How to solve a cold start in a product which needs critical mass to be useful : r/startups

Building a social discovery platform but for it to be anyway useful , we will need volume of folks to be on the platform trying to interact at one time. It might be easy problem to solve for companies like fb,reddit, Insta etc but how should a startup solve it? Read a summary of The Cold Start Problem. Make the product useful from the start, even for a single user, or focus on a specialized niche of users. Social discovery platforms rely on heavy network effects. See if you can find examples of startups that have succeeded in this space. You'll find very few. I was about to recommend this book as well. The cold start problem will be very challenging and you might want to build different services. Why does a person need to use your service when he/she can use IG/X/FB instead? Ask yourself. 'Can I provide meaningful differentiation and solve the cold start problem at the same time?' Facebook did this by starting out as a hyper local network, only for 1 school, so the needed critical mass

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• nicolas