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Congrats and good luck man! FWIW I am inherently drawn to this place for reasons of community, but I stay because that community is evolving and constantly redefines itself. I am educated by it, inspired by its inhabitants, I find my own minor opportunities to contribute and I experience things which I would otherwise not. Such is this community that I find myself venturing tentatively into the 'real world' elements of the forum (something I intend to do more in the future). The reason a noob like myself can do this is because of the considered and intelligent structure of the place and its overall ethos. Summed up for me by your advice on donating.
Long may you continue to develop this place and I hope you go on to make a solid career from it. Cheers for building this place man.
+1 to bonds too.
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Here's an idea (coming from someone who's been involved in massive startups since the dotcom days and before):
The classified section is this sites biggest pull factor. It's one of the few places in the UK where you can deal direct with other aficionados and get goods for a great price. Sure, other forums sell bits but not at the volume seen here.
The problem is, you rely on a honor system whereby someone donates money they've made from a sale, if they feel like it. If you take the ebay method, each person enters a contract to sell goods using your servers, your reputation and so on, and if sold, they pay a percentage for the privilege.
So I'm sure the cynical lot will shout out "but dammit, I'm a broke hipster living in hackney, I can barely afford my large plastic-rimmed glasses, let alone pay", which is reasonable.
The thing is, most modern "free" portals aren't actually free. I've been involved with the monsters out there (names excluded, i'm sure you can figure them out), who sell the stats to what you do when you use these free sites. It's a fantastic market, a Internet marketers wet dream if you must and it pays incredibly well.
This isn't LFGSS, so if you want to sell your goods on here, pony up some cash and let's be honest, it's hardly a large amount.
All the things about trusted sellers, dibs and arguments over who/how they are performed, could fall away. You could turn this into the cycling marketplace for the UK.
If done correctly, you can turn this into a decent revenue stream alone, leaving the creative process to think about other areas of pushing the brand and the site further.
Happy to chat more about this, as I said earlier, I've been involved with teams who do this for a long time now, so can shed light on the approaches that work.
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will you now have to track and manage all donations and costs for the accountants? that could be interesting.. maybe have the LFGG as a separate company under yours, separate accounts etc
still love your idea, more so the sacrifice.
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It's finally time for me to donate the biggest chunk of money I can afford.
This forum has helped me out and so many other people with loads of stuff. Dave, your work and commitment to us bastards has been exemplary.
Bravo, good luck, and we've got your back.
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Id be up for making a decent investment in the company in return for bonds. Not just thinking of the potential to make money, mostly just interested in helping a startup grow. Plus I love this place.
Good luck David.
Btw Wiggle are currently considering an IPO at present. Apparently cycling is the new Golf.
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One last thing: If you run a community, if you know someone who does... point them my way. I want to solve their problems too.
i'll bump that bit of the long OP.
good luck david
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Looking at the Y combinator site, they take 6 to 7% of the company. What, if any, say would they then have in how it is run and what it does?
As I understand it Y Combinator try to put you in a position where you can then attract a proper investor: how, at that point, will you be able to be sure that those investors will not want LFGSS to be something you, or us, do not want it to be? An example mentioned above might be commercialising the Classifieds section, which I am not sure would be all that popular in the long run when people start to put up their prices to cover any charges the forum would make and investors might start to ask for a bigger return on items sold.
I think you are making a brave decision: not just quitting your job but, once again, asking for suggestions. That's ten hours a day gone right there.
Good luck. -
Addressing some of the points you raised above, Drupal might be the "right" answer, as it supports multiple sites sharing the same install, disparate types of content, and it quite easy to write modules which work together for any custom functionality you need.I can give you a few pointers if you need but 9 servers sounds excessive.
See "Sites made with drupal": http://drupal.org/cases
Also:
http://drupal.org/whitehouse-gov-launches-on-drupal-engages-communityGood luck!
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Here's an idea (coming from someone who's been involved in massive startups since the dotcom days and before)
...You could turn this into the cycling marketplace for the UK.
I agree. But think bigger. Why just cycling? If we're solving problems that communities have, what communities exist? Local ones, topic based ones... the same solution fits perfectly well the problems that watch forums have, or fishing forums. And they also work for local forums such as a Hammersmith forum, where you want to buy some white goods second hand and it makes sense both to buy and sell that locally.
Actually, when you think about it, communities (orientated around topics or locality - and sometimes time) are the best place in which to have such trade. And what if it's free for small items (below £100) and you pay a trifling on large items (above £100).
Doesn't that then take out Craigslist, Gumtree and the like? Because strong communities are a better place in which to perform transactions you can trust. Especially if tools existed to prove the provenance of stuff (removing the stolen goods fear).
It's bigger than just cycling, but cycling being what I love I will solve the problems here before branching too much. Just mindful of, does this problem exist for others too?
It's finally time for me to donate the biggest chunk of money I can afford.
This forum has helped me out and so many other people with loads of stuff. Dave, your work and commitment to us bastards has been exemplary.
Bravo, good luck, and we've got your back.
It's really appreciated. I may, next year, be buying beans with some of the money donated. So much for the yacht, beans on toast is the future.
Id be up for making a decent investment in the company in return for bonds. Not just thinking of the potential to make money, mostly just interested in helping a startup grow. Plus I love this place.
Bear in mind the scope. We're starting the feelers on investors, but the scope isn't "make cycling better", it's "offer hosted communities to the world so we can connect people by the things they care about - their interests - and then provide the tools for them to further their interests more than they imagined".
It's a big thing. I honestly believe that the knowledge in this community on cycling outdoes the knowledge on wikipedia about cycling. So why don't we have articles, reviews, mechanical advice, and this rich archive of that stuff so that someone re-furbishing a bike in a decade finds all the knowledge still.
There are so many angles on this, but it all comes down to you the reader, you the lurker, you the person who posts on here.
The problem with so much ambition and the speed we want to go at is how much funding that takes. If people have the means to think 6 figures and larger for initial angel investment, then we'd love to meet. We need to be thinking: How many staff, servers, and space do we need for 18-24 months? And that comes out at a large figure, but then... the potential is huge and I have 15 years domain experience, and one of the other founders is a proven doer.
Looking at the Y combinator site, they take 6 to 7% of the company. What, if any, say would they then have in how it is run and what it does?
As I understand it Y Combinator try to put you in a position where you can then attract a proper investor: how, at that point, will you be able to be sure that those investors will not want LFGSS to be something you, or us, do not want it to be? An example mentioned above might be commercialising the Classifieds section, which I am not sure would be all that popular in the long run when people start to put up their prices to cover any charges the forum would make and investors might start to ask for a bigger return on items sold.
I think you are making a brave decision: not just quitting your job but, once again, asking for suggestions. That's ten hours a day gone right there.
Good luck.Y Combinator want you to think big such that they attract investors... investors expect 10 fold return on their investment. If we take $150,000 for 6% then we need to deliver back $1.5m in 3 to 5 years. Clearly that is beyond what LFGSS could ever do. Which is a good thing, as LFGSS isn't expected to do any of that.
The whole premise is that if the servers work efficiently, and can attract enough communities, that the sum of all communities achieves the revenue. I'm not looking to undermine, compromise any community. I'm looking to so effectively give communities what they need in terms of a place in which to exist that the traffic across all communities makes money.
Think of it this way, if 250,000 unique visitors brings in £1,500 per month in revenue, is it important that the 250,000 is one community? Couldn't it be 100 really small communities... the niche of the niche.
Then, if some communities support intra-community commerce such as classifieds... a very small bit of revenue comes from that. Other communities might support dating solutions (because you want to meet people interested in the same shit as you), which may also produce a small bit of revenue. Other communities might support advertising supported newsletters (such as a community based around a town).
The important thing in our projections is to realise that 2 things are the case:
1) That communities seldom make enough money to pay for themselves... but that they do make money.
2) The software could support many communities for much lower per-community costs... so the money you do make is now profit rather than being eaten by costs.So I'm not looking or even thinking of exploiting the communities, I'm looking to give each community such a good solution that attracting hundreds, thousands of communities is possible.
It's scale that makes this works. That the network of communities adds up to far more than any single community.
Think Wordpress... that wordpress.com and a million hosted blogs, is profitable even though each individually hosted blog isn't.
Addressing some of the points you raised above, Drupal might be the "right" answer, as it supports multiple sites sharing the same install, disparate types of content, and it quite easy to write modules which work together for any custom functionality you need.I can give you a few pointers if you need but 9 servers sounds excessive.
See "Sites made with drupal": http://drupal.org/cases
Also:
http://drupal.org/whitehouse-gov-launches-on-drupal-engages-communityGood luck!
9 Servers isn't excessive when 1,500 people are online simultaneously.
4 web servers.
1 load balancer and memory cache.
1 file server.
2 database servers.
1 mailing list server.All run quite warm, and taking out any creates a weak point on the solution.
Yet all could support more... another 9 sites the size of LFGSS, or 100 sites that are really small.
At the moment the software isn't constructed with such efficiencies in mind, but I've seen Drupal and nor is that. Each page on this site is 7 database queries... I want to get it down to 3. I want to reduce the number of CPU cycles involved, to do nothing, anywhere, that isn't necessary. I propose to do this using a very heavily layered solution. It's really elegant stuff. ESI, memory cache, pre-rendering chunks.
No software out there does what I believe needs to be done to make it possible to have hundreds of communities hosted on a big platform... each with their own strong identity (and domain), each profit sharing and building their shit. All of which scales effortlessly and removes all tech work from community admins.
That's before my weird feature list comes in... software shouldn't fragment communication just because it's shit software. You shouldn't need to create events on Facebook just because forums are crap at events. That stuff is daft. I want to end that.
Bold move. You going to be open-sourcing it? Y Combinator are very supportive of that kind of model. Also, you'd end up with LFGSS geeks working on your code for free - the comments in the code and the commit messages would be something to see.
Seriously thinking about it. The only problem is: How much effort spent on open sourcing, and making things work in other environments, could be better spent working on the core thing? And from that... if we have the choice of the 'right thing' that used some proprietary thing or some very specific architectural setup... would open sourcing it prevent us from doing the right thing in our code?
I am a person very much inclined to be open and transparent, but I don't want to do that just because... and then have it affect us in other ways.
From the outset though, this is a platform. An API will do everything, and it will some day be possible to build your own site on top of the API. So it's obvious that even if 1 specific API touched upon something that made opening it hard, the fact that it's totally separated layers and modules mean that parts of it should be fine to open.
Which is cool, but therein lies another problem... is everything needed to make your own, open? Who knows... it's a long way into the future and I can't see that far.
Let's just say, I want to, we'll keep it in mind always. But I cannot promise something I don't know I can deliver.
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LFGSS: Turning a hobby into a technology startup
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