Ask HN: Chicken and egg problem in a community startup with a slow velocity?
A couple of months ago I posted this and got great feedback. I've been through quite a few iterations since then and have what is now a site that is minimally feature complete. I'm beginning to work on the more advanced reputation dependent features, but have a bit of a chicken and egg problem with the community. I have about 150 users, of whom some 20 maybe visit on a regular basis. And a handful post recipes on a regular basis. The site has a pretty slow velocity, because even the most dedicated users only have recipes to post a few times a month.
The issue I'm facing is that I'll need enough of a community to test the reputation dependent features when I implemented them. And I don't really have that right now. Unless I make the reputation threshold incredibly low, which beats the point.
So I'm facing the classic community based chicken and egg problem. I've pretty much mined my solid connection network out. The ones who cook regularly already use my site. The ones who don't, well, don't. I've been working pretty hard on Twitter and the various food-based subreddits to try and draw in some new early adopter users. But I've experienced limited success with that. Those who comment love it, and join. But the slow velocity often prevents them from doing much before forgetting about it. I've been trying to build connections with food bloggers, however, that is slow going. I'm not naturally a marketer type, so I have to spend a great deal of effort doing that. And it takes time away from writing code. I've considered cold e-mailing bloggers with a basically canned e-mail, but haven't tried it much. And when I have, I experienced pretty limited success there too.
So how can I solve the chicken and egg problem? People seem to love the concept of my site, and like the implementation. But the slow velocity and small community is preventing me from... well building a big enough community to have a higher velocity. Also, I'm having trouble just finding ways to get the link to it out there. Despite being pretty active on reddit and twitter I've only garnered about 3,000 unique views in about 1 month and a half. What are some other places I can put it out there?