Rabby
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Edit January 5, 2018:
I changed the thread title from "building industry specific community" to "helping professionals execute and grow.'" After chatting with a lot of you here, this sounds much better to me. As of this edit, my current state of mind related to this project is represented by Post #16. In some of the posts prior to that, I see signs that I was falling into disorder in a way. By that I mean, trying many actions to make something work. With a new project, the problem is usually not that you need to work more and harder. It's that you need to be disciplined and efficient about solving the actual problems for individual people. That is becoming more and more clear to me as I reflect on past ventures, both successful and unsuccessful. It makes things much easier. It's not about the work or the product - focusing too much on those can, ironically, be counterproductive. It's about finding the real problems, validating the need for solutions as quickly as possible, and focusing on helping people with those problems. Special thanks and credit to @Andy Black for exemplifying this concept over and over again, until it sunk in deeper for me. I genuinely owe you one. I know this will be at the core of my business-building repertoire going forward. One of maybe 2-3 concepts that remain inseparable from entrepreneurship for me.
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I've never done a progress thread in a forum, but now that I know it's a thing, I find I can not resist. This is early progress... but I'll post as things develop.
Let me get this out there so you can either beat me up or laugh at me... a core component of my new project is a forum. However, it is not a "be an entrepreneur" or millionaire forum. It is for a specific industry. If that's still a no-no here let me know (I'll respectfully delete this), but I don't think it competes with thefastlaneforum at all.
I chose the format because I'm already familiar with it through my online classes, and I think it works for the industry-specific community I want to draw. I'm playing with some non-forum features to add as well, such as directories, job boards (which I have one of already, and I can perhaps leverage it), and other resources to make these people's lives better.
Phew. Ok, so I set up a Discourse forum, which I chose because it looks nice and modern, supports some cool features like wiki posts, and I like the Ruby programming language. I probably will not do much/any programming myself though.
The forum and other features TBD are for small-medium business owners in the specific industry, one that is so pervasive that the potential audience is quite large. I am ridiculously familiar with that industry. Looking at other attempts to build community for it, I am not impressed.
I got the technical part done a week or so ago. After some procrastination and hem-hawing I finally wrote rules and guidelines, and an intro post, and had some Indian VAs finish a directory page for me (they did a good job!). My friend and programmer who I employ in my other business will help with technicals, and he also has some valuable things to post there.
To get more initial posts, of course I will go through my contacts in the business and ask people to join. But not all at once. I want the ones who will help me with no reservations to post first, to add a sort of growing medium for new conversations. The agar. I have at least 10 people like this with valuable industry experience and strong enough ties that they'll do it just to help out.
But, for some variety, I went to Upwork and made offers to (so far) 5 freelancers who have relevant experience. Some I've worked with before (had them help write/edit course material). One turned me down. Two have said yes and started posting.
But Rabby, what's your revenue model? Well, I have products I can sell through such a community, and I am pretty good at developing products/courses for the industry. In the past I've never sold them outside my home state, so I'm broadening my horizons a little.
Aside from that, I can sell advertising. And the site itself could become valuable enough that an industry publisher wants to buy it. Having no set in stone revenue model may sound lame (and Silicon Valley Startup-y), but there are enough potential revenue sources that I'm actually less worried about that part than I am about just getting the thing going. What I want to do first is provide value to the (soon to be) community of people using the site. Only then does it make sense, to me anyway, to try to monetize it.
Since I'm starting this thread super early in the process, my goals will start off super unimpressive. I would like to attract 100 users. I hope I can do that in a few weeks once the agar sets, so to speak. Then I'll post the next goal, which will probably be 1000 users and baby revenue streams.
So, here's the tiny amount of progress so far:
I changed the thread title from "building industry specific community" to "helping professionals execute and grow.'" After chatting with a lot of you here, this sounds much better to me. As of this edit, my current state of mind related to this project is represented by Post #16. In some of the posts prior to that, I see signs that I was falling into disorder in a way. By that I mean, trying many actions to make something work. With a new project, the problem is usually not that you need to work more and harder. It's that you need to be disciplined and efficient about solving the actual problems for individual people. That is becoming more and more clear to me as I reflect on past ventures, both successful and unsuccessful. It makes things much easier. It's not about the work or the product - focusing too much on those can, ironically, be counterproductive. It's about finding the real problems, validating the need for solutions as quickly as possible, and focusing on helping people with those problems. Special thanks and credit to @Andy Black for exemplifying this concept over and over again, until it sunk in deeper for me. I genuinely owe you one. I know this will be at the core of my business-building repertoire going forward. One of maybe 2-3 concepts that remain inseparable from entrepreneurship for me.
-------
I've never done a progress thread in a forum, but now that I know it's a thing, I find I can not resist. This is early progress... but I'll post as things develop.
Let me get this out there so you can either beat me up or laugh at me... a core component of my new project is a forum. However, it is not a "be an entrepreneur" or millionaire forum. It is for a specific industry. If that's still a no-no here let me know (I'll respectfully delete this), but I don't think it competes with thefastlaneforum at all.
I chose the format because I'm already familiar with it through my online classes, and I think it works for the industry-specific community I want to draw. I'm playing with some non-forum features to add as well, such as directories, job boards (which I have one of already, and I can perhaps leverage it), and other resources to make these people's lives better.
Phew. Ok, so I set up a Discourse forum, which I chose because it looks nice and modern, supports some cool features like wiki posts, and I like the Ruby programming language. I probably will not do much/any programming myself though.
The forum and other features TBD are for small-medium business owners in the specific industry, one that is so pervasive that the potential audience is quite large. I am ridiculously familiar with that industry. Looking at other attempts to build community for it, I am not impressed.
I got the technical part done a week or so ago. After some procrastination and hem-hawing I finally wrote rules and guidelines, and an intro post, and had some Indian VAs finish a directory page for me (they did a good job!). My friend and programmer who I employ in my other business will help with technicals, and he also has some valuable things to post there.
To get more initial posts, of course I will go through my contacts in the business and ask people to join. But not all at once. I want the ones who will help me with no reservations to post first, to add a sort of growing medium for new conversations. The agar. I have at least 10 people like this with valuable industry experience and strong enough ties that they'll do it just to help out.
But, for some variety, I went to Upwork and made offers to (so far) 5 freelancers who have relevant experience. Some I've worked with before (had them help write/edit course material). One turned me down. Two have said yes and started posting.
But Rabby, what's your revenue model? Well, I have products I can sell through such a community, and I am pretty good at developing products/courses for the industry. In the past I've never sold them outside my home state, so I'm broadening my horizons a little.
Aside from that, I can sell advertising. And the site itself could become valuable enough that an industry publisher wants to buy it. Having no set in stone revenue model may sound lame (and Silicon Valley Startup-y), but there are enough potential revenue sources that I'm actually less worried about that part than I am about just getting the thing going. What I want to do first is provide value to the (soon to be) community of people using the site. Only then does it make sense, to me anyway, to try to monetize it.
Since I'm starting this thread super early in the process, my goals will start off super unimpressive. I would like to attract 100 users. I hope I can do that in a few weeks once the agar sets, so to speak. Then I'll post the next goal, which will probably be 1000 users and baby revenue streams.
So, here's the tiny amount of progress so far:
- Site up
- 8 whole users, counting me and a VA (haha)
- 3 posters posting so far, with 3 more promised
- 10+ who I think shall promise, once I ask them
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