how do you solve cold-start for personalization when your app has no behavioral data yet?

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Summary

A software engineer asks for strategies to bootstrap personalization for new users with no behavioral data, discussing the cold-start problem in content recommendation.

im a swe in a small startup building a content recommendation feature. the problem i keep running into is that we have zero behavioral signal on new users, so their first session is just generic top-of-funnel content. i can't ask users to rate 20 items on signup like netflix used to ,nobody does that anymore. sign-in-with-google gives me an email and a name, that's it. how are people bootstrapping personalization for new users in 2026? is everyone just eating the cold-start cost and waiting weeks for enough in-app data, or is there a smarter pattern i'm missing?
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