When we launched the public Grupthink Beta, I knew we needed to attract a handful of people who understood the potential and value that Grupthink offers. Without these “early adopters” to post topics and answers, Grupthink.com would stagnate and become nothing more than a neatly manicured ghost town.

We knew we could build an elegant, powerful web application (that’s what we do). The real challenge ahead of us was creating something that people found interesting and addictive. The initial “chicken-and-egg” problem is obvious: How do you attract people to a “social media” site that has very little content, and how do you build content without people to provide it?

I was prepared to spend two months or more “seeding” grupthink with topics, in case we didn’t immediately get the critical mass needed to perpetuate the Grupthink mindscape.

To my relief, that kind of forced effort was not needed. We’ve attracted a core group of folks from all over the world, who have become “hooked” on Grupthink. The active topics page is constantly being updated throughout the day with insightful topics. It appears that we have momentum building, as each new topic makes Grupthink increasingly attractive and accessible to more people.

In my mind, Grupthink has passed an important test: We’ve struck a chord with people, despite the lack of an extremely large body of content. It’s only a matter of time before our neatly manicured town becomes a thriving city.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 12th, 2006 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.