Location-based apps that rely on UGC (user-generated content) have a chicken and egg problem. People won’t use the app unless there is quality content and you can’t get the content without enough users. How many location-based apps have you used where you see an empty screen because there aren’t enough users nearby posting content?

We came up with a five ways to solve this challenge. These are not a complete solution but go a long way to addressing the challenge:

1. Pick a few locations and go deep: It’s better if you have great content for a few locations than poor content for many location. Start with just one city and get everyone there to love your app. Then do the same in other locations. 
2. Show some content even if it’s far away: It’s better to see some content than an empty screen. Someone may be willing to drive 20 miles if the content is compelling
3. Pull content from other sources: Many sites and apps provide APIs such as Google, Foursquare, Yelp. Pull in appropriate content from these APIs to augment user-generated content.
4. Encourage posting through rewards: Provide likes, badges or other methods to encourage people to post. Positive reinforcement goes a long way.
5. Provide easy social sharing: Making it easy to share on social networks will amplify your content and bring more users which in turn will feed new content. 

At mezz we use all of these methods to address the content challenge. This is not something that you can do once and stop. These methods need to be constantly iterated and improved. If you have other methods you’ve used we’d love to hear about them. Try out the mezz mobile app or web app and let us know how we are doing.