How We’re Battling the Chicken-and-the-Egg Problem

Two tricks we’re using. Plus, the actual answer… (it’s the egg)

Goal number one at Spark is to create a user experience that’s unique and valuable — right from the start.

That goal is common but not easy to deliver. It’s harder at Spark because we’re focusing on location & real-time. That means, we don’t only need interesting content to share — we need interesting content near each user that’s also new.

Whoa!! Now that’s my kind of challenge!

It isn’t fun to discover what’s happening near you and either see an empty app or content that’s 100 miles away…

We have two tricks up our sleeve for helping kick-start the community.

1) Curating Early Content

We’re bringing in carefully curated geo-referenced Instagram (and soon Twitter) data to help populate the network with interesting content before many Spark users are posting in an area.

Check out some Instagram posts in Spark:

Posts from Instagram are treated just like normal posts, you can comment on them to start the discussion and you can upvote them to promote that post up the list.

2) One Location at a Time

In order to kick start Spark to an interesting level we need a pretty significant density of engaged users. To help reach this density quickly, we’re focusing on one city at a time even though Spark is available worldwide currently.

This let’s us focus our energy and resources on quickly reaching market saturation in one place at a time.

We look forward to seeing you in Spark!

Actual answer to chicken or egg question here if you're wondering.
This post first appeared at kb.sparknearby.com