Forrst Gets Seeded With $200,000 | Hacker News Reader

Forrst Gets Seeded With $200,000

techcrunch.com

110 pointsnathanh44 comments

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$200,000 isn't cool. You know what's cool? $41,000,000.

Honestly though, grats Kyle. Passionate users, revenue is coming in, you obviously deserve it.

Haha, indeed.

But thank you, I really appreciate it!

kylebragger (forrst's founder) first introduced forrst with a small Tell HN invite session a year ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1132947

Then a more wide-spread RWW article:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440847

Grats Kyle!

Thanks so much. It seems like forever ago that those went up. I'm really proud of the progress we've made in the last year.

Question for you: According to the article, 10% of users pay 9$/month:

9$/month-user * 12 months/year * 10% * 23000 users = 248400$/year

200k$ seems like a small sum compared to your yearly revenues.

What did you gave up for 200k$ ? Why not just wait for the revenue to come in ?

It is 10% of forrst.me accounts that cost $9/month, not forrst.com accounts.

Forrst.me can serve as the central place of your online profiles, but not everyone on Forrst have a forrst.me portfolio.

Thanks for the correction. I guess I got confused by the similar names, especially since http://forrst.me redirects to http://forrst.com . I can't be the only one confused by this dual use of the same trademark...

BTW, it shows "435 supporters so far" and supporter accounts cost $9/month.

Over 40 Million and you get to buy a vowel. Less than 40 million? No vowel for you.

Great for forrst, well deserved, even if this is yet another article that pretends forrst is for designers only...

Us devs are on there, I promise.

Yes we are but one of the reasons like it is that it's mostly about design. There are already enough dev dominated ghettos on the web.

I like that it's a mixture of coders and designers. It's enlightening to mix up with a different group of people now and then.

there's even articles on forrst about node.js!

http://forrst.com/posts/tagged?with=node.js

I love this. A small, sizable round for Kyle and his two employees -- I think there are three people building Forrst? -- to advance the product and see where they get. If all things go well, they'll get more financing and continue to build it out. If not, his options are to (1) sell for a reasonable amount; (2) reduce the team size and chug along on their revenue; or (3) let it run as a side project.

The reason I like forrst is because an engineer created a community that brings together people who might have never have ever met. Also, the name rocks.

Good for them, but it still annoys me that I have to give a twitter username to sign up. Not everyone tweets all day. Some of us waste our time on here instead ;)

Thanks. I appreciate where you're coming from. It was a bit short-sighted of me to add that field. FWIW We're working on an overhaul of the invite system and model.

I applied to forrst, but never got a response on being rejected or approved.

Is it always going to be invite-only?

We're requiring invites always, in order to keep out recruiters, "idea" people, and other non-dev/designers, as that would likely detract from the community in a grave way.

We are, however, in the middle of a huge overhaul to the invite system to ensure that developers/designers can and will get access, while still ensuring only they do so.

The new system will be much, much less of a black box, and hopefully alleviate the frustration too many folks have had to experience.

  ensure that developers/designers can and will get access, 
  while still ensuring only they do so.

Curious about how that might work - anything you can expand on that?

Sorry for the late reply. We're prototyping a new invite system where we do a few things:

a) drop the whole "Apply" motif, since it's not so much about approval/denial as it is ensuring the integrity of the community. It's caused a lot of confusion.

b) move from a "use your invite and become accountable for the invitee" model to a vote-centric one: you cast votes for folks you'd like to invite, and depending on the reputation of the voters, after a threshold of votes is reached that person is invited in. People who voted on users who end up being invited get a point - we're building a leaderboard that will surface the users with the most points -- basically trying to reward, through exposure, users who are great at growing the community. (NB: this leaderboard will also feature users who have a large amount of comments marked as helpful or starred by staff)[1]. The overall goal here is to use humans as a "not a good fit for Forrst" filter. We're trying to encourage folks to grow the community by rewarding them with recognition -- both within the community and publicly.

c) We're also working on some other stuff that will whitelist users who want in based on various things (e.g. having a verified email address with a well-known company e.g. Google, Facebook, etc.). Also have been working on looking at a user's existing social graph(s) to determine potential overlap between that person's network and the Forrst userbase. Much of the credit for this one goes to Nate Westheimer (innonate.com). FWIW I'd love to speak to folks who've done similar things (kyle at forrst.com) Also looking to make it dead easy to get dev/design shops on, and furthermore, to make it simple for existing Forrst users in good standing to get their teams on board.

Happy to elaborate on any of this.

[1] I should add that we're really pushing right now to make it all about quality comments. Posts, to me, are second class citizens. They only exist to create great discussion/feedback/critique.

Same experience, here; never received a response.

Same here

I have an invite... can't find your guys' email address though. =(

> Coders hang out on Stack Overflow. Designers hang out on Forrst.

Actually, designers hang out on Dribbble, and - to put it bluntly - those who can't get in hang out on Forrst. It is really weird that TechCrunch included no reference to former, feels almost like it was intentional.

I think they are sitting in slightly different pieces of the market. I'm far from a design expert, but everything I see on Dribble seems like finished work (or at least polished and ready to show off). Often on Forrst I'll see stuff that people are struggling with and requesting real feedback on.

As someone who is about 95% developer and 5% designer I'm well aware that there is no place for me on Dribble, but Forrst users are happy to critique and offer solid suggestions on how to improve my limited design skills (which is something I'm really grateful for).

this is actually true. dribbble users are the who's who of the web design world. doesnt mean there isnt room for other invite design communities though.

Forrst has a better community feeling to me than Dribbble.

That is actually true.

Congrats Kyle + Team.

This headline made me cringe, because in Jamaica 'seeded' means 'impregnated'.

Congrats, Kyle and the whole Forrst team! Looking forward to seeing what's coming in 2011 and beyond.

Thanks, Jim!

Kyle, since you're here I figured I'd give you my #1 bug I'd love to see fixed: The login wall loses what you were trying to access after a successful login. It's a stab to the heart. Stabby stab stab.

EDIT: That and the login cookie seems to be one of the shortest lived of any site I use. :(

Our session lib is my arch nemesis these days. They should be good for a year, but for whatever reason, it's hosing them. I'll see what I can do...

The article kind of assumes developers and 'coders' are mutually exclusive, and seems to suggest Forrst is not for people who write code, after a glance at their home page for a couple of seconds it seems apparent this is not the case.

Still perhaps I'm being pedantic.

Forrst is an incredible community. I post my in-development snaps on there all the time and receive a lot of great advice from some amazing and extremely talented people. Super happy for them! :)

I love how Forrst posts seem to get a lot of visibility on from the community where they might not get much on HN/Reddit. Sort of a facebook news feed instead of a vote-up competition.

As feedback for Kyle: I find the Activity and Posts menus confusing. Why the separation? Why don't you just show me things you think I want to see, and not give me so many choices? I feel like you can get rid of a lot of the stuff on the top menu bars. I'm not a power user and I find it overwhelming.

At any rate, I expect that forrst will slowly start to become another one of my regular visits.

Proud to be an investor. Go Kyle!

Finally, some sanity in the bubble :) Congrats Kyle!

Forrst has been a source of inspiration for my work ever since I started using it. Honestly some of the designs I see there are so polished and refined that it makes me (a developer trying to improve on my design skills) feel downright design-dumb sometimes.

Congrats Kyle!

Great, the question is though, is it enough for them to be able to purchase the domain www.forest.com and www.forrest.com?

Congrats on the seed! I have been a member of the community for a while, and love what it has to offer members.

Awesome to hear this. I am on Forrst daily and find it to be a great community.

Run, Forrst, run!

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