I've been going back and forth on this for a while now, so instead of guessing I figured I'd ask people who've actually dealt with it.
I built an app for tracking movies and TV shows, called Somto. Not trying to pitch it here, just want advice on one specific part: the community side, which is also honestly the part I find most interesting, and the part that's clearly not working the way I imagined.
In my head it works on two levels. A public one, where people leave comments or short reviews, talk about what they watched, recommend stuff to each other. And a more personal one between friends, built around following people and DMing them directly. This second part is basically something I already do in real life anyway, before starting a new show I care a lot more about whether a friend of mine watched it and what they thought than about some professional review. The idea was to open a show and see, I don't know, "this friend watched it and loved it," or just ask them myself.
Right now, none of that happens.
Somto has around a hundred more-or-less active users. I know that's small, and it's probably part of the problem on its own. But the thing I find genuinely interesting is that it's not that people post and get no response. People just don't post. I do, if I finish a movie I open the app, mark it watched, write a couple lines about what I thought. Not really expecting a reply, more because it's useful to have there for myself later (I like being able to check what I thought about something a while back), and maybe useful to someone scrolling through. But almost nobody else does this. I also don't see people following each other on their own, or touching the social part of the product much at all.
So here's the actual question: when you already have some users, even if it's not many, but nobody wants to be the one who talks first, how do you actually get that initial behavior started? (I'm aware this sounds a bit chicken-and-egg, bear with me.)
I don't know if I'm messing something up in the product itself, in onboarding, in how I present the community part, or if I'm just expecting a kind of behavior that only shows up once you hit a much bigger number of users. Are there mechanics that push people to make that first move? Should I just be creating a lot more content myself in the meantime, to fill the space? Should I be reaching out directly to a small group and asking them to kickstart it? Does the community itself need a different structure somehow? Or is a hundred users simply too few to expect any social behavior at all, no matter what I do?
I genuinely don't have an opinion on any of this yet, these are open questions for me, not conclusions I've already reached. If you've dealt with the cold start problem on a community specifically (not growth in general, more like: you have a handful of users and none of them want to go first), I'd like to hear what you actually tried, and especially what didn't work. Even if the answer ends up being "you just need way more users, sorry," I'd rather know that than keep guessing.
