4 ms·
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 t
by 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 agoThat 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.