I have a social travel product (http://wherescool.com) that I launched in 2009 with a team composed of 65+ "writer interns" I found off of the NYC Craigslist jobs section. We filled up the site with so much quality content it was written up by the NY Times within a few weeks.
Pretty sure I was inspired by Reddit at the time, and also Yelp which actually was mostly seeded by paid writers in the early days.
There's an art to seeding communities that I wish I had more opportunity to dabble in...
I have bought more than a few of them lunch / dinner when they're in town, some of the top writers I've written recommendations for and helped them find jobs.
But it wasn't because of any substantial income, those nice lunches & dinners probably got me a net operating loss for the year...
They were interns looking to fill out their resume and clips with writing samples. There wasn't much of a pitch, some of them started contributing before they even responded to the ad
Pretty sure I was inspired by Reddit at the time, and also Yelp which actually was mostly seeded by paid writers in the early days.
There's an art to seeding communities that I wish I had more opportunity to dabble in...