A few random thoughts on building communities

http://kylewritescode.com/post/1065654202/a-few-random-thoughts-on-building-communities

by calebrown • 16 years ago

49 15 16 years ago

I 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 with your own self and other techniques?

kylebragger6• 16 years ago

> 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 on it now (~6 days a week) than I did at the beginning; the site is almost profitable now and is my full time job, vs. the first few months where it was only a side project.

> 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 with your own self and other techniques?

I got friends and colleagues to join up and pestered the heck out of most of them until the site became sticky enough that they came back (to my delight) on their own volition. I only have ever had one account :)

petercooper• 16 years ago

This sounds like the bowling pin technique (or whatever it's called) that was described on HN a few weeks ago. Where you start with a very small community that will talk to each other anyway and then grow at a trickle to keep the overall velocity up. In this way, your invite only tactic seems to have paid dividends vs having 10,000 people hit on day one and finding nothing going on.

Update: Thanks for find it where that "bowling pin" thing was, a clicky link: http://cdixon.org/2010/08/21/the-bowling-pin-strategy/

akahn• 16 years ago

What is the source of revenue on the site? Just ads? (I know this has nothing to do with community. Just curious since you mentioned that you are almost profitable.)

twidlit• 16 years ago

How do you monetize forrst? ads?

papa• 16 years ago

"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.

kylebragger6• 16 years ago

Thanks so much. If I had to pick one "top" point, it'd probably be this one.

tsipo• 16 years ago

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 :-)

magic6435• 16 years ago

One thing for sure is that the first people on forrst steered the creation of the posting guidelines tremendously. There was a time when we enthusiastically had posts showing off users workspaces but it started to get old and show that was not the type of content people were coming to see. Very organic growth with the community being in charge of content but you still need someone like Kyle to put his foot down here and there.

wwortiz• 16 years ago

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.

kylebragger6• 16 years ago

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.

minalecs• 16 years ago

not sure if this is the right place to ask, but can I get an invite ?

A few random thoughts on building communities

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