Business discussion.
I was reading this thread:
http://www.gfy.com/showthread.php?p=...4#post17245104
My thoughts are below and it seemed like this would be a good topic for it's own thread. I am curious to see what other people think and ideas they have come up with, to what I think is the biggest hurdle to any new project / site (especially mainstream).
I wonder HOW people like Markus with POF, and Craig with Craigslist got to where they are today. I believe they both were programmers and started off with little to no money and programmed their own sites. Both were based on the free model, and both sites became incredibly popular and made a lot of money.
But how did they get from creation and launch to having their site get traction with out having a TON of money to buy advertising to launch it???
Was it just luck and they had 1000's of friends and asked them all to start using it and tell their friends?
The biggest hurdle I face with start ups that are similar to a classified site or dating site is how do you start it off with no users? Ok so you can fake it and make some bogus classified ads or dating profiles but still, who wants to use a site that is new and has very little to no one else is using yet ??? Is it because there were no other free dating / classified sites except for theirs back then so people gave it a shot? Where as now if I created a classified site that was new and there was no listings on it, why would someone take their time to post on my site that apparently no one posts on? Why wouldn't they just go to craigslist and post their shit and sell it in a matter of minutes? Or make a dating profile on POF???
Discuss... Why did they make it past this huge hurdle where as many many other people can not.