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Ask HN: How would you promote a social network start-up?

15 points by kuvkir ↗ HN
Hello all!

My bosses have just bought a social network website with 20K+ userbase and 80K pageviews per day, it is basically a copycat of facebook for Russian market. We have large social networking websites here in Russia like vkontakte.ru, odnoklassniki.ru with tens of millions of users, so the competition is quite high. Our goal is quite ambitious – to get a decent market share and grow our audience at least to 1M users in the first year. The problem is that our marketing budgets are relatively small and absolutely not comparable to those big players.

Ideas that have come to my mind are referral contests like "get more friend signed up and win an iphone", cross-promotion with our friendly websites, sending invitation to users from email accounts, maybe some kind of viral videoclips...

Any more ideas how to promote a website like this?

P.S: I don't have any realworld marketing experience, I'm actually the CTO of the project but would like to contribute to project success as well.

20 comments

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olalonde
Build a ChatRoulette like feature.
rms
Definitely... clone ChatRoulette with additional features is going to be a really viable business for the next 3 months or so.
imp
How? It seems more like a curiosity than a viable business.
rms
Exponential growth first and then new features is normally a viable path for a Web 2.0 business, but the founder of Chatroulette is finding it a bit hard to deal with new features when he has to worry about scaling his exponentially growing site, including limo rides and negotiations with Russian billionares.

To the OP: Isn't the strategy for succeeding at business in Russia to find out how to get in cars with Russian billionares? You would have to be careful though, because the existing billionares that own the social networking sites might not like you much.

This could also work for you as a quick flip, if you can get your page views up in a year and sell, that may be wiser than getting in cars with Russian billionaires.

---

Chatroulette would be completely illegal if run by a US founder. People that are under 18 are regularly exposed to live masturbating penises on Chatroulette. US Law is such that if a certain prosecutor was sufficiently morally offended by your existence, the founder of a Chatroulette clone could be charged with Federal Racketeering. I don't think the DMCA would provide any protection for the site operator.

So anyone from a country with rule of law similar to the USA should be really careful about starting a Chatroulette like site.

nkohari
> US Law is such that if a certain prosecutor was sufficiently morally offended by your existence, the founder of a Chatroulette clone could be charged with Federal Racketeering.

IANAL, but this sounds like a load of FUD to me. The majority of porn is created within the US. In my understanding, to be legally protected, all you have to do is put a warning that states that underage people are not permitted to use the site.

rms
No, it is much more complicated than that, depending on if the host of a Chatroulette clone is defined to be a porn producer.

Again, my point is that hosting an unfiltered Chatroulette clone is not safe without receiving a great deal of legal advice.

imp
Not sure about the legal stuff, but I'm still curious about the making money part. So the business model is either 1) advertising, or 2) getting acquired? That's what I think of when I hear "Web 2.0 business."
rms
Yup, advertising or getting acquired is the typical Web 2.0 business. There could also be some freemium options.
wlievens
"Russian ChatRoulette" could be either a horrible or fantastic idea!
olalonde
Actually, the original ChatRoulette was built by a Russian.
yosho
how would that work?

maybe you have a 1/6 chance of getting banned from the site for an hour forcing people to actually make conversation instead of just clicking "next"

revorad
The Vaynerchuks have some very good advice:

http://mixergy.com/wine-library-tv-gary-vaynerchuk/

http://mixergy.com/aj-vaynerchuk-vaynermedia/

http://vimeo.com/4671951

In one word, care.

benwerd
And in another, differentiate. Build something different, or adopt a different focus; don't just be a clone.
revorad
That's true, but it's easy to make something no one wants just for the sake of differentiating. If you care, you differentiate only if it actually matters to your customers.
rythie
Well what's the name of it? Surely everywhere you go, you should be telling people about it as a start
ankeshk
Buy all the Russian school and college name domains. Allow members to add content to those domain names (Ning style) if they have joined that particular school group - from your social network website itself.

Then do the same thing with Russian city names.

bgnm2000
Start innovating. Figure out a core offering and stick to it. Read rework by 37signals, it might help you out.
dejan
what's the relation of rework and innovation? Can you quote some stuff? I am considering this book, but to me it doesn't seem like it has anything innovation, especially since 37signals didn't really do anything innovative. Can't count open source framework there, as by itself it's just a framework.
foulmouthboy
Obviously, if you're just going to copy Facebook's offerings, you might as well copy Facebook's launch plan and marketing. Their high level marketing strategy is very well documented and most of the tactics can be inferred.

Secondary suggestion: Pick a niche and focus on it.

kimfuh
What's your target demographic?