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That was our initial play... but small forums take a long time to grow, and so the growth argument still isn't won by focusing on that (hence our switch to focus on the import tool and migration, to push the numbers and make a more compelling growth story).
The best performing (new) forums we host have around 250+ members, with 25+ concurrent online most days.
Most new forums we host have got to ~25 members per forum, with ~5 concurrent most days, in 6+ months of operation. They are small seeds showing solid but very slow growth.
The fundamental hypothesis that we started with has proven to be true, that each forum grows linearly and by hosting many forums it is possible for the compounding nature of many linear growth lines to work as cubic (or exponential) growth. The flaw is that on the graph of this, the x-axis of time has much larger labels we expected. We always knew it would take time, but we didn't imagine it would take this much time.
Again, this is my bias and my flaw... my experience founding forums (Jeepster, Bowlie, LFGSS) and working with forums (Chicago Fixed Gear and other music forums like the Beggars Banquet and NME forums) has always been seen far faster growth per-forum so I believed this was the norm. I also suspect that when I was speaking to other forum owners that I've been misled by survivor bias, I spoke to good sized forums... and obviously (now) those are the ones that grew fast enough to survive - I didn't hear from those that failed.
So aside from it taking ages to acquire customers, it takes ages for those customers to grow to the point that they produce any significant revenue.
Velocio-
True - but are any of them from breakaways/splinter groups?
I have seen it happen on several forums (mostly HiFi / AV related) where a core, key set of users get pissed off with the administration so setup on their own, often taking a large user base with them.If you can somehow make these key "players" aware of the existence of microcosm and its ease of setup then I think you could grab a large number of users quite quickly.
A lot of forums use google ads - could you take out a small test campaign to target getting adds on forums along the lines of "microcosm: create your own awesome, mobile friendly forum in under 5 minutes, for free! "
If it works, this has the benefit of not requiring a migration but still having a strong initial userbase...
danb
I am wondering if migrations are the way to go, rather than perhaps trying to push the ease of creating a new, awesome forum that just works perfectly via mobiles.
I wonder if you could try and generate some buzz around the ease of creating a new forum and get a whole load of signups that way. Most would likely be tiny and probably not much used, but I recon you would get quite a number of "breakaway" forums signing up by people/groups of people who are disenchanted with (large) forums that they currently use but the barrier to setting up a new forum has been the tech knowledge. You have removed that barrier...