Thanks
[1] I've moderated private invite only forums with 20 members that generated 12-15 threads everyday! And yes - these threads were busy. 20 people were easily spending a total of more than 10 hours on the forum everyday.
Action Summary:
- Find 20 people who like your concept and invite them to participate before you launch. Make them your beta testers and ask them for their input. Give them non-monetary rewards (tshirts etc is a good idea). Let these folks populate your site and make it look busy.
- Then on launch day, have a strategy in place that does generate 500-1000 visitors per day. Thats probably about $50-100 in ad expense per day if you don't have a viral aspect to your social website and your users don't drive traffic.
Another rookie mistake to avoid, is fragmentation. Say you want to start a forum on topic X. Just have a forum for X till you gain traction.
A mistake many people make, is to have subforums X1, X2, X3, etc, from the get go. It makes what little traffic you have seem even less. Start with one forum, and then fragment according to the dictates of the main forum. In any case, the sub forums you will end up with will rarely be the same ones you envisaged before launch.
It might be interesting to hear how HN started gaining traction. I know the old YC application asked about your Slashdot profile, so I imagine a group of people there felt there was a need for new community.
So, I can say that everything depends on the community niche, main idea of the site and what problems of users it can solve. You must have a good understanding of people who can be interested in your site and have a set of ideas how you can motivate them to start using your community. Anyway on the early stage you should at least make the site look alive.
You have a link I can pass around to send some folks your way to check it out?
