Ask HN: How do I get a crowd sourced web app off the ground?

2 points·macinjosh··2 comments

I am working on a web app that in order to be useful requires that a critical mass of data be present. The application is crowd sourced so this data will come from my users and can only really come from them.

How do I get users to contribute to the app while this critical mass is being acquired?

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I don't know the specifics of your product (or anything about it at all really), but it may be possible if you primed your database with data you've gathered yourself. Depending on the content, you may be able to spend 20 hours, 40 hours, or hundreds to thousands of hours to develop a base layer of data that will be enough to attract a userbase to "do the rest."

Chances are, for most people, this will not work for you, but it is an option, and has worked for others in the past. It's risky though, because if you spend hundreds of hours priming the data and then no one comes, you've wasted a lot of man hours. For some products, there is no other way.

What you are describing is known as the "chicken-and-egg problem", and if you search HN on that phrase, you'll find a lot of previous discussions and advice.

The short version is that you will probably have to resort to non-scalable means of priming the pump-- basically, identifying a subset of users you can persuade (financially, if necessary) to produce enough seed content to get the ball rolling.

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