How to create a social network?

How can you create a great social network?

• I have a concept for a social network on mobile phones, want to come to the bay area, however don't know how to go about getting investment and finding a good team to create the product. Suggestions?

• Answer:

  Congrats on deciding to make one in the first place! Quite honestly it's not as hard as you think. If you don't know programming or don't want to pay someone to make it for you, there are tons of websites that can dramatically help you--without much programming needed. For example, http://www.ning.com/ allows you to create your own "social-community." And on Wordpress, there is a plugin called BuddyPress that converts a WP theme into a "social-network theme." Joomja and Weebly are amazing but require a little more programming knowledge.   But to truly customize your network, I would recommend starting a website from scratch (or hiring someone). You can learn the basics of making a social-network with PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, etc. on Treehouse--http://teamtreehouse.com/. That way, you'll learn programming in addition to creating the social-network.   Whether you choose to start from scratch or use a pre-built framework and then edit it (i.e. Wordpress, Weebly, Ning) depends on your desires. Do you primarily want to learn coding? Then start from scratch. Do you want to learn how to market an Internet website? Then don't focus on the programming. Personally, I made CafeMocha to inspire students to write and then share their writing with the world. In other words, I wanted to focus on the business--not the programming aspect--of the social-network. So I focused my time on Search engine optimization, social media optimization, blogging, guest posting, marketing, speaking, and eBook writing.   And the business is the hard part, not creating the website part.... Having people come to the social-network, post, and then recommend the site to their friends is the extremely difficult. Why? You have to offer a really solid incentive for them to switch to your network from previously established networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Youtube, Reddit, and tumblr.   Good luck! Hope this helped.