
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Now we have 4 options:<p>1. Open Source the Code. It's sorta amatuer but some people might be interested in using / developing it.<p>2. Sell hosted forums. Blog owners and other people interested? Will you be interested?<p>3. Get other interested devs on board (It's sorta too much on one Rails dev) and continue to work in this direction.<p>4. Sell everything.<p>Would like to hear from you guys. Ideas from HN always help :)<p>Off to wiser people out there:
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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.

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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?

~~~
macavity23
Why are you doing 'crazy tests' on your live front page? You should have a
staging site for that.

~~~
kingsidharth
We were expecting some traffic from a source, tried targeting them with that
those tests.

~~~
Zakuzaa
That source is HN. :)

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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/>

------
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

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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?

------
md1515
What would you sell if traffic died? It seems like you were truly interested
in entrepreneurship so why not help the community and open door number 1.

I can't use it, but maybe someone can revive it.

------
four
Move on. Better use of your time, energy and wisdom to start on the next
thing, than to spend it on trying to extract some money from the last thing.
Move on.

------
arihant
It is important to note that the points 1,2 and 4 are not necessarily
disjoint. You can do them in the same order.

------
zerostar07
Evolve it to something else. I 'm sure you got lots of ideas and little
energy, but hey this is the internet.

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teyc
startupguild uses Yammer. I think you're solving the wrong problem here.

------
rongdonu
The ultimate modern village of Bnagladesh: www.hulhulia.com

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adivik2000
Well document and Open Source it.

~~~
aymeric
Why should he do that? Could you detail your answer a bit?

~~~
adivik2000
I've used Besperk back in their early beta stage and was impressed with the
design and thought they'd be something like Disqus someday. But then, what
Besperk focuses on is a discussion on a nice looking website. I have facebook,
google+ and convore(for private discussions) to do that already. So, why use
this when all the folks are out there on other networks? Again, coming back to
the point. Besperk looks neat. Say if @KindSidharth sells Besperk to a company
and think they've done a good job, the product is gonna go nowhere as many
companies look for features that simplifies stuff and empowers them at the
same time. Say this is a product X that they would be using. When someone
showcases product Y to the company, there is a high probability that the
company 'will' go for Y. Cuz its better. I would suggest Open Sourcing the
product as "Evolution of Design happens only when its copied" as quoted by
@KingSidharth himself to me once. There is a high chance that 'I' could use
some of the design elements of Besperk on the next product we're building cuz
it looks nice and I can showcase it to a broader audience. Looking at me,
there could be several others who could use the code that is Open Sourced and
there you go. Good looking forms and websites! That's my view.

