The Robot Co-op (Radar posts 1 & 2)launched 43Things over two years ago and in that time it has become a very successful site. Over a million people have answered the question “What do you want to do with your life?” with goals. Fellow users often offer encouragement, advice, or relate their own experiences to help[ the goal-seekers. The Robots’ users are top-notch (which leads to great content), the traffic is steadily rising and the Google AdWords get clicked. This success comes from having users who get the site and feel ownership.
The Robots’ other sites have not taken off in quite the same way. 43Places is a site that lets you share where they’ve been and where they want to go. AllConsuming is a platform for sharing the latest album, movie, book, drink, or *anything* that you are trying. They are both modest successes but they haven’t gelled with users in the same way that their older cousin has. You can see this trend on Compete. The Robots want to grow all three of these sites and they are now pondering two different methods to tackle this.
Last month they launched The Petri Project, a self-improvement blog. It’s similar to a short-lived blog that the Robots started last fall; they found that it too difficult to blog and work on their sites. This time they have hired an outside writer to post about acheiving goals. Think Lifehacker, but without the focus on software. There’s a lot of self-improvement happening on 43things and the hope is that a site that fills this popular niche with a new take will be popular. Potentially some of the Petri Project readers will become new 43Things users.
For the other two sites they plan to try something else — get new users via MySpace and Facebook. However, diving into another site’s ecosystem is a scary thing. What is a Facebook user worth? Are Facebook user’s adding value back to the original site or are they just incurring server costs? (see Andrew Chen’s evaluation of Facebook users)The places for the Robots to experiment are 43Places and AllConsuming. The sites need an influx of fresh users who build up 43Places and AllConsuming into larger communities. They will be releasing some apps soon to test this theory and to learn what they can about enticing Facebook users with their offerings.
It’ll be interesting to track these sites’ growth over the next couple of months. Community is the lifeblood of any social-collaboration website and it is something that must be nurtured.