11–20 of 46 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please ignore the front page for now. It was some crazy test we did for some purpose. Did you sing-in and check it?
Why are you doing 'crazy tests' on your live front page? You should have a staging site for that.
First, to your points:
1. If there is something unique the code does and you want to nurture the project in the open (e.g. GitHub) this can't hurt. If you just want to dump it and move on, save the work of open sourcing it if there is no audience and you don't want to carry it forward.
Just take the technical and non-technical lessons you learned from this and apply them to the next idea!
2. Hmm, this typically gains traction when the company/person offering the hosting has some expertise that is unique and/or trusted. Also forums are going to be a very hard sell, I don't expect you'd be met with much success here. Open source forum software is abundant as well as commercial solutions so there is a lot of competition and I don't know that much market for this.
3. People don't want to join a project that already puckered out. Adding people will not add energy back to the project if you and your co founder already lost it.
4. Sure, if you can get money for it. People won't appreciate you selling the personal information, but you guys can make that decision.
SUMMARY In short, #1 and #3 should have been things you did going out of the gate when you first launched, e.g. the WordPress model. You could develop a community of more than just users around your idea.
Tossing a dead product over the wall into the open source community can help if you are Intel ditching MeeGo, but if this is "just another community" code base, I don't know that you are going to get any interest.
If the code is impressive, you could put it on GitHub or your repository of choice merely as a record of big systems you have built if you wanted to apply for a job somewhere in the future and show them something you made.
#2 is a total shift and forums... man that just seems like a long hard road to walk sales-wise if you are doing it as a fallback and are not excited about the idea.
Ultimately motivation, energy and persistence lead to success. It sounds like you two burned out on this already... just move on to the next thing that excites you.
You learned a lot, this wasn't a loss, just leverage it to make yourself even more optimized with the next startup.
That is my 2 cents.
I don't think that's forum owners main concern, I bet they're more interested in fighting Spam and Trolls.
So you gave yourself quite a hard task here. You went up against onstartups, hacker news and all the other startup communities.
You also built a forum, which I think is above and beyond an MVP as you could have used an off the shelf forum ?
But the best thing to come out of this is that you can clearly deliver an idea all the way to getting people to signup. Ditch this idea move onto the next.
I think you can try out forum as service. We've been servicing our clients for 2 years and had faced need of this. Well integrated under custom domain, white labeled and customized forums are something that I won't mind paying for.
Have you thought about relaunching after a redesign? What you just outlined as the idea behind the site sounds great... so I visited the site and was hit with off-putting text (the 'voice' of the site doesn't work for me), spelling errors and no clear indication what the site was FOR. So: idea really good (to my mind), execution: needs some polish.
Please ignore the front page for now. It was some crazy test we did for some purpose. Did you sing-in and check it?
Basically, I want to know what I'm signing up for that is half the problem. So it isn't clear what it does.
It also isn't clear how sign in works. There is a button and it looks like I need to type in a user name and password, but there is no username or password field. Should be top right, above the button that you have.
If you really think that you have 'solved' online forums, why not market it to a larger audience? Offer free public and pay-for private forums, or use ads.
Have you thought about relaunching after a redesign? What you just outlined as the idea behind the site sounds great... so I visited the site and was hit with off-putting text (the 'voice' of the site doesn't work for me), spelling errors and no clear indication what the site was FOR. So: idea really good (to my mind), execution: needs some polish.
Please ignore the front page for now. It was some crazy test we did for some purpose. Did you sing-in and check it?
Experts Exchange is actually a great case study in the distrust engendered by walling off your content behind a sign-up requirement. Stack Overflow has taken off like a rocket. I can browse every bit of user contributed content on their site without creating an account. Experts Exchange has a sizable community of people who actively dislike them. I think SO has the better model.
When you're ready to give up you're usually much closer than you think.
Did you try going to startup events and provide an access for the event members to create a niche community for them?
Though the concept is good, I feel you should reach to the audience when the merits are not clear over HN.
Since you are based in India, I feel you may go to the weekend startup meets and toss up this idea.
My 5 paise...
There is chicken and egg problem at play here.
If I had designed and launched a site exactly similar to HN or Stack Overflow, it would have been empty and dead, even if it would look exactly the same. The reason those 2 worked was becaue those that started it had some number of followers already to get the ball rolling.
Just my 2 cents.
That's not long enough to build a self-sustaining community. You did the easy part which was within your expertise (coding a site), but the hard part, which not many people can do, is building a community.
I agree with @tomcreighton. You should simplify, rebrand (rather than redesign: your entire brand needs attention. What problems are you solving for me? What am I going to love about your site? What about it speaks to me?) and relaunch. It looks like could be something I'd definitely use.
Try to find someone who can help you build your community. It's very difficult to do but you need to address the brand first. If you don't have a brand which resonates with people then there won't be a culture in your community.