By all means bring your friends on board but to improve content we need a focused approach. It would be much better to bring in ten top authors in a narrow subject than in ten different subjects. Look at the anarchy success here. Everyone in the community joins. You could say the same for crypto news. You need critical mass to build a community. The approach of finding one good content source in a subject is like a city trying to randomly win manufacturing rather than try to add business that complement its population. Austin tech Seattle space, Detroit auto. These work better rather than a random city trying to win one good employer in each category.

Remember Facebook started with schools.