As social has become integral part of how web product are built these days, every new start-up pitch contains some social angle. While this is great to see, a few approaches seem to treat social as an afterthought and not the foundation of the business. A social commerce site will mostly likely not be successful if you first build a straightforward e-commerce store and then put social features on it. In the same way, it is extremely hard to build a community around an existing content site (independent of how good the content actually is) – users usually come to the site to look for information and not to hang out and share their experiences with other members of the community. So if you truly want to leverage social for your product, you need think about it as the first layer you have to build, not the last.

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