Hey, what's up?
John Sonmez here from simpleprogrammer.com.
So I got a question about building user based apps from zero.
This is a good one because this is something that I think a lot of you that want to build
applications that are kind of social applications or user based applications that you’re not
sure how to do this, and this is a difficult problem for sure.
So the question is, “Thanks for the videos that you make, very interesting and useful
to watch.”
Cool.
“I have a question of my own.
A lot of the best application ideas that I, and others, come up with, have the same problem:
For users to want to use them, there needs to already be a large user base.
So how do these things build from 0.
And obviously, that problem can be overcome because most successful apps have had to overcome
it.
This is especially the case with social networks and apps that match people together, or match
people with businesses.
Thanks and all the best, Roy.”
So there are a couple of things here.
First of all, Roy, what you’re talking about is what is called frequently the network effect.
The network effect basically says that the more nodes that you have in the network that
you have, the more valuable the network is, right?
There’s a lot of applications that this applies to.
eBay isn’t really very useful if you don’t have a lot of sellers and a lot of bidders.
It becomes more valuable for the sellers when there’s more people to bid.
It becomes more valuable for the bidders when there’s more things to buy, right?
Then they want to go to eBay more.
So it’s sort of like the chicken or the egg problem.
How do you start something like an eBay?
Same thing with Facebook, how do you start something like a Facebook?
Again, Facebook becomes more valuable through the networking effect.
Whereas, the more nodes, the more people that sign up on Facebook, the more valuable it
is for everyone involved.
So how do you start stuff like that?
Okay.
Here’s how you start stuff like that.
Well, I’ll give you an example and then I’m going to give you some recommendations
on what you should do here.
Here’s a really good example of someone who was able to start this.
If you’re familiar with the site stack overflow, the history behind this, I remember when I
was first starting up, Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, was they did was they came up with
this idea of creating stack overflow and they both had these huge blogs, right?
Jeff Atwood has codingwhore.com and Joel Spolsky had a blog called Joel on Software.
They’re probably 2 of the biggest software development blogs that existed at that time.
What they did was they combined their forces together and they created the stack overflow,
and they launched and they announced on both their blogs and they had this huge audience—both
of them had this huge audience and following.
When stack overflow started, it didn’t start with five users.
It started with a beta with thousands of users already and that was the seed audience that
they needed in order to make it to succeed.
Stack overflow needed that because stack overflow is worthless—it’s worthless to ask questions
if there’s no one to answer them and it’s worthless to answer questions if no one is
reading them, so you have to have that seed.
It’s one of those things that benefited greatly from the network effect, then it became
really successful.
So that’s one way to do it is to build a big audience.
Essentially, my answer is this: In order to do this, you have to come in with a huge influx
of users.
You have to have a seed, a really good seed in order to be able to do this.
You’ve got 2 options really for doing this and this is why I would recommend actually
against this.
One is you build a huge audience first and then you carry it over, right?
This happens a lot of times.
The Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood with stack overflow is a really good example of that,
but you see this from time to time where you see movie stars create perfume lines or clothing
lines, or things like that.
They’re essentially using that.
They’re essentially getting enough traction from their audience in order to do this.
It’s not the same thing as a social network, but you could use that.
If you can build audience, you’ve got a big following, you’re a movie star or something
like that, or you can find someone who has a big audience, that is a great way to do
that because you can get enough people in because you have to get enough people in initially,
so that there’s enough value that people stick around and keep contributing.
Forums have the same problem.
If you can’t do that, if you can’t get enough traction, if you don’t have enough
big of an audience or you can’t tap into someone that has one, then forget it because
it’s what’s going to happen, is if you get a few people come on to the system, they
look around.
They’re like, “Oh, no one’s here.”
They never come back again and then later you get 3 more people that sign on and they
look around.
You got to get them all at once, a big burst of them in order for there to be enough value
that people stick around and then it grows.
It’s this snowball effect.
Option 1 is that is to have the audience.
Option 2 is to have money.
A lot of startups that are going to like—that are going to build like a network like, let’s
say, Groupon or any one of these startups that has done well recently they had a ton
of money to sign on a bunch of people or PayPal.
When PayPal started, they had a ton of money.
Elon Musk had put up a bunch of money and they got extra funding and they were giving
people $5 to—when you sign up for a PayPal account, I remember, or X.com.
They’re both kind of using the same tactic at the time before they merge, but, essentially,
you’re getting paid to sign up for the service.
That made sense because they could throw money at the problems so they could get a bunch
of initial users.
Once they had enough users then PayPal become valuable because you could transfer money
between users.
You need to go—If you want to do an idea like this, my advice would be either, one,
find an audience or someone who has an audience or build your audience enough that you can
get a good seed group or, 2, go get outside funding.
This is one of those cases where you’re probably not doing this on your own.
You probably need millions of dollars so that you can buy customers essentially.
If you have a lot of money, you can purchase.
You can do advertising and you can get a bunch of customers at one time in order to build
up the service.
If you can’t do either of those things, forget it.
Don’t do it.
Do something else.
Build a different application.
It’s not going to be worth it because you’re just going to be frustrated and it’s going
to be a waste of your time.
All right.
I hope that helps you.
I hope it doesn’t disappoint you too much, but this is the honest truth of it.
I’ve seen forums and I’ve seen people trying to create social networks and apps.
I’ve seen that fail so much because they can’t get that seed on in, so you’ve got
to be able to do that.
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