Ask HN: We dreamed, we shipped, we are stuck

So: idea really good (to my mind), execution: needs some polish.

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.

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.

When you're ready to give up you're usually much closer than you think.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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?

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.

(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.)

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