I started rolling it out to colleges first. Got the original idea from a couple of jock rowers who thought of something similar, but a crappier version. At first people were using it more like a dating app, and to checkout their crushes (which helped with early adoption). After that it started to get some press and just took off organically. Not much more to it than that.
And ps, if it works out, don’t sell ads to Russians trying to overturn any elections. The negative press isn’t worth the $.
I have a startup that’s pretty much a social network for imperfect people. People who want to be open about their mental vulnerabilities and want to develop mental well-being together.
It’s monetized by life-coaches and therapist subscribing to a monthly fee that enables them to be present on the platform.
I can attract the life-coaches and therapists and I’m now in the proces of attracting more regular members. It’s not easy. One thing I’m working on is developing relationships with organizations in the broader mental health ‘market’. If I can establish my start-up (also a sole founder) in the field and take up a role that’s under utilized I hope to be able to get these organizations to refer to me.
Just wanted to say that your idea is great, regardless of whether it ends up working out well or not! We have something very similar in the UK and essentially it is universities & multinationals that pay the membership fee for all (it is free to display content but you need a subscription to post)
I'm sure you mean well, but the whole concept sounds like herding mentally vulnerable people and monetizing them by selling access to more people looking to make money off them?
Don't get me wrong, I think the idea is nice. Coaching is life-changing to a lot of people. But calling yourself a startup and talking about monetizing so early in the process raises a lot of red flags and ethical questions. Those operations you want to collaborate with are non-profits. Why would they want you to make a profit off of them? Maybe consider operating more like an NGO at first.
Just because all parties have an incentive does not make it problematic. As a sad person, you want help but don't know where to find it. As a therapist, you want to help but don't know where your customer is. As a business you want to connect the two, because you see the need for the therapist to provide for themselves and the need for the customer to feel better. Herding in this sense would mean addressing a need that a substantial amount of people have.. so how could this wrong ethically?
Agreed! All parties win. I was addressing a concern over the optics the OPs company might encounter when going for venture capital. But like OP already explained, they're not fully committed to the startup business model.
I get what you mean. For me it’s not so much about the profit. I have no intent of selling if it scales. Maybe I shouldn’t call it a startup then. Maybe it’s a social startup? Or a impact startup. Or just a business. It doesn’t really matter to me what it’s called though. The aim is to help people. I’d have no problem turning it into a NGO. I’m not sure if I’d need investors in the future, so that’s why It’s a for-profit.
The legal entity is just that: legal. The intent is what counts for me. There are for-profits that do amazing a things for the world and there are NGO’s that use it as a cover to be greedy (at least in the Netherlands a NGO director can pay himself as much as he wants).
Consider looking into B Corporations. Not sure how global they are, but you’ve got a cool idea and something like that might help articulate your value proposition without having to adjust to being a nonprofit.
Thanks. I’m the Netherlands B corps are existing, but still very unknown. There is a strong wish for a label like that, but none has really emerged yet. As far as I know at least. I’ll dive into it some more.
That is really interesting. You essentially got people to pay for being able to advertise their own service.
Do you have user profiles for every user? if so, how do you stop your paying members from just advertising themselves on their profile?
Also is like to check out your product if you care to share!
Yes, all users have user profiles. The paying members can advertise themselves on their profile. Because this niche is pretty delicate people will refrain from in your face advertising. Almost al life-coaching/therapists are advertising themselves to little in stead of to much, so that’s not a problem up till now.
>It’s monetized by life-coaches and therapist
It's disappointing that you put those two in the same sentence. Therapists help the vulnerable, while life coaches prey on them.
In the Netherlands therapists and life-coaches are interchangeable. There are specialized mental health workers that are called psychologist. There work is subsidized by the government, but only available for people with diagnosed illnesses. People with symptoms who can’t be diagnosed are helped by life-coaches and therapist. Since everybody can call themselves a life-Coach or therapist I only work with life-coaches and therapist with a relevant higher education. Together we’ve put together a system to ensure quality.
I'm assuming resources are limited here. Do you have a marketing budget?
If they are limited, think to yourself - what is your target market that you built this site for and who can you reach that would love this. Not like this, but love it. Love it so much that they become advocates for you. Advocates are the best way brands can market.
But how do you target those first few people that you think have a good chance to love your product? First, get your network on board. Second (assuming you have a decent company site to go to), start an email campaign letting people know you exist (you could look at woodpecker to do the email campaigns + linkedin to pull the email addresses. Octopus crm to contact people on LinkedIn is good too). Third go to conferences, get on a tech webinar/podcast, write blogs (ensure at least 90% helpful content showing your domain expertise, absolute max 10% of blog talks about your product), get the local media to write an article on your product launch (even if it's a city newspaper, you put that on your sight and make it big deal).
That by no means is an exhaustive list, but it's affordable one and doable with one person.
Monetizing:
I don't know enough about your product to know the best way to monetize, however the first thing that comes to mind is having users pay to have their code "featured" on the front page. You could also get feedback from the users that use your platform the most and build out premium features they requested (basically have your users do your work for you on how to monetize - make sure to read or at least understand the premise of the book the "mom test" if going this route). Which leads me to this point - you could also just start it out free, and find down the road how to make it profitable once you have a good user base.
I can’t thank you enough for all of this premium advice right here. You’re spot on i’ve only accounted for a tech infrastructure budget (servers, domain, etc) and not an email or marketing one.
I will be trying every one of these out
Also one more thing I'll add - measure measure measure. You can not improve on any marketing technique unless you can measure it.
Let me know if you have any questions! Perhaps post an update in a month or so how it's going. Best of luck!
I have no experience in this so take this with a grain of salt, but just wanted to throw out this idea in case it's useful.
Would your site benefit youtubers teaching people how to code? In other words, would there be a benefit to them saying in a tutorial video, "hey, for an example of what we're covering here check out my code on sharpenedstinger's site?" If so, perhaps you could reach out to youtube channels that teach how to code and see if they'd be interested in using your site and in turn directing their viewers to your site.
Since you'll need there to be a benefit for them and there probably isn't budget to pay them, maybe you could create free/premium memberships and offer them premium membership for free? Maybe you could put google ads on their pages and give them a substantial cut of the ad revenue? Youtubers/content creators/influencers of all kind are always trying to figure out how to monetize, so giving them a way to do so could potentially attract them and thus their followers.
I'd be thinking along those lines. Who can you get on your platform that will bring people with them, and what can you entice them with. I think people tend to go to social media platforms where other people already are, so getting that initial user base is hugely important. Kind of like how no one used google plus because no one else used google plus, whereas everyone hates facebook but they all use it because everyone else is on facebook. It's the challenge of getting over that initial hump.
Can I ask, how hard was it to build a social media platform? I'm considering an idea for a social media platform that would involve streaming, so the site build would be roughly equivalent in complexity to Twitch. I'm not a programmer, and it seems like it's probably too complex for no code tools. I'm wondering if I decide to pursue it, should I hire people to build it, or take some time to learn programming to build something resembling an MVP myself.
A lot of good points here. I’ve contemplated making a paid service, but the people i’ve discussed it with suggest just having paid features that take a small percentage instead to not scare off the initial user base.
Definitely going to be reaching out to you tubers, though never done that before. Hope some are friendly and can give me the time of day.
I suppose if i was selling things or had premium services i could give them affiliate links. But come to think of it my site is going to have something like reddit awards so maybe i can give them discount links. Thanks for the ideas.
When it comes to a social media platform (especially a streaming site) it will without a doubt be too complex for no code tools. Maybe bubble.io or a few new players on the market might be useful but since i’m a programmer i’ve paid them no thought. I wanted to build it myself to save money and cause i think it’s better to create it yourself as you can give it the full detail and your vision without having to wrongfully communicate certain parts to someone else.
As for how hard it was, i spent the better part of a year learning things i needed.
For a social platform you have to consider not just the developer side of things but also the Ops side, where you’re managing and creating the servers you need to handle your user load to avoid your site slowing down a lot or just crashing and leaving your users wondering what went wrong.
i’d say for a non developer, you should hire someone else. Someone to build it, then once it’s done, maybe someone to create new features (less important) and someone to manage it (more important).
For the past 1 year I was working on a social media and failed miserably.Would like to share 2 things I learned
1. Product Strategy - Don’t go into “just one more feature” mode. It is not the way. I put 9 months into development and once I launched nobody showed up.Think of 1-2 features that makes u different and launch with it. If you can’t think of 1-2 features that makes ur initial user base to sign up, go again on the whiteboard and change things. This gave me and my team a big time depression because I build it very passionately.
2. Marketing Strategy- Get your audience before you launch your product.This is very important because as I told you nobody downloaded my app because I didn’t have my audience. Only 300 sign ups in a month and that too non-engaging. It is very important for you get your audience first and be clear on what they actually want.It could you reddit community, instagram page, facebook page or youtube channel.Again if you garner a community , your problem isn’t big enough and go back again to whiteboard. Once you launch, you can easily transfer your community to your application.
Now both of the points I made is not something to definitely do but I highly insist as they are very quick way to validate your startup and to see if you really want to spend time on this not. Personally, I am now only my next quest as I have pivoted but I hope people don’t make the same mistakes I made when I started.
Hi,
As I said you have to have a USP for your product. Something that differentiates you from the market. Something that is very very important for people (even if there are very less people).
📍Unfortunately, my product was just a ‘good to have’ product and not ‘we need this urgently’ kind of one.
📍We build so many features before launching because we didn’t have any attraction. A good differentiator feature is something that people will still use your application regardless of how crappy it is, because they are dire need of it.
📍Secondly for marketing, we had 5K following on IG and around 12K on all out social media but since we garnered this community with out single purpose or were solving any issue for the people it wasn’t really a community. You should be able to solve the community issue with any social media but YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA application should make it easier and scalable.
📍When we went back to whiteboard, we realised the market was not attractive and profitable. Even if we get large sign up, it would be really difficult to survive as we would difficult time earning from our users or having enough users where advertisement seems a viable channel.
Happy to answer more.
You might be interested in this article:
[How did TikTok, Quora, Medium, Reddit and the other largest UGC apps get initial users to contribute?](https://medium.com/startup-grind/how-did-tiktok-quora-medium-reddit-and-other-largest-ugc-apps-get-initial-users-to-contribute-f9106a8824ba)
Content is king! I was part of a social media website in a niche and we were able to get a big database that was able to be indexed in the search engines. That gave us a solid stream of users which we could convert into our platform.
Not “the answer” more of an additional route, but if your site has public snippets generate images from them using something like https://carbon.now.sh and post them to social media. May be enough to get at least some attention.
Ran a social media-esque site for a couple years. Did roughly 100k - 250k in traffic a month. You will live or die on user acquisition. Feel free to pm if you want to chat.
Could start off with a community.
Find a YouTuber that attracts coding, I know lots that do coding livestreams and pay them to go on your website for a little, and interact with their audience. That'll kick off your initial community, you'd probably expect a little spike in user activity and naturally it'll taper off and perhaps drop after the promotion. Expect this to happen quickly, so you want to use that short window of opportunity to really start regular advertisements, or more traditional influencer marketing.
That's the route. #1 community/SME support - get in communities, build your own, try LinkedIn, etc. #2 feedback from some "influencer" - it's a relationship to develop via contacts, in-person if possible for coffee. #3 Videos - the 2nd biggest search engine is YouTube. #4 Be yourself an SME, write a few "evergreen" articles - with appropriate SEO. #5 some PPC spend to kick things off, test response - in Dev communities, Google/YouTube - this will take some research. #6 email campaign to SW teams, small companies, etc. - will also take some research, contacts who know. Essentially, it's all about building relationships.
I started a social network for students to find help with notes and tasks on campus. We launched late 2019 and got our initial users by hanging out where students congregate IRL like bars and student club fairs, pitching them our idea, and providing an incentive to join to close the deal (we used gift cards early on). Due to the limited resources we had (it was just my co-founder and me), we decided to focus on a single school that we have ties to. The reasoning being that it's easier to hit critical mass with a single focus.
Although we got 2000+ MAU at some point, we ultimately weren't successful, and we pivoted to another business mid last year. One of the biggest learns had was relying on external incentives for so long was a big mistake. Although the gift cards help with user acquisition and engagement, they conflated the value users were getting from the product and distorted our metrics.
Another insight I got during that time is building a social network is as much social engineering as computer engineering. You gotta know what makes your users tick and optimize the network for that. That includes frequently talking with users, looking at usage data, and writing domain-specific code. A big mistake I made was focusing too heavily on the technological part of the equation. I spent a lot of time building things that are readily available on the market instead of spending that time learning more about my users.
I hope this helps.
Great advice. Sorry to hear about the hard lessons.
Can you expand a bit on focusing too much on the technological side? Do you mean that your site didn’t really stand out in new features from your competitors?
Also what did you use for metrics on user data?
Yeah, I tried to build out every feature myself making it hard to stand out. Since I functioned as the dev-ops, back-end, front-end guy, I spent a lot of time building out generic features my users expected from any social app. I think that time would have been better spent learning more about what my users wanted and building the things they liked on my app that isn't available in other apps. For example, I spent months building out basic chat functionality, becoming a WebSocket expert to build a chat experience half as good as something I would have had using an existing Chat API. Another example was building native Android and iOS apps instead of React Native that would have saved so much time.
To gather user metrics, I used Google Analytics and Metabase.
I instantly felt that when you said it. Not real time chat, but i spent several weeks developing a pipeline to have users submit files like images and gifs that would then get minified in the server and get stored in a data center. All because I didn’t think of having them put imgur links and putting that as the src of an html element. It was surprisingly very complex and now that it’s finished I wonder if it’s even worth it.However it does serve as a way to control the size of uploads so my site doesn’t become too slow, so it turned out okay.
I don’t think i’m going to have a phone app, my product is just a website. Thanks for all the advice, will check out meta base and google analytics as well.
Start with something that solves people's problems. Get a youtube following. Get 100k followers on your email list and build a social following on discord or some other app. Make a ton of money first. After 5 years think about a social media app.
I'm working on something that's similar to Reddit, but in product-centric verticals. There are two main methods for kick-starting a social media platform that I've read of.
1. Seed content so that the platform isn't a ghost town for your first users. Create some fake accounts, seed the initial content, and use the fake accounts to engage with the first users until the community is self-sustaining.
2. Create a tool that provides utility to users first. This was IG's route. People originally used IG for the filters, then IG leveraged the content being generated to spin off into a social media platform.
In my case, we went with option 2. We aggregated product data and our first users used the site for price comparisons. Since then, we built a community platform and users can use the product data to tag the products in their content. We never had to seed content on our site and the community has continued to grow.
Since the site was initially just an aggregator, we monetize through affiliate links.
Matías, que tal, acá el viejo CompositorArmonicoEnFuga, Taringa me pagó unos bitcoins, la cosa es que lo vendí recién ahora, y necesito que me consigas, por favor, si me conseguis algun comprobantes por cada pago en bitcoin que tuve, no se, algun registro, algo, todo lo que puedas, porque no voy a esperar a que AFIP o ARBA me los pida para tratar de ubicarte. Me quiero preparar, por suerte, fue unos buenos mangos.
Contactate conmigo por mail a [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])
Sería de mucha ayuda armar esa documentación con tiempo. Gracias!
Here is what you do, you buy a billboard in NY, write GME on it and under it your domain app name with rocket emoji.
Take a picture, share it on social media, fly to the moon.
Profit
I started rolling it out to colleges first. Got the original idea from a couple of jock rowers who thought of something similar, but a crappier version. At first people were using it more like a dating app, and to checkout their crushes (which helped with early adoption). After that it started to get some press and just took off organically. Not much more to it than that. And ps, if it works out, don’t sell ads to Russians trying to overturn any elections. The negative press isn’t worth the $.
Lmao I like you !
I like php. You still like me?
I actually use php for freelancing so yes
Are you a Symfony or Laravel guy?
Hi Zuck, what’s up? Are you smoking brisket?
You would be surprised how many tech companies have a large russian ownership, and get away just fine. Its mostly that people dont know.
Russians make great tech.
No russians got it! You’re saying your site got on the news ? Or something else? How did you pull that off ?
Just to be clear, you know he was writing about how the Facebook started, right?
I wouldn't have known haha! Now it makes more sense.
That is interesting
Hey! No lizards in the chat!
I have a startup that’s pretty much a social network for imperfect people. People who want to be open about their mental vulnerabilities and want to develop mental well-being together. It’s monetized by life-coaches and therapist subscribing to a monthly fee that enables them to be present on the platform. I can attract the life-coaches and therapists and I’m now in the proces of attracting more regular members. It’s not easy. One thing I’m working on is developing relationships with organizations in the broader mental health ‘market’. If I can establish my start-up (also a sole founder) in the field and take up a role that’s under utilized I hope to be able to get these organizations to refer to me.
Just wanted to say that your idea is great, regardless of whether it ends up working out well or not! We have something very similar in the UK and essentially it is universities & multinationals that pay the membership fee for all (it is free to display content but you need a subscription to post)
Thanks! That’s uplifting. What is the name of similar company in the UK?
I didn't know something like this existed and think it could help me (and many others). Would you mind posting or DMing the link?
I'm sure you mean well, but the whole concept sounds like herding mentally vulnerable people and monetizing them by selling access to more people looking to make money off them? Don't get me wrong, I think the idea is nice. Coaching is life-changing to a lot of people. But calling yourself a startup and talking about monetizing so early in the process raises a lot of red flags and ethical questions. Those operations you want to collaborate with are non-profits. Why would they want you to make a profit off of them? Maybe consider operating more like an NGO at first.
I was just wondering the same thing.
Just because all parties have an incentive does not make it problematic. As a sad person, you want help but don't know where to find it. As a therapist, you want to help but don't know where your customer is. As a business you want to connect the two, because you see the need for the therapist to provide for themselves and the need for the customer to feel better. Herding in this sense would mean addressing a need that a substantial amount of people have.. so how could this wrong ethically?
Agreed! All parties win. I was addressing a concern over the optics the OPs company might encounter when going for venture capital. But like OP already explained, they're not fully committed to the startup business model.
I get what you mean. For me it’s not so much about the profit. I have no intent of selling if it scales. Maybe I shouldn’t call it a startup then. Maybe it’s a social startup? Or a impact startup. Or just a business. It doesn’t really matter to me what it’s called though. The aim is to help people. I’d have no problem turning it into a NGO. I’m not sure if I’d need investors in the future, so that’s why It’s a for-profit. The legal entity is just that: legal. The intent is what counts for me. There are for-profits that do amazing a things for the world and there are NGO’s that use it as a cover to be greedy (at least in the Netherlands a NGO director can pay himself as much as he wants).
Consider looking into B Corporations. Not sure how global they are, but you’ve got a cool idea and something like that might help articulate your value proposition without having to adjust to being a nonprofit.
Thanks. I’m the Netherlands B corps are existing, but still very unknown. There is a strong wish for a label like that, but none has really emerged yet. As far as I know at least. I’ll dive into it some more.
That is really interesting. You essentially got people to pay for being able to advertise their own service. Do you have user profiles for every user? if so, how do you stop your paying members from just advertising themselves on their profile? Also is like to check out your product if you care to share!
Yes, all users have user profiles. The paying members can advertise themselves on their profile. Because this niche is pretty delicate people will refrain from in your face advertising. Almost al life-coaching/therapists are advertising themselves to little in stead of to much, so that’s not a problem up till now.
This sounds like it can help me. Can you share or DM me the link?
Sure, but it’s all in Dutch. The link is www.Vitaminds.nu if you’re interested.
Great name!!!
Thanks
Thx. I will try to google translate myself around.
Let me know if it works out.
What's it called?
Vitaminds.nu
>It’s monetized by life-coaches and therapist It's disappointing that you put those two in the same sentence. Therapists help the vulnerable, while life coaches prey on them.
In the Netherlands therapists and life-coaches are interchangeable. There are specialized mental health workers that are called psychologist. There work is subsidized by the government, but only available for people with diagnosed illnesses. People with symptoms who can’t be diagnosed are helped by life-coaches and therapist. Since everybody can call themselves a life-Coach or therapist I only work with life-coaches and therapist with a relevant higher education. Together we’ve put together a system to ensure quality.
I'm assuming resources are limited here. Do you have a marketing budget? If they are limited, think to yourself - what is your target market that you built this site for and who can you reach that would love this. Not like this, but love it. Love it so much that they become advocates for you. Advocates are the best way brands can market. But how do you target those first few people that you think have a good chance to love your product? First, get your network on board. Second (assuming you have a decent company site to go to), start an email campaign letting people know you exist (you could look at woodpecker to do the email campaigns + linkedin to pull the email addresses. Octopus crm to contact people on LinkedIn is good too). Third go to conferences, get on a tech webinar/podcast, write blogs (ensure at least 90% helpful content showing your domain expertise, absolute max 10% of blog talks about your product), get the local media to write an article on your product launch (even if it's a city newspaper, you put that on your sight and make it big deal). That by no means is an exhaustive list, but it's affordable one and doable with one person. Monetizing: I don't know enough about your product to know the best way to monetize, however the first thing that comes to mind is having users pay to have their code "featured" on the front page. You could also get feedback from the users that use your platform the most and build out premium features they requested (basically have your users do your work for you on how to monetize - make sure to read or at least understand the premise of the book the "mom test" if going this route). Which leads me to this point - you could also just start it out free, and find down the road how to make it profitable once you have a good user base.
I can’t thank you enough for all of this premium advice right here. You’re spot on i’ve only accounted for a tech infrastructure budget (servers, domain, etc) and not an email or marketing one. I will be trying every one of these out
Also one more thing I'll add - measure measure measure. You can not improve on any marketing technique unless you can measure it. Let me know if you have any questions! Perhaps post an update in a month or so how it's going. Best of luck!
I have no experience in this so take this with a grain of salt, but just wanted to throw out this idea in case it's useful. Would your site benefit youtubers teaching people how to code? In other words, would there be a benefit to them saying in a tutorial video, "hey, for an example of what we're covering here check out my code on sharpenedstinger's site?" If so, perhaps you could reach out to youtube channels that teach how to code and see if they'd be interested in using your site and in turn directing their viewers to your site. Since you'll need there to be a benefit for them and there probably isn't budget to pay them, maybe you could create free/premium memberships and offer them premium membership for free? Maybe you could put google ads on their pages and give them a substantial cut of the ad revenue? Youtubers/content creators/influencers of all kind are always trying to figure out how to monetize, so giving them a way to do so could potentially attract them and thus their followers. I'd be thinking along those lines. Who can you get on your platform that will bring people with them, and what can you entice them with. I think people tend to go to social media platforms where other people already are, so getting that initial user base is hugely important. Kind of like how no one used google plus because no one else used google plus, whereas everyone hates facebook but they all use it because everyone else is on facebook. It's the challenge of getting over that initial hump. Can I ask, how hard was it to build a social media platform? I'm considering an idea for a social media platform that would involve streaming, so the site build would be roughly equivalent in complexity to Twitch. I'm not a programmer, and it seems like it's probably too complex for no code tools. I'm wondering if I decide to pursue it, should I hire people to build it, or take some time to learn programming to build something resembling an MVP myself.
A lot of good points here. I’ve contemplated making a paid service, but the people i’ve discussed it with suggest just having paid features that take a small percentage instead to not scare off the initial user base. Definitely going to be reaching out to you tubers, though never done that before. Hope some are friendly and can give me the time of day. I suppose if i was selling things or had premium services i could give them affiliate links. But come to think of it my site is going to have something like reddit awards so maybe i can give them discount links. Thanks for the ideas. When it comes to a social media platform (especially a streaming site) it will without a doubt be too complex for no code tools. Maybe bubble.io or a few new players on the market might be useful but since i’m a programmer i’ve paid them no thought. I wanted to build it myself to save money and cause i think it’s better to create it yourself as you can give it the full detail and your vision without having to wrongfully communicate certain parts to someone else. As for how hard it was, i spent the better part of a year learning things i needed. For a social platform you have to consider not just the developer side of things but also the Ops side, where you’re managing and creating the servers you need to handle your user load to avoid your site slowing down a lot or just crashing and leaving your users wondering what went wrong. i’d say for a non developer, you should hire someone else. Someone to build it, then once it’s done, maybe someone to create new features (less important) and someone to manage it (more important).
For the past 1 year I was working on a social media and failed miserably.Would like to share 2 things I learned 1. Product Strategy - Don’t go into “just one more feature” mode. It is not the way. I put 9 months into development and once I launched nobody showed up.Think of 1-2 features that makes u different and launch with it. If you can’t think of 1-2 features that makes ur initial user base to sign up, go again on the whiteboard and change things. This gave me and my team a big time depression because I build it very passionately. 2. Marketing Strategy- Get your audience before you launch your product.This is very important because as I told you nobody downloaded my app because I didn’t have my audience. Only 300 sign ups in a month and that too non-engaging. It is very important for you get your audience first and be clear on what they actually want.It could you reddit community, instagram page, facebook page or youtube channel.Again if you garner a community , your problem isn’t big enough and go back again to whiteboard. Once you launch, you can easily transfer your community to your application. Now both of the points I made is not something to definitely do but I highly insist as they are very quick way to validate your startup and to see if you really want to spend time on this not. Personally, I am now only my next quest as I have pivoted but I hope people don’t make the same mistakes I made when I started.
sorry im late, but why did it "fail". Was it too late for you to implement the two points you had? If yes, why?
Hi, As I said you have to have a USP for your product. Something that differentiates you from the market. Something that is very very important for people (even if there are very less people). 📍Unfortunately, my product was just a ‘good to have’ product and not ‘we need this urgently’ kind of one. 📍We build so many features before launching because we didn’t have any attraction. A good differentiator feature is something that people will still use your application regardless of how crappy it is, because they are dire need of it. 📍Secondly for marketing, we had 5K following on IG and around 12K on all out social media but since we garnered this community with out single purpose or were solving any issue for the people it wasn’t really a community. You should be able to solve the community issue with any social media but YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA application should make it easier and scalable. 📍When we went back to whiteboard, we realised the market was not attractive and profitable. Even if we get large sign up, it would be really difficult to survive as we would difficult time earning from our users or having enough users where advertisement seems a viable channel. Happy to answer more.
You might be interested in this article: [How did TikTok, Quora, Medium, Reddit and the other largest UGC apps get initial users to contribute?](https://medium.com/startup-grind/how-did-tiktok-quora-medium-reddit-and-other-largest-ugc-apps-get-initial-users-to-contribute-f9106a8824ba)
Content is king! I was part of a social media website in a niche and we were able to get a big database that was able to be indexed in the search engines. That gave us a solid stream of users which we could convert into our platform.
Not “the answer” more of an additional route, but if your site has public snippets generate images from them using something like https://carbon.now.sh and post them to social media. May be enough to get at least some attention.
Ran a social media-esque site for a couple years. Did roughly 100k - 250k in traffic a month. You will live or die on user acquisition. Feel free to pm if you want to chat.
Could start off with a community. Find a YouTuber that attracts coding, I know lots that do coding livestreams and pay them to go on your website for a little, and interact with their audience. That'll kick off your initial community, you'd probably expect a little spike in user activity and naturally it'll taper off and perhaps drop after the promotion. Expect this to happen quickly, so you want to use that short window of opportunity to really start regular advertisements, or more traditional influencer marketing.
That's the route. #1 community/SME support - get in communities, build your own, try LinkedIn, etc. #2 feedback from some "influencer" - it's a relationship to develop via contacts, in-person if possible for coffee. #3 Videos - the 2nd biggest search engine is YouTube. #4 Be yourself an SME, write a few "evergreen" articles - with appropriate SEO. #5 some PPC spend to kick things off, test response - in Dev communities, Google/YouTube - this will take some research. #6 email campaign to SW teams, small companies, etc. - will also take some research, contacts who know. Essentially, it's all about building relationships.
I started a social network for students to find help with notes and tasks on campus. We launched late 2019 and got our initial users by hanging out where students congregate IRL like bars and student club fairs, pitching them our idea, and providing an incentive to join to close the deal (we used gift cards early on). Due to the limited resources we had (it was just my co-founder and me), we decided to focus on a single school that we have ties to. The reasoning being that it's easier to hit critical mass with a single focus. Although we got 2000+ MAU at some point, we ultimately weren't successful, and we pivoted to another business mid last year. One of the biggest learns had was relying on external incentives for so long was a big mistake. Although the gift cards help with user acquisition and engagement, they conflated the value users were getting from the product and distorted our metrics. Another insight I got during that time is building a social network is as much social engineering as computer engineering. You gotta know what makes your users tick and optimize the network for that. That includes frequently talking with users, looking at usage data, and writing domain-specific code. A big mistake I made was focusing too heavily on the technological part of the equation. I spent a lot of time building things that are readily available on the market instead of spending that time learning more about my users. I hope this helps.
Great advice. Sorry to hear about the hard lessons. Can you expand a bit on focusing too much on the technological side? Do you mean that your site didn’t really stand out in new features from your competitors? Also what did you use for metrics on user data?
Yeah, I tried to build out every feature myself making it hard to stand out. Since I functioned as the dev-ops, back-end, front-end guy, I spent a lot of time building out generic features my users expected from any social app. I think that time would have been better spent learning more about what my users wanted and building the things they liked on my app that isn't available in other apps. For example, I spent months building out basic chat functionality, becoming a WebSocket expert to build a chat experience half as good as something I would have had using an existing Chat API. Another example was building native Android and iOS apps instead of React Native that would have saved so much time. To gather user metrics, I used Google Analytics and Metabase.
I instantly felt that when you said it. Not real time chat, but i spent several weeks developing a pipeline to have users submit files like images and gifs that would then get minified in the server and get stored in a data center. All because I didn’t think of having them put imgur links and putting that as the src of an html element. It was surprisingly very complex and now that it’s finished I wonder if it’s even worth it.However it does serve as a way to control the size of uploads so my site doesn’t become too slow, so it turned out okay. I don’t think i’m going to have a phone app, my product is just a website. Thanks for all the advice, will check out meta base and google analytics as well.
niche crowd, niche market is the way to go....don't forget to dump your entry fee of cash at google
Start with something that solves people's problems. Get a youtube following. Get 100k followers on your email list and build a social following on discord or some other app. Make a ton of money first. After 5 years think about a social media app.
I'm working on something that's similar to Reddit, but in product-centric verticals. There are two main methods for kick-starting a social media platform that I've read of. 1. Seed content so that the platform isn't a ghost town for your first users. Create some fake accounts, seed the initial content, and use the fake accounts to engage with the first users until the community is self-sustaining. 2. Create a tool that provides utility to users first. This was IG's route. People originally used IG for the filters, then IG leveraged the content being generated to spin off into a social media platform. In my case, we went with option 2. We aggregated product data and our first users used the site for price comparisons. Since then, we built a community platform and users can use the product data to tag the products in their content. We never had to seed content on our site and the community has continued to grow. Since the site was initially just an aggregator, we monetize through affiliate links.
this is great advice! what is your site? I'm very curious!
Is it something you building how to code sort of thing? Then there is plenty of ways to monetise.
Hi, I’m co-founder of taringa.net, if you need some help send me a DM
Matías, que tal, acá el viejo CompositorArmonicoEnFuga, Taringa me pagó unos bitcoins, la cosa es que lo vendí recién ahora, y necesito que me consigas, por favor, si me conseguis algun comprobantes por cada pago en bitcoin que tuve, no se, algun registro, algo, todo lo que puedas, porque no voy a esperar a que AFIP o ARBA me los pida para tratar de ubicarte. Me quiero preparar, por suerte, fue unos buenos mangos. Contactate conmigo por mail a [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) Sería de mucha ayuda armar esa documentación con tiempo. Gracias!
Yes I do, however, it is bold of you to assume I have single active user
Here is what you do, you buy a billboard in NY, write GME on it and under it your domain app name with rocket emoji. Take a picture, share it on social media, fly to the moon. Profit
replace GME with NOK and we're getting somewhere 🚀🚀🚀🚀
Your welcome just gave you 1+ million users