Overcoming chicken-and-egg problem
We released first version of our website few months ago but we faced a serious chicken-and-egg problem. Basically, we needed users registering content in our catalog but they wouldn't even sign up because the catalog was nearly empty at the beginning.
I should explain—the website aims to gather links to learning resources and organize them under hierarchy of topics. Users can contribute to the catalog and also rate the best resources. (Example topic: CRDT.)
But users wanted to search for resources, not register them. So we added a "single-player" feature in a recent release to overcome the chicken-and-egg issue. Basically, you can register everything you read/watch online/offline and create your own "study profile". It includes timeline of resources and nice "topic cloud" visualization (see our blog).
We think it's great not only for tracking what you studied (and easily finding it later) but also for sharing with other people (and putting it on your CV) as this is better record of what you really know than for example your university diploma. (You can even find experts on some topic and learn the same way they did by following their public profile!)
We believe this will create incentive for users to use our website to track their learning. And by doing that, they will contribute resource links to our database.
Let me know what you think about the idea or the site in general. Looking forward to your comments!
If users go towards search (if that's what your analytics rather than your gut is telling you), then it sounds like you need to provide more content.
Allowing users to capture content sounds great, but it may take a long time to kick-start this process.
What about a bot that sucks up lots and lots of content and categorizes it? (Assuming that your users are mostly searching. It's worth validating).
I assume users would look at your /examples page to see an idea (validate with analytics), it might be worth starting there as it's mostly empty resources.
Be care about trusting analytics too much if the quantity of users is small. However if you're a content site, without much content, it's probably worth starting there.
Good Luck.
Indeed, analytics tell us that. And you are right many users go to examples page.
Bots are a great idea. We plan to automatically register content. However, that is hard to do well, i.e., with topics correctly assigned. Nevertheless, it might attract more users to use the site and contribute to our database, so it is definitely the next thing to do.
... this is such an interesting concept.
... hard to know what i'm doing tho.
Can you elaborate? I am pretty used to the platform, so I would very much value your feedback on what exactly is not clear to you. Thanks!
if i landed on it randomly (which i kinda did as i hit the link before i read anything)... i wasn't sure precisely what i was supposed to do or what i was trying to do... or what problem i was trying to solve.