Do you have plans to open forrst up at any point? I don't have a portfolio and doubt I will have a good one for quite a while (in engineering school) but I really do enjoy looking around the design community at what people are building and how they are doing it.
A few random thoughts on building communities
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Re: A few random thoughts on building communities
#12Do you have plans to open forrst up at any point? I don't have a portfolio and doubt I will have a good one for quite a while (in engineering school) but I really do enjoy looking around the design community at what people are building and how they are doing it.
No plans to allow open signups, but the invites are purely meant to help throttle the growth of the userbase & community. If you are a developer and/or designer and are passionate about what you do, no matter how experienced or not, that's more than enough.
Re: A few random thoughts on building communities
#13I have two, possibly three questions: How many users are there in that "community" right now and how much time do you exactly, roughly, spend on the "community"? How does the time you spend now compare to the time you spent right at the beginning? The third optional question is, how did you actually build the community? Did you use those techniques, like, posting through different accounts and starting discussions wi…
> How many users are there in that "community" right now and how much time do you exactly, roughly, spend on the "community"? roughly 12,000, with ~5,000 active in the last 30 days (this only counts users whose accounts are more than 30 days old). still very young but seeing very healthy growth. > How does the time you spend now compare to the time you spent right at the beginning? I'd say I actually spend more time…
How do you monetize forrst? ads?
Re: A few random thoughts on building communities
#14Do you have plans to open forrst up at any point? I don't have a portfolio and doubt I will have a good one for quite a while (in engineering school) but I really do enjoy looking around the design community at what people are building and how they are doing it.
No plans to allow open signups, but the invites are purely meant to help throttle the growth of the userbase & community. If you are a developer and/or designer and are passionate about what you do, no matter how experienced or not, that's more than enough.
not sure if this is the right place to ask, but can I get an invite ?
Re: A few random thoughts on building communities
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
No plans to allow open signups, but the invites are purely meant to help throttle the growth of the userbase & community. If you are a developer and/or designer and are passionate about what you do, no matter how experienced or not, that's more than enough.
not sure if this is the right place to ask, but can I get an invite ?
Shoot me an email: kyle at forrst dot com.
Re: A few random thoughts on building communities
#16"Be ready to follow the community; that is, the community might end up in a slightly/vastly different place than you intended. That’s okay; embrace it." Spot on with this one. If you fail to embrace where the community is pulling you, you might miss out on a bigger business opportunity than the one you originally envisioned.
Thanks so much. If I had to pick one "top" point, it'd probably be this one.
I totally agree. I joined Forrst about a month ago, and this is one of the things I like the most about it. I can see that you are listening to the community. I have seen other examples (no need to get into names) when the people who built the community think that they OWN it. That they can dictate exactly what's gonna happen there and that the community members are in a way puppets in their own great show.
It doesn't work like this, of course. As a community builder you can - and should - set the rules and the guidelines. You can - and should - be proud of it. But you don't own it. You should leave your members enough space to be themselves, and you should listen to them and be ready to adjust your system if you think their input makes sense.
One other thing I like about Forrst is the diversity. There are experienced people next to high-school students. From many paradigms of web development and design and many corners of the planet. I learned about Forrst from an NYC tweep who asked "how can I get invited?". In the few days when my invitation was pending (and I still didn't know anything about the community), I was afraid that it will turn out to be a Silicon-Valley closed clique. I am very happy to see that I was absolutely wrong!
Keep up the good work, Kyle, you and the others who work on Forrst. Many thanks. Any my excuses for the lengthy reply :-)