Microcosm, the open-source front-end

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The key learning from launching and getting customers: We built a great tool for the users of forums, but not so great a tool for the people who build and run the forums.

Meaning we're having a harder time selling it than we realised we would, and that most of our sales leads are telling us that we're only solving half of their problem.

Of the leads that want forums, forums are just one part of what they want. They also want a "home page" for the site and a blog. Those are the core requests that everyone wants.

And then customers also want some mix of galleries, polls, selling tickets for events, membership management (paid dues to the site/club for access to private areas), etc.

Which is good, because they are already identifying transactional based stuff that they want. But bad, because we don't have that stuff today.

We do have most of what is being asked on our roadmap, because we always intended to put galleries in forums (think of the Current Projects on here), and polls, classifieds, Q&A, etc.

Effectively our positioning is wrong. We solved problems that end users had regarding how easy it should be to interact with, use on mobile, etc. And those solutions have led to much better engagement through Microcosm than on other software.

But... we haven't solved the needs of the site admins who are the ultimate decision makers.

So we're going to have to look at how to bring a basic blog and homepage so that we can win convert more of these sales leads.

At the same time as all of that... we need to look at fundraising, and the best way to do that is to import LFGSS. So that's actually our #1 priority, but we've seen that some parts of the export and import system are causing us to re-work existing stuff to make it work.

We're in a time of a lot of work, and not much in the way of resource, so it's just about getting on with it.