Whiteboard Diaries

So I thought I’d give it a shot and start my own social networking site on as small a budget as possible. I selected a niche that I’m passionate about (fishing) and had a few connections in family and friends that could dedicate a little time to giving the site the push start it needed.

getREELed (www.getreeled.com) was launched mid-March as North America’s Largest Social Network Dedicated to Fishing. I remember sitting on the site, with my brother and I as the only two registered users, thinking how is anybody going to find this place. I think calling it the “largest” actually helped the first users believe that this site was going to be something. They loved the idea that they were there first.

We had two members, a framework of a social site, no content and no members.

So off I went and did some of the guerrilla tactics I preach so much about to see if we could get the site off the ground. We woke up the next morning and had 5 members. We kept at it for a couple of days and enlisted some of the first members as “unpaid guerrilla’s” and here we are two weeks from launch day with over 1200 registered users and over 175,000 page views.

I’ll keep this blog updated with progress of the site and over-time I’ll start to reveal some of the secrets in developing an engaged community on a shoestring budget.

In the meantime visit GetREELed and check out the awesome fishing photos and content, none of which I contributed.