Having no content on product launch

My team and I are facing an issue regarding the release strategy of our application, that is said to impact the User Experience of our first users.

We are building a content-driven app and our business development team argues, that it will be a problem for our beta-users that there is no content at day 0. Just fyi: The content is generated by users messaging other users, who then respond to the initial message. The whole conversation (message a + message b) gets morphed into a public conversation that is visible for all users, that follow the users who had the conversation. So when we launch the app and invite the first users to our platform, there won't be any public conversations. Visible follower counts on user profiles will be at 0 and the app will overall look kind of empty.

I wonder if you have any guidance for me on how to handle this issue.

• Should we fake public conversations between fake users, that real users can look at?
• Should we generate system questions that automatically will be sent to real users arriving on the platform?