

Show HN: SaaSaholics.com, a forum for SaaS builders - dchuk

I setup this up about two months ago and seeded it with a variety of questions about stuff SaaS related but it ultimately ran out of steam. I truly think there's a need for real honest to goodness web forum for SaaS enthusiasts as forums often turn into a gold mine of quality content as the user base grows and matures.<p>So this is my attempt to get this thing some exposure and get some users for it. It's not meant as a replacement for Hacker News at all, as HN is a perfect platform for trends and current news. But I think it's lacking when it comes to fostering long term topic discussion because of the inherent ranking decay imposed by the algorithm that powers the site.<p>I will host it for free and have no plans to monetize the site at all. I simply love forums and want to see people benefit from a SaaS-centric board.<p>Of course, any and all feedback is appreciated.<p>You can visit the site here: http://www.saasaholics.com
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Joakal
What kind of awareness (or marketing) are you doing for that website? HN is
one good start.

For design, sorry, but your theme/UX sucks very badly. Lets start with the
biggest problem; frontpage: It seems that your frontpage shows very little
value for returning members. Instead of seeing a list of threads on a
frontpage on like HN, Reddit, email, etc, users are forced to check each forum
section if there are threads worth reading/contributing.

Stack Overflow example: It rose so quickly because it was backed by noted
bloggers eg CodingHorror. Those people worked together to create a
question/answer website and was able to drive interested traffic that kept
coming back. Why? Because it was highly relevant and people that comment on
the noted blogs also did it on Stack Overflow.

Further, Stack Overflow's frontpage has new stuff on frontpage and lots of
direction to go.

Reddit example: They created many fake accounts and submitted stuff in order
to gain a feedback loop. Even PG sent some users their way although it was YC
funded. Plus the Reddit frontpage has relevant content of full titles with
pictures. Everything is simple and easy.

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dchuk
I hear ya, but neither Stack Overflow nor Reddit are true forums. SO is a Q&A
site format, and Reddit is affected by temporal ranking decay in a way
different than traditional web forums and boards. Reddit and HN are
essentially topic aggregators, which lend well to trends and current activity
but not to long term forum discussions. I'm an active member of forums that
have two or three year old threads that are still active on a daily basis.
Because of the algorithmic ranking system of HN, Reddit, etc, you'll simply
never get that.

I am honestly not doing too much to promote the forum other than posting it
here and attempting to reply quickly to everything. A few dozen folks
committing to the forum in the interest of getting it off the ground could
easily start it moving forward momentum wise. I'm open to running ads
somewhere to get traction, but there aren't many places I think that would be
conducive to ads.

As for design, I just used one of the free themes available for MyBB. The
homepage is very similar to many other forums online (such as anything powered
by vbulletin). I can start looking around for themes that show more
details/activity though.

I certainly appreciate your feedback and would love to incorporate as many
updates and enhancements as possible to get things moving. Quite honestly, I
would love for even just half a dozen people starting threads and answering
replies and we can start to get the ball moving. After that, it should be able
to grow fairly organically.

EDIT: I found this plugin that I will go ahead and install:
<http://mods.mybb.com/view/recent-topics-on-index-page> that will show recent
threads on the home page. I think that's a decent solution for showing more
recent activity to users.

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Joakal
It's still a tiny section of the forum. I do think you should do away with 80%
of irrelevant content somehow.

Here's Australia's biggest forum: <http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/>

It's quite balanced, content vs labels.

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dchuk
I see what you mean, I'll do some research into hacking at MyBB this weekend
and see if I can make it look like that. Thanks for the suggestion!

EDIT: I found a pretty nice plugin that shows the most recent threads created
and most recent replies in a thread, as well as most active users. You can see
it here at the bottom of the index page: <http://www.saasaholics.com/>

It also updates via ajax every 5 seconds, kinda neat. What do you think?

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fastspring
Seems like a great idea. If there's some way we can help support your effort
please let me know. Please contact me directly.

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dchuk
Here is the clickable link: <http://www.saasaholics.com>

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zmonkeyz
Sprechen sie SaaSy?

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dchuk
haha I like to think I'm somewhat knowledgable in this area, so I suppose yes,
sprechen sie SaaSy

