Growing a crowd-sourced website?
Hey guys! I've built www.pollt.io, a crowd-sourced website that lets users suggest, discover and vote on the best restaurants for specific dishes i.e. best ramen, best lasagna and etc.
I've gotten a few users by marketing the website on subreddits and on facebook groups. However, this doesn't seem like a sustainable way to grow the website because of its user-generated nature. Usually, within the first few days of the marketing post, I would get a lot of activity/contributions and then it would die down. Very few people do come back to the website, possibly to see if there are new changes but without more people contributing, I think retention rate will be low.
Any tips for growing websites like this?
What I personally think would help is finding and getting involved with communities that value quality food. You can even consider building community around your own product and enrich that experience by asking food expert to write commissioned articles.
From my understanding, the problem with building a community around my own product is that I need a large following first correct? I guess I can try to achieve this by getting involved with various communities as you mentioned.
Bootstrapping is never about quick wins, it's about building up and succeeding one milestone at a time. Especially where users are key, you will need to build a community around the product or yourself for them to continue investing heavily into content. Gamification and the likes might extend their commitment, but in the end it's very much about the relationship they build with the product and/or you.
I would recommend reading the Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen. It talks about starting and maintaining companies that rely upon or want to build network effects.
Read a summary and it was helpful. Will give this a read. Thanks!
Hi, I'm not an expert, but maybe you can add a modal asking user to join newsletter, then send them emails occasionally when there is a new poll, or top voted dishes each month.
I do already collect users e-mail from when they sign up so I can leverage that. I really like this suggestion! :)
Curious where you got the SVG for the background of that pink/red box that says "Explore the possibilities around you"?
Love the design!
TailwindUI! They have really nice templates which you can customize easily.
Awesome! Thanks!