How to bring in users for a community powered website
Like the title says, how do you start to populate your website with users and info to make it look inviting for others. For example, if I wanted to create a hand bag rating website where users can rate their favorite bags so others can see what's in style and what's not. How do you get your first 100 or so users to actually get the ball rolling. I'm sort of stumped on this because in the beginning, the website would not really be of use to anyone since it's kind of empty. So I can't think of any reason why someone or some 100 people would start using it if I didn't give them money or something lol.
I know that in the early days of Reddit and some other websites, the owners would actually create temp accounts to get it rolling, but are there any options?
A friend of mine did something similar to what you're after. This is what he did (converted to your example):
Hi there,
Right now we are facing the same problem with our platform.
Is the typical chicken egg problem where in this case you need both user and content at the same time.
Our strategy was to identify which one among "user" and "content" could be the most important in order to provide the best service in the long term.
Once we identified our "winner" we reached / (currently reaching) out directly our potential customer and offering special deal as early adpoters. We use channels like Reddit , Facebook, Quora and of course our friend network and asking them to spread the news :)
Of course this is not a scalable solution but in this way we have more control over the quality that we can offer and hopefully some happy customer that will suggest the platform to his friend :)
Keep in mind that i'm not yet able to say whether our approach will be successful or not.
Another solution if you have some budget could be also to spend money in advertising and targeting , but imho is something to do when at least you got a medium-large audience