I once started a social network around car culture. It did OK, and we got an exit offer, but decided to pivot to something else (which was the right move).
Anyways, the way we got our early users was nontraditional. We went in person to car shows, took pictures of the cars, making sure one of them was with a polaroid camera. We then handed the Polaroid to the owner of the car and asked if we could feature their car on our website. If they said yes, we wrote out a email/pass on the back of the polaroid and then went home and set up their account. This seeded our original social graph.
Harder to do these days, but don't forget about your legs. It's a lot easier to convince people in person than over a rote email.
We got on Techcrunch as well, but it didn't help nearly as much. Techcrunch is mostly good for the inner industry[0]
For the most part yes. I think it's also harder because Facebook, YouTube and Reddit pretty much ate up community message boards. My original premise was that any magazine in an Airport had enough community to build a website around. We simply looked for communities that had crappy websites and tried to fill the space. It worked well then, but it wouldn't be a strategy I'd employ now.
Niche social networks are easier to get traction with today than at any other time in the past decade. Vast numbers of people are turned off by the vile major networks like Twitter and Facebook, which are overflowing with hate, calls to violence, constant threats, psychotic mobs that will try to ruin your life over basic disagreements, and so on. The future of social media - where the best experiences will be had - is in niche communities that are heavily insular and can easily blockade against terrible users and their terrible posts.
I agree with all that, but I think people just make a discord server in 10 minutes when they want a niche insular community. The terrible users get blocked out and then go complain about discord server mods on reddit :)
Anyways, the way we got our early users was nontraditional. We went in person to car shows, took pictures of the cars, making sure one of them was with a polaroid camera. We then handed the Polaroid to the owner of the car and asked if we could feature their car on our website. If they said yes, we wrote out a email/pass on the back of the polaroid and then went home and set up their account. This seeded our original social graph.
Harder to do these days, but don't forget about your legs. It's a lot easier to convince people in person than over a rote email.
We got on Techcrunch as well, but it didn't help nearly as much. Techcrunch is mostly good for the inner industry[0]
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2006/06/11/cnet-veterans-launch-boomp...