Solving the Chicken and Egg problem - Part I, Pick a Niche

The Chicken and Egg problem is the bane of most ideas existence. Most ideas you ever come up with the first thing someone will say to you is that you have a "Chicken and Egg" problem, and I have been guilty of saying that myself.

In brief the Chicken and Egg problem (Explained by Seth here) is when you are in a situation where a thing A is not possible without B and B is not possible without A. In Seth's post he limits this to saying people will not use your product until you have a lot of people already using it but I think it can apply to a much broader range of things which are causally related. For examples in some cases investors won't invest in your product until its proven and it's hard to prove a product without investment.

I could discuss this longer and how it links to the network effect but for now I just wanted to give you some conceptual solutions I have come across or come up with (every problem has a solution).

Solution number 1 and the most obvious one (mentioned by Seth) is to pick a niche. If you can split A and B into small enough parts you can easily handle them directly. A concrete example to make that clearer is Facebook's marketing strategy (or part of it).

Facebook has a massive Chicken and Egg problem, you will not use them unless your friends are on it and your friends wont use it unless you are on it. Facebook solved this by picking a niche (naturally fell into this solution), they were only available to Harvard at the start and were able to build up there network organically there.

The niche solution is the easiest and probably the best and is employed in almost all cases I have come across. But you should probably do it in parallel to all other techniques, which I will write up in a bit.

Update:

Solving the Chicken and Egg Problem Index:

Part I, Pick a niche
Part II, Denial
Part III, The chicken chicken strategy
Part IV, Miracle
Part V, False Pretenses