Damon from BigStartups.com was kind enough to participate in an interview and share his knowledge about building online community startups from the ground up.  Read on for some great tips on finding members and different ways to keep your online community startup thriving.

Give us the quick pitch on BigStartups.com, and how you came up with the idea.
BigStartups.com began as a way for startups to promote themselves. That is the essence of what we are trying to do with the site. We realized there really wasn’t anything else out there helping startups get their ideas out to the startup community on a national or global level, so we built BigStartups.com. Our hope is that startups will be able to get the exposure they need to be successful and build great companies.

Neither of the BigStartups.com co-founders are new to starting interactive communities on the internet. Briefly describe your experience, and how you leveraged that to create BigStartups.
Matt Heaton is my partner on BigStartups.com and we met in our travels from building businesses in the online real estate space. He was a co-founder for ActiveRain.com, the largest community for real estate agents. I am the founder of a few real estate companies, HomesDiscovered.com, a real estate lead generation company, and IncredibleAgents.com, a real estate agent review site. Our previous experience helps us understand what our value proposition is to the startup community, along with our ability to ramp up the development process as well. We both have different skill sets and we are able to lean on each other when necessary. The lessons we’ve learned in our other companies has also helped us understand what needs to be done to be successful with BigStartups.com. Not to mention, having another successful entrepreneur to bounce ideas off of is a very valuable asset when building something new.

What is the #1 challenge you run into when starting a community driven website, and how do you overcome it?
It’s as simple as getting users. If your community has no citizens, you have no community. Also, the faster you build the community the more likely you will get other members to join. There’s definitely a crowd effect that takes place when building an online community. How to build that is the secret sauce that everyone wants to know the recipe to. It’s not an easy answer, but if you find it you’re golden.

What is the #1 tactic to find and recruit valuable and active community members?
Ultimately, I think we are still trying to figure this one out with BigStartups.com. When building a new community, your members all seem to have different reasons for joining and participating. My best advice for this is to keep things as simple as possible. That’s not always easy, but simplicity typically rules over anything else…especially in the beginning.

It seems like new social communities and networks are popping up online each day. How do you and how would you instruct others to gain a competitive edge and keep their community #1?
You’re right in that there are a lot of social communities popping up all the time. I don’t think there’s just one thing that makes them successful. It’s a combination of several things. Some are technical and some are psychological. You have to remember that being social is a human experience, not a technical one. The more human your experience the more success you will have. Psychology plays a huge role in this. Just put yourself in the shoes of your target market and think about why you would join and why you would participate. You’ll find your answer in that process eventually.

How can people get involved with BigStartups.com?
People can get involved with BigStartups.com by simply joining and adding their profile to promote their startup. It’s a quick 2 minute process. From there they can decide to ask a question, write a blog post about any topic or simply participate by answering questions and commenting on others posts. We are working on new ways for everyone to promote their profiles and get more exposure. Our first goal is to promote startups, our second goal is to give them the tools to promote themselves. However, we can only do that if we have startups to promote.