Here's what I learned from the interviews I did on Mixergy:

Jon Bischke told me he launched his community on eduFire by asking his personal contacts to add content first.

Seth Godin told me that you need a heretic message. (Yelp's message was that communities trump experts.)

Jason Siminoff told me he had Google alerts go off when bloggers talked about his industry--and then engaged them personally.

Jason Fried said 37signals decided to teach what they knew as a way of drawing people in.

Mateo Gutierrez told me that he always searches his sites' records for influencials and then he gives them power so they can encourage other users to participate.

Derek Sivers said launch your site and don't worry if it's crappy and no one uses it at first.

Douglas Atkin told me that he studied cults and noticed that the ones that let their members talk to each other were more likely to grow.

The key to Yelp was their content acquisition strategy. Yelp is of course the classic chicken and the egg type website, so they needed clever ways to get things rolling.

They incentivized them with things like private dinners, free dinners, and inside information that only the top Yelpers could see for a time.

Another trick was the founders of Yelp used their site extensively - if you want to get into the content game, be prepared to write some content - if just to demonstrate what your site should look like.

Putting aside Yelp's strategies, here's my number one launch idea for you - do a small launch before you do a big launch.

We've been working on www.trailbehind.com since April, and our first launch was May 1. By the time we have a big launch this summer, in time for the hiking season, we are hoping to avoid the flameout problems of big launches.

Remember, a Techcrunch hit comes and goes, but a Google search is forever.

You have your work cut out for you. There's a massive competitive market for getting customers opinions. The usual method is to pay them.

"Get paid to fill out surveys, try product samples, etc etc" is big business.

I'd start with a handy feedback widget that small businesses can put on their websites. (If you haven't already got that setup)

The problem with paying is that you get skewed results. The type of people who will take spare change for writing reviews do not frequent many of the places or use the things you wish to collect opinions for.

But the difference is that we allow the business owner to reply back to the same thread.

There's more of a business owner and customer engagement.

Sure, but I'm meaning at the moment, users expect something to give feedback. They want money for their time, a money off voucher, some freebie.

Talk to every small business in your city or neighborhood. Give them an X-day free trial and a sign/sticker that tells customers what to do.

Give customers an incentive to give suggestions if they're not doing it on their own. Pay out of your pocket (IIRC Yelp did something like this, paying for reviews) or helping vendors subsidize things at their store, e.g., give a review get 5% off your next purchase.

That's what I'd do, anyhow.

Yelp's got a lot of space for improvement, you can do well here.

For example: the iPhone app doesn't let you write reviews. The best time to write a review for a place is when you're there. But Yelp wants me to go back home and log in through a desktop to do that. EPIC FAIL.

Do some use case & scenario analysis, and you should do well. Consider plugging into different parts of peoples' lives. E.g. Facebook and the iPhone. A facebook app that browses reviews of people you know, and lets you invite people to a restaurant for dinner could do pretty well.

Do what Yelp did: try to launch a totally-unlike-Yelp site, and realize that Yelp is what your customers want.

But seriously: that sounds like a valuable app, but it's hard to tell how you should launch without getting some details. Maybe you can start giving feedback to businesses you patronize, and just contact the first few businesses you review ("Hey! You just got a suggestion on FeedbackJar.com!").

I think there are a lot of small businesses that still don't have websites. Or they have static, aging websites simply because they don't have the resources to commit to their internet venture.

My startup is working on getting businesses online, from the ground up in a simplistic yet proactive "learn as you go" type approach.

Anyway the point is your service is very useful to businesses because it generates content FOR them. When businesses get started online, generally all they want is EXPOSURE. They ask things like "how do i get on google", how do i get "clicks", "who do i pay to get customers" ... Your service allows greater exposure through organic content growth...

I would suggest you relate this to small business who may or may not have a website. Tell them to encourage existing customers to use your service. Their online exposure will grow and its a win/win. Prepare quick benefit packages and "getting started" guides for businesses. Encourage THEM to do the promoting and since it is in their best interest, it just might yield results.

Along the lines of do one thing and do it well: Start narrow but deep in an area that you either know well or have connections to. Excel in a small, defined area in order to build buy-in from businesses and credibility with your audience and then branch out.

Whether it is a core of local businesses, online businesses run by people you know, etc make sure that there is actual value to the service rather than a smattering of unrelated content.

I agree with the comment above. Start small, maybe your neighborhood mall. You could probably try and get the mall management on board since you will be promoting the businesses that lease from them.

Also get those businesses to promote your service in their stores by establishing a relationship with each of them and in return, give them incentive for using your service.

Yelp paid contributors to get the ball rolling with their community:

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2006/tc200...

But it sounds like your service is less like Yelp and more like uservoice.com or getsatisfaction.com for the small business market.

Exactly! That's how I got the idea! Both uservoice.com or getsatisfaction.com are doing really well.

Po Bronson's book "The Nudist on the Late Shift" says that CitySearch cold-called all kinds of businesses in every city it launched in. Have you read enough articles about Yelp to see if they did the same?

Incidentally, how do you plan to win people over when they're already on Yelp? I'm confused about what value you add that they don't.

We're not building another review. It's a customer service site where you can leave a question, suggestion, discussion, praise, or issue for the small business. The small business owner can sort by these posts and reply to the thread.

We even mail your feedback on postcards for unclaimed businesses on FeedbackJar.

Think of us as Getsatisfaction.com for small businesses.

I'm not sure how cost effective it is, but mailing postcards seems like a damn good way to advertise the site.

Yelp hires community leaders in each city to spread the word about Yelp and educate businesses about how to use it.

Assuming the following:

- A small percentage of internet users potentially interested in your site will find it.

- A small percentage of those who come to your site will become regular users and create content.

- A small percentage of those who create content will account for most of the site's content.

I presume you want to find those people in the last category fast -- and you probably don't have the resources to let the funnel above just work.

So find them, cajole them, steal them, hire them, reward them, make the site engaging for them -- basically don't sweat the content side for a while until you have enough content to break a sweat over.

You really are creating two sites. One for consumers, the second for creators. The better the consumer site is at being a content site, the more traffic you get. The more features the creator site offers for user-rewarding social interaction, the more content you get.

Look at how Yelp rewards their frequent users in every detail, using techniques that are not unfamiliar to game designers. Check out Amy Jo Kim's explications of this topic: http://www.slideshare.net/amyjokim/putting-the-fun-in-functi... http://www.oreillynet.com/conferences/blog/2006/03/how_game_...

The best thing about getting highly active (you could say passionate) users is that they become champions for your site and bring it up in other contexts, not just blogs but in workplaces, among friends with similar interests and other potential champions.

But my most practical tip would be to mine existing interest groups via messageboards and labor to introduce their champions to your site. You see this on Yelp in how vegans and vegetarians are very active users. You can do the same thing for people who know about an entire vertical business segment of their area -- they've visited every ham radio store, every bookstore, every coffeehouse, every diabetic food store, whatever. People who already, mentally, have a list of feedback they want to ask. It's a bit more challenging than reviews, maybe, because people more often have lots of opinions to give than questions to ask. So you may have to find some way around that, say to organize campaigns for active users to create and join to ask en masse about some issue they care about.

I hope for the best with your launch -- congratulations.

Definitely try to incentivize the business owners to update their listings. I think you will find if you can provide them a login to view some form of stats then word of mouth would carry a lot of weight here

My side-project, ClipClipSave (clipclipsave.com), let's small businesses create printable coupons.

Maybe we can team up in some way–incentivize participation by offering some sort of discount.

That's a possibility. =) email me at nick [at] feedbackjar [dot] com

incentives to try and help build the community.

Incentives like giving early adopters a better chance to become administrators?

depends on how the site works and how you want it to work, as well as its goals.

simple bribery works wonders, sometimes, if your intent is to build quick content, such as entering in the top, as defined by you, X users into some sort of drawing for a prize.

If I'm not already excited to join the site, would I be excited about volunteering for it?

How are you going to make money ?

We're going to offer premium features for a monthly fee.

Like what .. because I think its better to have fewer cusomers but offer something of benefit to the businesses .