in essence, think along the lines of “to attract job candidates, offer job hunting tips, and build traffic and a database of job candidates based on that – and then go for the job offers.”
In my opinion, there is no single correct answer to this question, though I've used a number of different options as an approach to addressing this issue:
Fake it: This approach has been used a lot and has its issues. Core issue is that long-term you can't run a business on a fake network and there's always the potential for backlash legally and to good will. That said, it's a common solution, and as always, it's really up to the business to decide what's best for it.
Simulation: Pretty much the same thing as faking it, though it's clear to the users that the network is being feed/run by the company.
Substitution: This is not the same thing as faking it or simulation. Basically, you find a way to offer substitute for what in the future will be driven by the network. Core issue with this approach is sourcing the substitution and that the substitution is not the same thing as the "real" network.
Proxy: This approach is basically the same thing as substitution, though the intent is to use an existing network real-time as if it was your own. Clearly, there are a number of issues with this, though this has also been done before, and worth noting as an option.
Limited launch: This is often the best approach, that being to very selectively pick an existing network to provide the product to, then if possible, leverage that success to grow beyond the network used to launch the network. This is the approach that Facebook and others has used with great success.
That said, based on my experience, it's possible to do valid customer development without a product that's in final form. Generally speaking, all that's required to validate a network effect based product is that the customer understands that intent and function of the product. Next step is to ask each customer in the first dev-cycle to invite 7-12 of their existing network to take part in the next customer development cycle. If you get enough traction leaping through the networks manually, then that's a very good indicator for the future of the product and its related network. Clearly, having something real to show a customer is better than not, but more often than not you'll learn more by directly engaging customers as soon as possible.
Building on the above, when you're scaling a product knowing the minimum viable network required to onboard new user network clusters is critical. If you're aware that a network has a user that has not been onboarded and another that to your knowledge has no existing connections, you're much more likely to land the user with existing connections than the user with no connections. Further, if you're able to map networks of users before their onboard you might even attempt to find an optimal path through the network to insure you're focusing on the right users to execute a leapfrogging strategy on.
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