4 ms·

I can't say trying to monetise yet another forum not working doesn't surprise me.

buro9 12y ago
We had revenue, and the revenue was 10x that for forums with adverts and our monetisation was far less intrusive (visually and on a privacy basis). The instance I still host has over 300 sites on it now, and remains profitable. Though without the company, this is now going into a non-profit which owns the server instance. The profits being used for charitable purposes. We did not fail to produce revenue from communities, we failed to make the argument to investors about the potential market and to grow to seize it. We could have remained a lifestyle business on the revenue, but our target was growth and we failed to sell that to investors.
- sfjailbird 12y ago
  I enjoyed your write-up a lot, and contrary to GP I think your idea and market analysis were really good. There is still a huge gap in this space and I've wondered many times why it hasn't been filled. I certainly don't look forward to the day I have to choose some forum software. Disqus is probably the best I've seen so far, and it is far less ambitious than you were.
- darkmighty 12y ago
  Your product itself seems very good, there's just one glaring inconsistency for me (perhaps I'm wrong): the product is ambitious but your goals are not -- and to get a huge growth you need to at least target a huge viral market. The good old forums are not a huge viral market, imo. For example, you could have tried to replicate a reddit environment: anyone can create a forum with a single click on your domain (don't even mention pricing), you could aggregate all forums on a front page to attract viewers, allow site wide discovery, etc.
  - buro9 12y ago
    That was on our roadmap. We felt that one of the strong differentiators was how much control we gave to forum owners to shape the structure and identity of their space. What we had planned was to focus on one market such that we'd have a small critical mass within that niche... in our case cycling forums which tend to exist with geographic focus yet have shared needs we could fulfil... and then create a directory from that to answer a "Find your local cycle forum" question before later making that question much broader. We knew from feedback that "community", "shared interests", "forum"... all these things are nebulous and vague, they say nothing to anyone. Offering a directory and creation method would fail because no-one searched for those things, and no-one created those things. We chose one segment to do well, from which we could expand into the other segments nearby (all sports and recreation interests), before expanding into entirely unrelated spaces. We had a plan, but it required time and growth to execute.
nailer 12y ago
I'm not sure: most forums are awful. Ever tried browsing through 19 pages of crap to find that one relevant piece of information? StackOverflows mostly sorted things for tech savvy Q and A ( I know there are other stack exchanges, but the non tech ones are ghost towns) so something for non technical people could be valuable.
hackerboos 12y ago
True but I'm not surprised they raised money on Seedrs. I've seen a lot of awful ideas raise money on there. Amateur investing at it's worst.

buro9 12y ago

We had revenue, and the revenue was 10x that for forums with adverts and our monetisation was far less intrusive (visually and on a privacy basis). The instance I still host has over 300 sites on it now, and remains profitable. Though without the company, this is now going into a non-profit which owns the server instance. The profits being used for charitable purposes. We did not fail to produce revenue from communities, we failed to make the argument to investors about the potential market and to grow to seize it. We could have remained a lifestyle business on the revenue, but our target was growth and we failed to sell that to investors.

sfjailbird 12y ago
I enjoyed your write-up a lot, and contrary to GP I think your idea and market analysis were really good. There is still a huge gap in this space and I've wondered many times why it hasn't been filled. I certainly don't look forward to the day I have to choose some forum software. Disqus is probably the best I've seen so far, and it is far less ambitious than you were.
darkmighty 12y ago
Your product itself seems very good, there's just one glaring inconsistency for me (perhaps I'm wrong): the product is ambitious but your goals are not -- and to get a huge growth you need to at least target a huge viral market. The good old forums are not a huge viral market, imo. For example, you could have tried to replicate a reddit environment: anyone can create a forum with a single click on your domain (don't even mention pricing), you could aggregate all forums on a front page to attract viewers, allow site wide discovery, etc.
- buro9 12y ago
  That was on our roadmap. We felt that one of the strong differentiators was how much control we gave to forum owners to shape the structure and identity of their space. What we had planned was to focus on one market such that we'd have a small critical mass within that niche... in our case cycling forums which tend to exist with geographic focus yet have shared needs we could fulfil... and then create a directory from that to answer a "Find your local cycle forum" question before later making that question much broader. We knew from feedback that "community", "shared interests", "forum"... all these things are nebulous and vague, they say nothing to anyone. Offering a directory and creation method would fail because no-one searched for those things, and no-one created those things. We chose one segment to do well, from which we could expand into the other segments nearby (all sports and recreation interests), before expanding into entirely unrelated spaces. We had a plan, but it required time and growth to execute.

nailer 12y ago

I'm not sure: most forums are awful. Ever tried browsing through 19 pages of crap to find that one relevant piece of information? StackOverflows mostly sorted things for tech savvy Q and A ( I know there are other stack exchanges, but the non tech ones are ghost towns) so something for non technical people could be valuable.

hackerboos 12y ago

True but I'm not surprised they raised money on Seedrs. I've seen a lot of awful ideas raise money on there. Amateur investing at it's worst.