Having tried and failed two social news sites, and seeing tons of people try social related startups via H&F, I think I have a little to add. I wrote my own niche social news sites (on Django), and they both failed to get initial audiences.
Cuuute.com was going to be a social news site for cute shit (cat, dog pictures, etc...). It failed because I created a text based social news site rather than a image based one, and because after working on it for 4 months, I couldn't look at a kitten picture without wanting to vomit.
Newsley.com was my second attempt. It started out as a social news site for financial news. I worked hard at getting an initial audience for about 6 months. Finance types generally didn't want to talk about financial news, they want the news that's important to them, and they want it now. So, I pivoted to turn Newsley into a financial news search engine. That was going really well. Traffic was (and still) doubles every 6 weeks even though it's crap, alpha and buggy as hell.
<aside>Hackers & Founders started exploding this winter, and we had to choose either Newsley or H&F. Having a chance to hack Silicon Valley is a bit too enticing to pass up, so we're focusing on H&F right now. You'll hear from us soon.</aside>
The large social news sites, Digg, Reddit, HN have all had large geek audiences at inception. Digg had Kevin Rose's following from TechTV. Reddit and HN got a _huge boost from the people that read pg's writing.
The only other social news site that I'm aware of that's gotten anything close to successful has been Tipd.com. That was started by Digg power user refugees, and focused on a highly monetizeable audience.
Normals don't get social news. They don't get the concept of voting, checking back on a regular basis, and contributing to the conversation. If you're approaching a non-geek niche (like I did for both my social news sites), you're facing an uphill battle. That may change in a year or two as Reddit grows, but Reddit's a juggernaught right now, and it's done a great job of sub-reddit communities.
I firmly believe that starting (like I did) with a social news technology, is the wrong approach. I took a technology and tried to jump start a community around that technology. What I should have done is to create a community and then create technology to support and scale that community.
Adam Rifkin is doing that at 106miles.net for the 106 miles meetup. I'd put a lot of money on him succeeding. Adam has been building the 106 miles community for 6 years and recently opened it up to the public the last 18 months. His team only recently started writing code to support online conversations for that community. Their approach is to build online tools that help their physical community continue interacting.
Start with the community first, and build the technology to support it.
Cuuute.com was going to be a social news site for cute shit (cat, dog pictures, etc...). It failed because I created a text based social news site rather than a image based one, and because after working on it for 4 months, I couldn't look at a kitten picture without wanting to vomit.
Newsley.com was my second attempt. It started out as a social news site for financial news. I worked hard at getting an initial audience for about 6 months. Finance types generally didn't want to talk about financial news, they want the news that's important to them, and they want it now. So, I pivoted to turn Newsley into a financial news search engine. That was going really well. Traffic was (and still) doubles every 6 weeks even though it's crap, alpha and buggy as hell.
<aside>Hackers & Founders started exploding this winter, and we had to choose either Newsley or H&F. Having a chance to hack Silicon Valley is a bit too enticing to pass up, so we're focusing on H&F right now. You'll hear from us soon.</aside>
The large social news sites, Digg, Reddit, HN have all had large geek audiences at inception. Digg had Kevin Rose's following from TechTV. Reddit and HN got a _huge boost from the people that read pg's writing.
The only other social news site that I'm aware of that's gotten anything close to successful has been Tipd.com. That was started by Digg power user refugees, and focused on a highly monetizeable audience.
Normals don't get social news. They don't get the concept of voting, checking back on a regular basis, and contributing to the conversation. If you're approaching a non-geek niche (like I did for both my social news sites), you're facing an uphill battle. That may change in a year or two as Reddit grows, but Reddit's a juggernaught right now, and it's done a great job of sub-reddit communities.
I firmly believe that starting (like I did) with a social news technology, is the wrong approach. I took a technology and tried to jump start a community around that technology. What I should have done is to create a community and then create technology to support and scale that community.
Adam Rifkin is doing that at 106miles.net for the 106 miles meetup. I'd put a lot of money on him succeeding. Adam has been building the 106 miles community for 6 years and recently opened it up to the public the last 18 months. His team only recently started writing code to support online conversations for that community. Their approach is to build online tools that help their physical community continue interacting.
Start with the community first, and build the technology to support it.