Ask HN: We dreamed, we shipped, we are stuck

[kingsidharth]

About an year ago me and utkarshkukreti set out to create an online network for entrepreneurial people. Just where you could share ideas, ask question and mark progress of your startup in mile-stones and all.

The MVP we ended-up building is live at http://besperk.com . We got decent enough traction in earlier days. It did face some problems - there were no email notifs at first, then there were just too many of them. We tried hard keeping up with them.

But it just didn't work out. We burned-out and the traffic slowly died. But it wasn't all useless; looking back, it's clear, we did solve some problems. Biggest one of them - UX of online forums.

Now we have 4 options:

1. Open Source the Code. It's sorta amatuer but some people might be interested in using / developing it.

2. Sell hosted forums. Blog owners and other people interested? Will you be interested?

3. Get other interested devs on board (It's sorta too much on one Rails dev) and continue to work in this direction.

4. Sell everything.

Would like to hear from you guys. Ideas from HN always help :)

Off to wiser people out there:

[rkalla]

Please balance my recommendation with that of everyone else that ends up replying, but here are my thoughts.

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.

[georgespencer]

It looks like you lost your drive after about three months (judging by the messages in your Twitter stream).

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.

[ianpurton]

"Biggest one of them - UX of online forums"

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.

[lallysingh]

To be fair, most forums I see are beyond ugly. Eyebleed and personally-offended ugly, I think, are about the right level.

The rest of it -- click to read, click to respond, etc etc. Eh, I'm not too worried about.

[katherinehague]

Have you guys ever heard of Sprouter? They are basically in the exact same problem space. They were able to get a huge amount of traction in the entrepreneurial community. However they are currently facing financial difficulties after not being able to monetize the concept despite about three years work and multiple iterations. I think that you guys probably need to take a hard look at what your business model would be if you were to continue the project, and what value you would really be providing an potential acquirers.

I went and took a quick look at your site. While I won't pretend to know your user base, the value proposition and messaging doesn't seem to be that strong. The site starts with > "Ridden by evil entrepreneurs and people who follow their dreams.We know, that's wierd. You were warned."

Despite the obvious typo, its not very clear to me what you do. I know word of mouth might be what has brought you traction thus far, but apart from that I couldn't imagine myself signing up if I just landed on that page.

There is certainly merit to the idea of bringing entrepreneurial people together, but you aren't without significant competition, and you aren't in a space that has yet discovered a viable business model. I'd take a long hard look at your overall strategy and market approach before investing heavily in the same direction.

[padmanabhan01]

Not everything is a technical problem. If there isn't a place as of yet like an online network for entrepreneurial people, it is not because no one was able to do a site or a forum where such people can hangout.

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.

[vnorby]

I went through a similar situation earlier this year. I think it's pretty much always better to cut your losses, especially for your mental health. Most of the time, it's just not the right idea and you'll drive yourself crazy trying to make it work. In rare cases, you need to give it some time and put more effort to make it work - but only you will know in your heart if more time and effort will really help.

I myself prefer not to open source the code because I may wind up using it for my next project. For the same reason I prefer not to sell my code either. Instead, take the lessons you've learned and the site you've built, and try something new, either another startup or joining someone else's startup. If you're joining someone else's startup, leave it up temporarily as a testament to your ability, you'll get a job in no time.

[tomcreighton]

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.

[kingsidharth]

Please ignore the front page for now. It was some crazy test we did for some purpose. Did you sing-in and check it?

[webwright]

1. Open sourcing is a fine idea, if there is demand for it. There are a million forum apps out there, though-- be honest-- do people REALLY love yours?

2. Are there any/many companies making money doing this? I'd go narrower and perhaps aim at Support Forums (something companies pay money for).

3. Worth a shot. I think you need a design/marketeer/evangelist more than you need another dev. Keep it 1-developer simple until you nail a narrow use case that has users/customers excited to keep coming back. Who on your team loves distribution problems? SEO? SEM? Bizdev? Blogging and tweeting?

4. Almost impossible. Very few people want someone else's (failed) codebase.

In general, the current market you're attacking (a place for entrepreneurs to discuss) seems like a pretty crappy one. Can you name 5 high-margin companies that are positioned directly at the same audience? Pre-startup people are a penny-pinching bunch. Hard to charge them money, and few advertisers want access to that audience unless you've got pretty amazing scale/brand.

Whatever you do, have a marketing plan. 99.9% of businesses hit the "wow, our sales aren't growing fast enough" wall. Don't count on word-of-mouth-- be happily surprised by it if it happens. If you're going to go with the pure-engineer team, try to think of a business that either solves a REALLY ACUTE pain or can capitalize on existing channels (app stores, SEO, Adwords, etc).

[evolution]

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.

[simonbrown]

I don't know how good they are, but there are several FaaS products:

http://vanillaforums.com/

http://www.invisionpower.com/hosting/

[buro9]

Fully white label? As in... an API you can use?

In which case, Disqus.

Or just comments on things?

In which case, Disqus.

Also, if you're doing forums as SaaS you really need to think about the kind of anti-spam, moderation and admin tools that you're going to provide.

I don't know if you've ever seen the admin section of vBulletin, but there's a reason why vBulletin is so widely used and it's not to do with the front-end.

[kokey]

I also think there's space in the market for a strong forum engine service, while labelled. Something that's search engine friendly and maybe something to help people replace their php forums with.

[qikquestion]

FWIW, I like to know whether you tried marketing this in an offline way to increase the community.

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...

[joss82]

I'm sorry guys, but there is a typo on your front page: s/wierd/weird

I would suggest you to take some long vacation with fresh air and go back to work to polish the website, and maybe spin the forums off.

[davidandgoliath]

Kudos of course for a launch of any sort, the product at least looks good in screenshot form :)

As for..

Now we have 4 options:

1. Open Source the Code. It's sorta amatuer but some people might be interested in using / developing it.

You could potentially do a combination of 1 & 2. Look at http://vanillaforums.org/ as an example -- both open source and offering the pay2play style platform for hosting. Wordpress does the same.

As for the direction to go, that all depends on how much interest you have in the project. Do you want to spend the next five years solving this problem? Do it. If not? Sell, or open source.

Either or could lead to bigger opportunities as a dev., as could working on it.

[wsdom]

I would say find a way to integrate with with large social networks. Facebook and LinkedIn both have API's you might be able to use to help regain traction and maintain certain aspects of your site. Like the idea and its potential after looking at your site. But the name is strange. I cant even tell if I am saying it right.. Might want to work on that also. But I would would keep going with it or open source it... Only my opinion.

[kingsidharth]

Hmm that's one direction that we must try out! Thanks

[fleitz]

Your MVP worked perfectly, you put something out, gained valuable experience and now know that there is a market for hosted forums.

Go talk to the people that are interested and get letters of intent. Get something salable and charge them money. Who cares if a bunch of people who could roll their own forums in a weekend are interested, what matters are the 99% of people who can't and are willing to pay you.

[spobo]

5. Pivot! Experiment a little with what your users want. Ask your users what they are missing. Add a random chat feature or something that will match up potential co-founder matches based on some shared interests and qualities each of you provide and you'd like to pool.

Do some A/B Testing on landing page designs to draw more people. Measure which features stick and which don't.

[brackin]

Why not continue what did you do to market it? There's lots you could do which is slightly different to normal techniques. I think you need to try something new and if all fails continue with this plan of action.

When you're ready to give up you're usually much closer than you think.

[icebraining]

> Just where you could share ideas, ask question and mark progress of your startup in mile-stones and all.

But does it actually offer that, or is it just a generic forum UX? Frankly, I think the latter market is pretty well covered by cheaper, full featured and easy to host (PHP) alternatives. There's no point in going after that.

I think what SO (and possibly Quora, I'm not there yet) has shown is that you can succeed and displace well-established competitors if your software is custom tailored to the domain at hand.

So, what differentiates your engine-for-the-entrepreneurial-community from any other engine? What specific features does it have just to solve that problem?

[kingsidharth]

PHP Forums, you and I can get away with those. Not my mum or my aunt who wants one for her blog readers. FaaS is for people who find WordPress too geeky.

Not sure about the later part, there is nothing special about Besperk.

[hernan7]

Number 3 looks interesting. Maybe become a cloud-based competitor to VBulletin.

(Make sure that transitioning from the old forum to the new one is as painless as possible, though. Forum members usually hate any changes to their forums.)

[kingsidharth]

Transition part never thought about but very important yeah!

[tarekayna]

2- Before asking if anyone is interested, are you interested? Is this something that excites you?

3/4- I think it all comes down to this: do you still have the passion and the drive to do this? Do you still believe the in the mission? If yes then continue doing it. If not, there is no shame in calling it off and moving on to something else that keeps you up late and gets you up early

[TomGullen]

I just signed up and had a quick look, is it fair to say it's just a forum?