I'm not actually starting a social networking site, but I've always been curious about the hundreds, if not thousands that are out there - where did they get their first few thousand users? Obviously we all know the story of how Facebook started, and how their user base grew. Same applies for the story about Twitter and the big screens at South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, but what about all the others?<p>Has anyone here who's started a social network got any insight on this? As far as I can see, no users = no social network.
You make something that's so good you want to use it. You have your friends use it too.<p>If your product's so shitty your friends won't use it until their friends are there first, then you've made something bad and should fix up your product.<p>(My mock social network had 10,000 users in a month, and I got them all from posting a link to a blog with a few hundred users. We went viral fast.)
* Digg - Kevin Rose promoted it on his TV show.<p>* Reddit - Early users included other YC startupees.<p>* HN - YC startupees who were tired of the growing crassness on reddit.
Advertise? Building value for one or two niche markets (on the same platform) first seems like a good strategy. If you have some unique benefit then you can go after known enthusiast markets - games, creatives, etc. or even niches within niches. Obviously, your goal is to offer something sufficiently cool and useful that users will want to invite their friends.
The members of your network have to already exist as isolated nodes. As isolated nodes, they may not realize that they are actually part of a bigger network that just need to be connected. It is your vision's job to identify these opportunities.<p>Your social network software's job would just be to connect them.