marketing, target-market, social-networkingHow can a start-up find the first users (say 1000 users) for a social networking site (imagine something like meetup, couchsurfing or Airbnb)? These users should be geographically close to each other (ie same state or city). It should be a cost-effective (as start-up is not funded and has no financial investment ). Essentially these users would be able to provide feedback, which would help with the UI and bug fixing.
Follow-up question: After these initial users, how many users would be required for this start-up to get seed funding (for non US)? Also how would that be possible to keep the site traction as high as that amount?
Simple answer is to find an existing network a piggyback off of it. For example, AirBNB did this with Craigslist; which just to be clear, was against Craigslist terms-of-service. Personally, based on experience, it's possible to do piggyback without pulling illegal tactics out of the bag via for example marketing partnerships in some cases, but the general gist is that the fastest way to going a network is using an existing network. (Beyond that, one could easly writing whole books on the topic, which clearly won't)
As for the second aspect of your question, I'd suggest reading Want To Raise A Million Bucks? Here’s What You’ll Need - to get a feel for how many users would be required for this start-up to get seed funding; finding non-us numbers is harder, and would likely vary by industry/vertical/investor anyway.
In friends and family funded start-up, entrepreneurs can often achieve initial users/customers from connected people, you need to compile a story about your self and start-up. You need to spare words to your existing friends and family, telling them about your start-up , like what ? why? how? you did.This story should be very much friendly and you can pass by using your Gmail account.
Jonas and qdot are very much right. You always have to think about some value added service for users, which they can utilize in their life. Like you can pass them a small valuable e-book or urls for interesting articles.
Like for you; I will suggest Pat Flynn.
It's not easy to tell that after how many minimum users, you will get fund. But once your start-up starts generating some revenue then Angel Investors will be interested to raise funds, as per your start-up & team capability.
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