Ask HN: Advice on building a community from scratch?

I've recently launched a website/forum/community to help others use up their soon to be wasted food.

The idea is to help people by providing them with ideas and recipes. These ideas are provided by a community.

I believe it is a skill to look at ingredients and have a basic understanding of what to cook. That skill like any can be acquired by chipping away day-to-day.

I'm wondering if anyone here has any experience in building a similar type community and has any lessons to share or points of failure to watch out for.

Or if you have any other input?

For reference: gidfid.com - is the site.

4 comments

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sharemywin 10y ago ↗

I built a classified ad site once. I pre-seeded it with some of my own classifieds and then advertised it on google. I got people to fill out classifieds but it just wasn't enough to get a marketplace off the ground.

giarcyevod 10y ago ↗

I remember somewhere reading that the founders of Reddit did the same. Did you use adwords?

sharemywin 10y ago ↗

yes. was paying about 10 cents a click back then.

sideproject 10y ago ↗

I run HelloBox - http://www.hellobox.co - a tool to create and manage online communities.

One of the main things that we encourage community owners to do is to let their community grow organically. This means, implementing features where sharing is easy, inviting other members are easy, email notifications etc. It's been really helpful to watch the communities grow this way. Hope that helps.