Tip 1 for creating a user generated content site

I have a friend who is starting a UGC / social network site in the health space and he asked me to send him an email with my lessons learned from Judy's Book. I'll post it here for you all to read and comment on.

Keith,
Here's my advice...
1) Focus, focus, focus
Focus the network on a specific category. Health is way too broad. At Judy's Book, I wish we had just focused on restaurants. And for that matter, we should have started with Seattle restaurants. Restaurants as a category are the area where there is the intersection of consumer passion, review writing, and daily activity.  Let me be even more explicit on these points

• consumer passion: people love to eat out. (period)
• review writing: people consume restaurant reviews whether that be from Zagats or from the local newspaper or from their co-workers or friends. In fact, recommendations from friends is often a higher trusted source than a Zagats.
• daily activity : this is critical. People eat out frequently and are often looking to try or willing to try new restaurants. Frequency of visits -- and the closer to a daily activity you can make your site the better off you'll be. Compare the restaurant activity to the activity of looking for a plumber or an architect. They're not even close in terms of frequency -- or monetization. Restaurants clearly are less monetizeable than plumbers and architects but they have the ability to gain consumer passion -- and for the kind of site I hoped Judy's Book would become, focusing on restaurants and consumer passion would have been the right decision in retrospect. Once we owned this market, we could have moved to other categories.

So -- in a nut shell, my first and strongest piece of advice is to focus, focus, focus. There is a reason that Amazon (big brand promise) started selling books and only books. It's the whole crossing the chasm thing....

Comments

[Tom Grubisich]

I agree that a focused site is better than one that's generic. I'm not sure, though, that Judy's Book should have zeroed in on restaurants. What sites need, particularly hyperlocal ones, is passion, and people don't get passionate about restaurants. True, they have opinions, which, if a meal was especially good (or bad), they will want to ventilate. If you had so-so sushi at a highly rated restaurant, you may unsheath an epee, but you're not going to go to the barricades. But if you've finally become fed up with how you and fellow patients are treated at your doctor's office in this era of cost-containing managed care, you may be willing to throw your rhetoric, if not your body, into the breach. To anybody who wants to start a hyperlocal site, I suggest that ask themselves, What kind of response will I get with what I say I wish to do? When users see my mission statement, will they take their hands off the keyboard and clench them in fists and raise them high, or will they continue click-clicking away.

[adam]

this is great advise. i am not sure why people dont focus on that micro-niche thing first and then move onto other categories. fear that that micro-niche thing doesn't work and going broad helps hedge the strategy?

[David Armstrong]

I think there is too much....be good at a niche..then expand. Amazon is still books to me. Build a social network that lets people interact within their exsiting groups already (Reed's Law) Related to "health"....there are so many groups within this group. This is a great thing. Let the groups interact and publish newsletters via email/RSS. Have a moderator that brings new web content every day (like through a delicious feed or similar). I'd go wide...but make sure the design and usability is perfect for regular people.

[jason goldberg]

Andy -- it sounds like you are a fan of urbanspoon?

[jason goldberg]

Andy: Sounds like you wished you started urbanspoon?

[James Nicholson]

Andy,

Thanks for the insightful post. I found it particularly timely as I'm heading up a development effort that will soon launch a real estate site that uses social networking tools to harness knowledge on local markets.

We're getting to the end of the process and have realized we've build an incredibly useful local information site (not reviews - more like local content on schools, crime, etc.), in addition to the real estate content. So we've been debating internally on whether to stay focused on real estate or go wider and be kind of a one-stop portal for local content.

Your post may have convinced us to keep focused on our niche. :-)