Re:Show HN: Words for Chrome – Smarter, safer web comments
by walterbell on Sunday July 27, 2014 @10:11PM
(#8094770)
It wasn't a marketing suggestion. If an existing community (even a small one with hundreds of users) promotes the plugin, you will get feedback about requirements and feature enhancements. This is a necessary precursor to finding 100K users. Even Facebook started in a limited school environment.
These "second screen" or "third voice" apps require people to be (a) trained on the tool, (b) have a common set of target objects that they want to talk about. You could start off simple by looking for a small community of people who:
(a) use chrome
(b) regularly visit multiple (5-10) sites related to their primary site
(c) currently talk about the secondary sites using their primary site
(d) see value in having their existing conversations appear in-context on the secondary sites
The plugin may have business applications for proof-reading.
As far as overcoming the cold start, I'm looking not so much for marketing ideas, but for product or feature enhancements that would be valuable to users immediately, without a huge number of other users.
Google search - useful for 1 user Facebook - theoretically useful for a handful of friends Twitter - useful for a slightly larger network
Words doesn't have friend/follower mechanisms -- it's just not the nature of the product. The intention is for users to interact with each other as they happen upon the same content. It's a dynamically-changing social graph. Unfortunately, this means the critical mass of users is definitely north of 100k, probably higher.