Yeah, and the problem is that if you try to start a bootstrapped company to compete with Glassdoor without ever taking funding, you’ll be outspent on marketing by the companies that did take funding and you’ll go under. There’s a reason so many of these sites are VC funded even when it feels like they shouldn’t be. And VCs are often willing to fund things with a 1% chance of success, so even if multiple VC-backed companies in a market have failed, it won’t dissuade them from investing.
The thing is you did find reddit via marketing, its just the marketing hit the people before it hit you, that guy that told you about it or the one that told him was the one that marketing got into reddit, which got them to a critical mass that word of mouth can take over.
Reddit's early employees were very busy with sock accounts reposting things from other sites, commenting on them, then messaging the creators on the original sites "hey your thing was posted on reddit!".
Reddit didn't start to attract the critical mass until they became the top result in Google though nor it was able to keep its servers with its own profit. Until they squash all possible opponents, such social networks has never been profitable.
>Why is it impossible for communities to emerge organically in 2024?
levels and blind sort of feels that way, but that's part of the issue:
1. these kinds of sites are a paradox in that you want employees to be anonymous but also verified. So you can't just spin up a site in a week and have valuable data
2. despite the comparisons, I'm sure both levels and blind were in fact vc funded. The models feels indie but it probably isn't. But they did their part for SEO and marketing and yadda yadda. So it got the eyeballs it needed before word of mouth set in
>Why does a Glassdoor alternative inherently need marketing?
to be frank, because most people don't try very hard to find the grassroots. They are lazy and will take the first thing that looks good on Google.
