Question
How do web startups solve the chicken and egg problem of having initial content before a public launch, if the web app is based entirely on user generated content?
Answer
The simplest answer is to pay dedicated content creators to prime the pump. So long as you are transparent about it (via an 'editor' type handle). You COULD do the shyster version (paying 1-2 freelancers to make up dozens of fake handles and posting content via a different handle each time) but that ultimately always backfires IMO.
In private beta, the product is often immature enough that real users will only create a test piece of content or two, send some feedback and leave (this is for "true" private betas designed to truly generate usability feedback for an early prototype, as opposed to "marketing" private betas which are really artificial scarcity mechanisms for a nearly finished product).
Paying for content generation does not scale easily, but you don't actually need much to prime the pump. Just enough to overcome the ghost-town look and deliver some search results.
We did this with http://trailmeme.com initially, and once real users started creating trails, we turned off paid priming. I still occasionally pay a freelancer to build special-purpose trails that we want to use for PR activities, but that's unrelated to the chicken-egg problem.
Another way is to progressively lower the barrier to creating content on your platform as much as possible. The lower the barrier, the crappier the content unfortunately, but this does get people bootstrapping into creating higher value content. We did that too. The idea of a "trail" on trailmeme.com is a pretty sophisticated one, and it takes some creativity and intelligence to create a great trail, but we also have a simple "quick create" mechanism for people who are not visual thinkers, or who need an easy starting point. As you would expect, trails created using this mechanism aren't as valuable and creative as the ones created using the full product's capabilities.
If your market is very well-defined, and the content is specialized and your team doesn't have the skills to create it (a s/w and marketing team won't know enough about airplanes to internally prime an airplanepedia for example), then you definitely need to court early creators aggressively in the target market, or pay specialist prices as opposed to generalist/freelancer prices.
In private beta, the product is often immature enough that real users will only create a test piece of content or two, send some feedback and leave (this is for "true" private betas designed to truly generate usability feedback for an early prototype, as opposed to "marketing" private betas which are really artificial scarcity mechanisms for a nearly finished product).
Paying for content generation does not scale easily, but you don't actually need much to prime the pump. Just enough to overcome the ghost-town look and deliver some search results.
We did this with http://trailmeme.com initially, and once real users started creating trails, we turned off paid priming. I still occasionally pay a freelancer to build special-purpose trails that we want to use for PR activities, but that's unrelated to the chicken-egg problem.
Another way is to progressively lower the barrier to creating content on your platform as much as possible. The lower the barrier, the crappier the content unfortunately, but this does get people bootstrapping into creating higher value content. We did that too. The idea of a "trail" on trailmeme.com is a pretty sophisticated one, and it takes some creativity and intelligence to create a great trail, but we also have a simple "quick create" mechanism for people who are not visual thinkers, or who need an easy starting point. As you would expect, trails created using this mechanism aren't as valuable and creative as the ones created using the full product's capabilities.
If your market is very well-defined, and the content is specialized and your team doesn't have the skills to create it (a s/w and marketing team won't know enough about airplanes to internally prime an airplanepedia for example), then you definitely need to court early creators aggressively in the target market, or pay specialist prices as opposed to generalist/freelancer prices.