Building a social discovery platform but for it to be anyway useful , we will need volume of folks to be on the platform trying to interact at one time. It might be easy problem to solve for companies like fb,reddit, Insta etc but how should a startup solve it?
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From what I have found, a guy that launched his own version of Tinder basically faked it till he made it…he paid actors to make up a story of how they met, they posted it and it went viral…not saying this is the way to go, but most new apps probably are “smoke and mirrors”.
What comes to my mind - offer highly limited discounts/VIP options. Add affiliate marketing features - invite a friend, get this or that. Ideally, you would already have people who have at least signed up and are just waiting for the beta to come out. An official launch builds hype - you can build a community on Discord/Twitter and make them anxiously wait to try it out before anyone else with Apple Test Flight for example. Plenty of ideas actually now that I started writing.
Watch the masterclass by wolf herd on how she got bumble going
Research 2 sided market place for insights into identifying critical mass.
The answer is capital for marketing campaign
Several good feedbacks in the comments. Also, include various hooks when users share findings to others, the others get pulled to you organically.
Definitely read The Cold Problem. But the gist is you need to figure out the hard side of your market - there’s always supply and demand and one of those is harder.
Get a bunch of hard side people to sign on individually (e.g. have an actual conversation with them).
Then get a bunch of easy side to come and check out the hard side that are already there. Again you’ll need to find those people manually and sign them on.
You need to go super niche - the same kind of people with the same kinds of interests need to get together at your site at the same time - actual physical time. Otherwise there’s no momentum.
It’s a hard problem to crack but when you do crack it it can grow beautifully because of network effects.
So if you’re committed to it, go for it!
That’s the problem that needed to be solved before you started to build anything.
Read a summary of The Cold Start Problem.
Make the product useful from the start, even for a single user, or focus on a specialized niche of users.
Social discovery platforms rely on heavy network effects. See if you can find examples of startups that have succeeded in this space. You’ll find very few.
I love a good book recommendation, especially in this community! Imma add this to my list.
I would recommend a tactic most marketing agencies use to get their initial batch of Email addresses for email marketing. They essentially offer a Free e-product (PDF, template) or a product give away. Take your niche, create a PDF book, bundle of instructions sheet, online course or Template outline, then offer it for free to the first 150 (Scarcity, you don’t have to limit it to 150) users that use the app.
For example: If your app helps fitness trainers get clients by providing free workouts with an upsell to a 1 on 1 Training with Trainers.
You can create a PDF bundle of 10 templates that can be used to track progress at them gym, and maintain a caloric deficit. I know a fitness trainer that would gladly give me all their templates, and let me give it away for free. You would advertise the price that the customer pays if they would go through a fitness trainer: $40/hr * 2 hr/week * 4 weeks a month = $320. Then offer set your offer as
“Free 4 Step plan to abs in 6 months fitness guide! $320 Bundle used by Top Rated Trainers for Free on our paired Fitness App!”
This above example may not work for you, but you’d quickly get a bunch of people who’ve been quoted $400+ by other trainers on the app.
Facebook did this by starting out as a hyper local network, only for 1 school, so the needed critical mass was small, and it was super relevant for the people who it was advertised to.
This book is really great! Thank you for sharing!
Social discovery is an idea from 2008 before social media went mainstream. Newsfeeds solved that problem pretty well eventually. How are you going to do meaningful social discovery in the age of the newsfeed
Cold Start Problem audiobook. Work on supply side. Reduce barrier to entry. Do everything you possibly can to provide value for both sides even if it means menial manual tasks. If you aren’t willing to do that then give up now.
When we started tinder we had the same problem. The silver lining of this is each new user has a sort of exponential effect. The founders were fanatical about the product and went on a guerilla marketing campaign. They focused on college campuses first. In hindsight or from the outside it seems like a no brainer but it was critical. The user experience was compelling. It offered clear and immediate value. A few campus parties and next thing you know the whole campus was hooked.
Anyways, the marketing evolved quite a bit. But the key fact remained that the platform gave something to people. So I imagine you find yourself in this mental loop of “user experience will suffer without users and they’ll log off”. I think if your product is compelling, your users will come back. Period. So focus on user acquisition at a micro scale and continue marching forward to you next target.
Super helpful to know this, because I am fanatical about my website and use it every day. I need to get off reddit and go work on the user experience… so much to do…
Start with a self-fullfilling standalone product.
A product that require everyone to be onboard before delivering value is bound to fail. Even facebook isn’t managing to get everyone onboard.
Rather than “Do X will all your friends”, find a way to deliver something quite similar to X but without requiring friends to join the app.
For an event app, scrape all public events you can find, add them to map. Show how many people are going etc…
You can start by building the best “Event Agenda” --> once you reach a critical mass you can only then become a “Social Event Platform”
Trying to shortcut to success isn’t going to workout. It’s like asking
“How do I start a Real estate building company that owns 20 appartments ?”
Answer: you can’t, you need to start smaller and when you start it’ll won’t be the same thing or structure as the bigger thing.
The smaller thing isn’t the bigger thing but smaller, it’s a different thing.
A planning problem bro. It has to be useful from the beginning or to have a clear acquisition strategy. Ideally, you should look for both.