EffectiveDiscussions — plz roast this combined Forum + Chat + Q&A software

[inluvwithjc]

Hi! Can I please have my startup roasted? (Is that "question" clear enough? :- ))

About the product, and unique selling point: EffectiveDiscussions (ED) is Forum software with Chat and Question-&-Answers features. Often, organizations setup a chat (e.g. Slack), a forum (e.g. Discourse) + use e.g. StackOverflow — but then they've split their community into three. However, with EffectiveDiscussions organizations get all (?) they need and can gather everyone at one single place.

Homepage: https://www.effectivediscussions.org/

Who would want it: Companies, to talk with users & customers. Non-profits. Political parties, for their members? Open source projects, for support and for their contributors. Well, "anyone" who wants to create some kind of online community.

The market (size, competition, dynamics that we should be aware of):

There seemed to be about 1 billion possible users of forum software (not customers), about 7 years ago. (I estimated how many people had been using discussion forums on the internet — because my software is fairly similar to discussion forums.) Today, the market seems to be ... larger than large enough, + growing (people in developing countries get access to the Internet).

Competition: Competitors include forum + chat + question-answers software. Lots of companies & open-source-software have appeared the last few years that do online team chat. E.g. Slack, Discord, Gitter. And some companies are building better forum software. E.g. Discourse and Flarum. Things like Facebook and Email are also competitors / alternatives.

Product analysis / comparison against competition:

The competitors I've found are single-purpose (either forum or chat or Q&A). However, organizations often want both a chat + a forum, it seems to me. Then they setup a chat and a forum, at different Software-as-a-Service providers —> people visit either the forum, or the chat. Half of the people in the community then is "invisible" to the other half. — With ED, however, an organization can gather everyone in one place.

Another difference is that ED includes Reddit and Hacker News type discussions + improvements. Which I think is needed for some types of discussions. Imagine Reddit without threading.

What stage are you in?: I've built a minimum-viable-product (or so I think).

Do you need money? Not right now.

Customer conversion strategy (where do you find them, and how do you make them buy shit from you):

Not sure. Ideas welcome :- ) I found this list: https://triphappy.com/blog/131-startup-directories-to-promote-your-startup/1 and will submitt to the relevant places. I'm also going to email organizations and ask what they think about creating an online community for their members / users (I should have done this long ago I suppose, to gauge interest), and offer ED to them for free for a few years. + there's lots of stuff out there for me to read & learn ...

Why am I a good person to do this: Well, I can create software. And I have a vision about where all this is going. ... Otherwise, at least initially I was not really the right person — I did everything wrong the first few years, and eventually gave up and got a full time job instead. ... But continued with ED in the evenings & weekends, and finally reshaped it into something useful. ... Did I? (A bit later, if ED seems to become popular, I'll look into creating a team.)

Thanks for reading, and for any feedback & thoughts & rosting.

/KajMagnus

 

[relationshipwithgod]

@inluvwithjc I like the idea. How do you plan on having companies/groups migrate from what they have right now to your tool?

The landing page is nice but I would change the row showing all the different use cases you would want to use it, it is a bit too many.

The demo site is cool as it lets you play around and get a real feel about the application!

The design is still a bit too boostrappy but I guess it is fine for a MVP.
Do you have some other ideas for the name? It sounds a bit too serious.

Do you plan on trying to make money out of it? How?

 

[inluvwithjc]

@relationshipwithgod Thanks for the feedback.

About how-to-migrate: I suppose I or someone will need to write a script that converts export-files from other forum software, to the JSON format used for uploading a new site into EffectiveDiscussions. ... However right now I have in mind people who want to create new communities only.

would change the row showing all the different use cases you would want to use it, it is a bit too many

Ok, now I removed 1 item from the row, so now there're "only" 5 items. I think this looks better. (I removed the one about newspapers.)

The demo site is cool as it lets you [...]

Ok :- )

The design is still a bit too boostrappy [...]

Ok, and well it's built on Bootstrap too, actually. I'm not really a designer ... I suppose later on I should get help by someone.

Do you have some other ideas for the name? It sounds a bit too serious.

Hmm I think the name "EffectiveDiscussions" is a bit too long. Hmm. Not a native speaker so didn't occur to me that it might sound too serious. Yes I've had some other ideas about the name, but all of them are even worse.

Do you plan on trying to make money out of it? How?

Yes by hosting other people's forums & charging a monthly fee. It's open source, but most people cannot provision their own servers & install stuff anyway — and for those who can, then the server cost + time cost will probably be more than what I charge.

 

[runestar]

@inluvwithjc It's not a bad idea. But I don't see how it's all that different from project management SaaS apps like bascamp.
The bigger problem is adoption.

Your company. Your non-profit. Your school or class. Your hobby, Relationships, games, politics ...

You can't expect the audience to be creative and figure out how this might work for them. You have to show them. I would suggest that you pick one of these uses and niche WAY down to get those first couple of sales. Pick a specific niche. Something not overly saturated with offers and not highly regulated. For example hobby is too vague. Pick a hobby with a passionate following. Ship in bottle building or something. Company is extremely vague. What industry? What niche within that industry?

 

[inluvwithjc]

@runestar Hi, yes in a way Basecamp seems fairly similar. They have forum + chat too. Right now 2 differences come to my mind:

\1. Their forum + chat seems to be two different things (I had a look at their How it woks page). I mean, you're either in the chat, and then you don't see any of the forum stuff. Or you're in the forum, and then you don't see any of the chat stuff. With ED, though, chat + forum becomes the same thing (a chat channel is a forum topic, so when you visit a chat channel, you're still in the forum), so there's just one place to visit, to find out what stuff people are talking about.

\2. Basecamp is for company internal communication, perhaps including clients and contractors — but not for public Internet communities? The stuff I built, though, is (also) intended for public communities where anyone is welcome to join.

In some cases, could make sense to use Basecamp for company internal communication, and use EffectiveDiscussions for a public community on the Internet.

***

About picking one kind of audience and showing them how the software can be used, in their case. Hmm, I think I'm not good at doing that at this time. I don't know so much about other niches and which ones I should focus on initially. ... Right now I have in mind to email different organizations, ask them what they think about creating a community and if/how that could be good for them, and then listen to what they say (if they reply), and then perhaps help them setup an ED community.

... When I've done that for a while, then it'll be easier for me to pick a niche in the way you describe. What if ... the "Your company. Your non-profit. Your school or class. ..." stuff was clickable links? Which lets visitors drill down into their own niche.

 

[runestar]

@inluvwithjc You've gone about this backwards. You've created a solution but don't know what the problem is, and now you are hoping that people can happen across your page and make the connection of their problem to your solution. Links like that won't help.

Additionally, you have to decide if you want to either differentiate from products like basecamp and slack or else compete with them outright.

If there is an industry that you know, or have an inside connection to, you should probably start there. Tweak your product to fit their needs. Then you will have a solution to a known problem. Without that, you are more or less pissing into the wind.

 

[inluvwithjc]

@runestar I think I might have misunderstood you. I thought you suggested that I write some kind of page that shows how the software can be used together with, say, Ship-in-bottle-building. And that seemed like hard to do (also for niches that I do know a bit about).

(I'd like to be different from Basecamp and Slack etcetera.)

Starting with some particular industry seems like a good idea. I can choose a combination of something I know a bit about, + something I want to learn more about. I'll then contact such organizations and talk with them, to find out more about what they need. And then, as you said, I'll try to "tweak [the] product to fit their needs".

Thanks for the advice.

 

[amandal]

@inluvwithjc This is a good looking web app, but I'm not sure I really understand the use case.

Chat and StackOverflow serve different purposes, and if I was worried about this "splitting my community" I could always use StackOverflow Chat to keep everybody in the same place.

Even so, I'll still have other points of contact with "my community" in other services: email, bug reports, etc. Are you going to integrate with every possible service? The GitHub logo appears 3 times on your homepage, but I can't tell if ED integrates with GitHub at all.

BTW, the scrolling on your homepage can get funky. At one point it was jumping up a screen, and then back down a screen, twice a second. I didn't know how to stop it, except to hit the Back button. That's probably not the best first impression.

 

[inluvwithjc]

@amandal Thanks for the feedback.

Hmm OK then I suppose it's possible to have a Q&A + chat community at StackOverflow. I have not seen any organization do that though. Seems to me organizations setup their own discussion forum, at their own domain, and / or use Gitter/Slack/Discord chat.

ED is intended to cover forum, chat, Q&A, wiki. But right now, no other points of contact, no. (No GitHub integration.)

About scrolling — what device do you use?

If you have time, is it easier for you to see a use case for this?: http://www.discourse.org/

***

If you have time: I removed some stuff on the homepage, added this instead:

Make better decisions, with a better discussion platform.

Make better decisions:
In a discussion, the insightful and useful comments are shown first,
so people see them, and can make better decisions.

Avoid mistakes:
You'll see if others disagree with a suggestion — then you can read
the replies, to find out what the problem is.

Dos this makes it more clear how ED is different from normal forums + chat?

Perhaps doesn't indicate any particular use cases though :- /

 

[amandal]

@inluvwithjc

About scrolling — what device do you use?

Mac, Safari 10.

If you have time, is it easier for you to see a use case for this?: http://www.discourse.org/

I've read some of their blog posts about it, and I generally agree with what they say. The world needs simpler and more modern forum software. But I've never seen anybody actually using Discourse (even though it's open-source), and when I tried their demo it certainly doesn't seem very easy to use, and their Docker-only install method scares and confuses me (I've had nothing but trouble with Docker in the past, and it's not clear how a Docker-ized database should fit into my existing database infrastructure, like monitoring or backups).

If my boss came to me and said "we need forums, on our own domain, by Friday!", I'd probably grumble a bit, and then try to set up Discourse. Or if it were up to me, I'd just say "everybody is on Twitter now -- just be more active and responsive with @OurCompany twitter account, and be sure to tag #ourproduct".

It's not clear to me what advantage ED has over Discourse. It's not clear to me why I'd need chat, if I have forums or a StackExchange (which is really just super-focused forums). It's not clear to me that "splitting my community" is even a thing, or why it's so terrible. All these things sound somewhat vague to me.

I think you need to find a great customer #1, so you can point to an actual use case, like "BrickNMortarCo had 10 potential customers asking about XYZ on their Slack channel every day, even though there was a great post about it on their Facebook page ... now with ED (and analytics) they can see that these people are all going to the same place and finding the answer right away (and 50% then buy their bricks from them)". Still seems kind of thin, and something that could be handled by FAQs/google/blogs, but it would give me a solid reason.

Just give me one great reason to use ED. (Will it increase sales? Will it lower my support costs?) Don't give me some architecture-astronaut stuff about service integration.

 

[inluvwithjc]

@amandal Ok thanks for your thoughts. Seems we have different habits about how to communicate online — I for example don't use Twitter (so a Twitter based support would feel a bit inaccessible to me), ... but I've been using a chat (Slack) a few years at work; after that, for me, having a chat kind of feels like mandatory. But before I had been using Slack, I don't think I knew why a chat would be any good.

Yes a few great initial customers would be good / important.

Ok, now I too think that the stuff about splitting the community is perhaps not such a good selling point. I moved that info a bit further down on the homepage, and edited the homepage even more + another main subtitle instead: "Get the right things done, sooner". Which kind of is the purpose with ED.

***

Oh, Mac + Safari 10, ... didn't expect those problems on such a common browser :- / seems important that I fix those issues then.

 

[amandal]

@inluvwithjc I tried again just now, and noticed the "scroll" buttons at the bottom. They do some strange things. I don't know what "back" is supposed to do (clearly it's not the same as the actual back button), or when it's active/inactive, but clicking it just shows me a dialog box with:

Error 400 Bad Request
For request 'GET /-/load-post?pageId=15&postNr=null&_=1493756162649' [Cannot parse parameter postNr as Int: For input string: "null"]

See server logs for stack trace. [DwE4KWE85]

Why does everybody with a webpage feel like they can do a better job at implementing scrolling than the people who made my web browser? I don't think anybody in the history of the web has ever succeeded at that.

 

[inluvwithjc]

@amandal Thanks for the bug report. Seems the Back button should have been disabled in that situation.

I wouldn't say this reimplements any scrolling — instead, the browser's built-in scrolling functionality is being used here.

If you've been reading large discussions at Hacker News and Reddit, you will likely sometimes have scrolled up to look at the parent comment. It's sometimes far-far-far away (because there're many comments). However, after you've found the parent comment, you'll want to scroll Back and continue reading. That's what Back does. It takes you back to where you were reading previously.

Here's a video that shows how it works: https://www.effectivediscussions.org/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-3-things (section 2: "Jumping to the parent post, and back").

Ok I'll look into fixing this now. + perhaps I should show a help tips the first time people click "Back", so they won't need to wonder what it's supposed to do. Edit: And remove Back from the homepage perhaps. /Edit

 

[inluvwithjc]

@amandal (Ok, found the problem. Happens for example if one is at the very bottom of the page, clicks Scroll Top, then manually scrolls back to the bottom, and then clicks Back. In this situation, one is already back where one was previously, so there's nothing for the Back button to do, ... instead, this bugg happened. Fixed now but the fix won't be noticeable until some days? a week? later when I've updated the server.)