Quote:
Originally Posted by will76
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. |
Great thread Will.
Take MySpace, new concept and word of mouth just blew it up. But if you are into racing, you would know being in third or second for a while, you can learn a lot to put you in the lead.
There were tons of other Social Network Sites, Yahoo had it's own, Google had its own, and out of no where, Facebook crawled up and took the lead.
How did Myspace get so big, it was unique and everyone wanted their friends to use it. But the lack of new ideas to it's users, slowly had everyone joining facebook.
I don't believe in Luck, so I won't use that word. You can have millions of dollars, and still not get a new product out. There is a new social network start up every day, you never hear about them.
You need something so unique, your friends will be forwarding it to each other. Word of mouth.
Look at ChatRoulette, not sure how, but that guy got a little buz in the media, and its a name brand. He just doesn't know what to do with it. He was smart enough for the idea, but not smart enough to monetize the traffic that it's getting.