pringle

I guess this is a two-part question:

1) Why hasn't Yelp gone international?

2) Why hasn't someone started an international version of Yelp?

Non-technical solo founder outsourcing development on a MVP web app (but also learning basics of coding in the meantime in order to better navigate the process).

As for the question: I realize that it is an iterative process and that development of each end doesn't happen in isolation. But in terms of practical application, you have to start somewhere and one part has to take the lead. What's the most common approach? Any reason to take the less common one? Is one better suited when outsourcing?

Any practical advice or tips much appreciated.

Curious as a thought exercise -- how would/how well could HN be monetized?

I think PG recently mentioned it gets about 60k visitors a day. How well do you think it could be monetized, based on its audience/traffic?

I guess the title says it all -- looking for ideas and strategies on how to build traffic and momentum for a social news aggregation site. Especially for one that is more niche-based.

Any examples of success outside of the big ones (digg, reddit, HN)?

I've recently been pondering the idea of a "Wikipedia for books" -- a site that houses a table of contents and synopses for every book. I would find something like this extremely useful, as there are many books that I either don't plan to read or not ready to read, but would like to get the general gist of, see the table of contents, get the main thrust of each chapter, etc. For most non-fiction books, this is enough to make me feel like I understand the argument the author is trying to make.

In researching this, I stumbled upon http://www.wikisummaries.org. It seems to be exactly what I'm looking for, except for one thing: it's not very popular and doesn't have any traction (to date it only seems to have 347 book summaries).

Wondering if anyone else would find this useful, and why you think this isn't more popular.