We have recently completed one of the milestones for our web start up, and we are at the stage where we can start entering and building data.<p>Our idea is similar to TripAdvisor or Yelp, and we think we need to have a lot of data before officially launching our site, in order to attract new users.<p>We were wondering what people usually do in this situation, because manually entering possibly thousands of items (and even fake users) is very time-consuming for two co-founders.<p>Thank you very much, and have a great day, all of you.
<a href="http://freebase.com" rel="nofollow">http://freebase.com</a> would probably like to gather and hold your data. They have a nice GUI for editing it. People are starting to make other sites that use freebase, e.g. <a href="http://www.dipity.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.dipity.com/</a>
For things that need to be manually entered take a look at Odesk and find someone who will do data entry cheap. I would probably never hire anyone for anything critical there and I wouldn't post my own services there but data entry is fine.