But in essence, we figured that out quite late... moving from helping to assist building a community to having created an import tool and to push our numbers harder by simply moving existing forums/communities to us.
We hit the end of the runway before the impact of that was felt. We didn't manage to raise enough funds to continue.
We've open-sourced everything now, and I'm helping a couple of customers set up their own instances. Most customers are staying on a single shared instance though, as one of the larger sites is able to cover all of the costs of this (via the affiliate fee structure we had built in).
It's a hard thing, to fail in such a way. We had 44,000 users, 280+ forums, and some revenue. But the revenue was significantly lower than costs (when you have employees, founders, etc), so the crunch hit us.
I hope that the platform continues to live, and that it continues to shine. The customers are really happy, and some of the sales effort is still paying off (I spoke to a customer 3 days ago, who have 4k users, and they are joining the LFGSS.com instance of the platform).
It would be easier if we had failed more spectacularly, more obviously. Perhaps by just not getting any users at all.
Having read through your post I think your stagnation was due to the wrong pitch, and, secondly and as odd as it sounds, due to that dorky faces illustration at the top of your landing page. I can't think of a single case where a forum maintainer would say "gosh, I need a better community building tool" rather than "I think I need a better forum". Then, say, he lands on your page and the first thing he sees is a bunch of ugly stylized mugshots, whereby what he's looking for is a single beautiful screenshot of a forum page... I mean it may sound like a minor, subjective thing, but the first impression lasts and I'm willing to bet that it had an extreme negative effect on your bounce rate. You got the "hello" completely wrong.
(I'm writing all this because I really liked what you've been doing and I still think it's a viable idea ... that you just happen to have overdone a bit).
We knew it too. But that wasn't the reason for our failure. Our sales pipeline was already quite full and so our focus wasn't on changing the pitch even though it was sub-optimal.
Instead we were trying to optimise the slow sales and onboarding processes as those were what held us back at that point.
It's the usual thing: We had limited resources, and so we prioritised based on what would achieve the most at the time. Even though our pitch was bad we didn't have a problem with populating our pipeline, we had a problem converting due to slow committee-based decision making and then onboarding an existing customised/bespoke forum.
Yes, our costs (even without wages) exceeded the revenue and would do so for a while. Revenue lagged behind the growth of costs, as is usual for affiliate revenue when the communities are being built rather than traffic being purchased.
The risk therefore was to the investors, whose support we needed to continue even though we hadn't secured more experienced angel or VC support (not a good signal).
But in essence, we figured that out quite late... moving from helping to assist building a community to having created an import tool and to push our numbers harder by simply moving existing forums/communities to us.
We hit the end of the runway before the impact of that was felt. We didn't manage to raise enough funds to continue.
We've open-sourced everything now, and I'm helping a couple of customers set up their own instances. Most customers are staying on a single shared instance though, as one of the larger sites is able to cover all of the costs of this (via the affiliate fee structure we had built in).
It's a hard thing, to fail in such a way. We had 44,000 users, 280+ forums, and some revenue. But the revenue was significantly lower than costs (when you have employees, founders, etc), so the crunch hit us.
I hope that the platform continues to live, and that it continues to shine. The customers are really happy, and some of the sales effort is still paying off (I spoke to a customer 3 days ago, who have 4k users, and they are joining the LFGSS.com instance of the platform).
It would be easier if we had failed more spectacularly, more obviously. Perhaps by just not getting any users at all.