A few random thoughts on building communities
kylewritescode.com
kylewritescode.com
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.
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 :-)
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?
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 :)
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/
[edit] Just checked it out; was a post from Chris Dixon. totally spot on. Thank you sir.