UGC systems depend primarily on content creation and curation by the users. Some of the most prolific products in the world are powered by UGC - e.g. Facebook, Yelp, Wikipedia, Whatsapp, Instagram, TripAdvisor, Zomato, Quora, etc. And there are many, many more.

There are 3 major challenges to make a UGC system work:

1. Think differently about all the three user categories 

Most UGC systems operate on the 1-9-90 rule of thumb, that is, 1% of people contribute (producers), 9% of people participate (participators), and 90% of people consume content passively (consumers). You need to think about all 3 of them. 

Image Source: Nick Kellet, list.ly

The producer, for example, is someone who writes a review on a site like Zomato or TripAdvisor and is motivated by passion and social recognition. Their needs are going to be make it super easy to contribute and then 'socially' reward them for having added value to the system. E.g. TripAdvisor and Amazon have done this really well by telling users than n number of people have found your review to be helpful across m countries, etc. That creates a trigger for the user to contribute even more. Further, contributors are also going to help you get more consumers by sharing their content that they have authored. This helps start the virtuous cycle as well.

The participator is not quite a "deep" contributor but adds value by curating and rating content. For example, could be someone who rates a restaurant on a scale of 0 to 5 or gives a thumbs up to a movie or upvotes a Quora answer. Most participators start out as consumers, see value that they are getting from the system and then want to contribute to continue to make the system better.

The passives simply want to consume but are indirectly motivating the contributors. Ideally, you need to get 10% of your users to contribute in some way.

2. Coverage

In a product like Quora, one of the key metrics is the number of questions that have been answered; the analog for a food site could be how many restaurants or dishes per restaurant that have been rated. Lets say, you are looking up a product review on Amazon and you don't find anything. How would you feel? If you don't have enough coverage, you will lose your precious consumers. Think of this as when you post something on Facebook and you're expecting to see likes, comments and shares.

Here it may be often important to run and get coverage metrics and either contribute through your own content/editorial team or nudge users who are "power contributors". Quora and other Q&A systems do this well by ensuring they get a lot of coverage.

3. Spam and abuse
You could imagine a hotelier or restaurateur wanting to favourably manage their reviews on a site like TripAdvisor, Yelp or Zomato. You need to think about how both algorithms and the community can minimise the destructive impact of this.  There are the widely available filters for spam, porn, hate, racial abuse, etc. that the system should provide. Then there could be proprietary content that can't be shared without licensing that needs to be eliminated (think music or licensed movie content uploaded on YouTube). Don't forget to involve the community into reporting abuse or inappropriate content. Also, where possible, see if user driven moderation regulate the community without your platform's direct human involvement. 

On the brighter side, once you build a UGC product which has a virtuous loop, you have a highly defensible product with a lot of moat.

About the Author -

(Amit Somani is a Managing Partner at Prime Venture Partners, an early stage Venture Capital firm based out of Bangalore, India. Prime VP invests in category creating, early stage companies founded by rock star teams. Prior, Amit has held leadership positions at Makemytrip, Google and IBM. He is also deeply engaged with the early stage startup ecosystem in India and actively volunteers with iSpirt, TiE and NASSCOM. He tweets at @amitsomani)

This article was originally published on Linkedin