Instant Messaging (IM): What are the best seed users for a chat app?

You're really asking about what type of social graph works best. So let's characterize a few of the attributes of the social graph that might be attractive to you. First off, you want the social graph that already exists. You don't want to solve the problems of discovery and introductions. You want to leverage existing relationships if at all possible. So that means you want a social graph someone else already cultivated. That could mean something generic like Facebook, something with more cultural context like LinkedIn, or something very tightly focused like the several hundred Foresight Institute Senior Associate members (molecular manufacturing professionals, investors and champions) who talk about and the . Next, find a specific context that gives people a reason to talk frequently. I have thousands of contacts across hundreds of services. Nearly all of them communicate one-to-one with me only once or twice a year, if that. You'll want interactions that give people reasons to talk together in bursts, and then come back quickly for new bursts. Sports are a great example; you have a season of events that attract attention. Or maybe your trigger is a life event like a pregnancy (on week 17...) or starting dialysis (want to watch a video together?) or joining a clan. None of these give you virality. For growth you need two other elements: a type of conversation that's better with more than two people in it and an experience worthy of dragging friends into your service from other networks. In a sports context, this might be seeing overseas futbol matches from home in the middle of the night but with a 'bleacher' full of friends to talk about the game, the players, and beer. Online teams for and the like need pre-, post-, and in-game voice chat; again >2 people and worthy of drawing fellow gamers into the service. Last, seek social graphs that are clumpy and tangled. Clumpy social networks are full of existing little clusters of people. is a great example of a social graph organized around clumps that are both topical and local. LinkedIn groups and Facebook pages are attempts to add clumpiness to otherwise flat networks. If you can find social graphs with pre-existing groups of people, where the group formation energy has already been invested for you, you have a much better shot at achieving the interactions that will make your chat product successful. Tangled social graphs connect people and clumps across a wider range of personal/social attributes. Tangled networks avoid saturating a small, isolated part of a network just to have word of mouth die. This is a little abstract but I hope you find it useful.

There's way too much NOISE in the chat app space. If you really provide some interesting value in a fun, engaging manner, college students, friends, family are the best one's. The first couple of hundred adopters actually give you the best possible feedback. Go spread on social media. Its still effective to use the web to promote your mobile app (if you are talking mobile). If its a web app, well, there are few reasons which I see to really use one!