Ask YC: Data building

5 points by wonjun 18y ago ↗ HN

We have recently completed one of the milestones for our web start up, and we are at the stage where we can start entering and building data.

Our idea is similar to TripAdvisor or Yelp, and we think we need to have a lot of data before officially launching our site, in order to attract new users.

We were wondering what people usually do in this situation, because manually entering possibly thousands of items (and even fake users) is very time-consuming for two co-founders.

Thank you very much, and have a great day, all of you.

6 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 26.7 ms ] thread

gexla 18y ago ↗

For things that need to be manually entered take a look at Odesk and find someone who will do data entry cheap. I would probably never hire anyone for anything critical there and I wouldn't post my own services there but data entry is fine.

smoody 18y ago ↗

Have you considered using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service?

mattjung 18y ago ↗

What about an outsourcing company like http://www.b2kcorp.com?

abecciu 18y ago ↗

What about scrapping data from similar sites?

drewp 18y ago ↗

http://freebase.com would probably like to gather and hold your data. They have a nice GUI for editing it. People are starting to make other sites that use freebase, e.g. http://www.dipity.com/

wonjun 17y ago ↗

Thank you all very much.