June 2nd, 2011

Startup Interview With Kyle Bragger

Posted by: Travis | No Comments »

Last week I was asked by the guys at Namesake to host a series of interviews with entrepreneurs. For the first week I interviewed the founder of Forrst, Kyle Bragger. Kyle and I go back to SXSW 2010 when he first told me about a new project of his. Back then, Forrst was only a twinkle in Kyle’s eye. I’ve watched it grow from that stage to what it is today and I was really excited to sit down and ask Kyle some questions.

Running an interview on Namesake is more like moderating a discussion. The great part is that the community is extremely smart and engaged. They asked a number of great questions which I’ve included alongside mine. You can read the entire conversation on Namesake.

Travis O: Hello everyone, thanks for joining the conversation. We’re just waiting for @Kyle Bragger to hop on in and we’ll get started

Kyle Bragger: Hello!

Travis: Awesome, thanks for joining us today Kyle.

Kyle:

Can you talk a bit about the genesis of Forrst? How did it become what it is today?

Sure. Forrst started as a utility for cataloguing dev + design content for myself. Had a simple social layer. Anything from code to ui conventions/screenshots etc. The social layer led to some really interesting interactions.

Scott Hurff: You guys are based in Brooklyn, right?

Yes indeed – park slope. Well, our offices are at Dogpatch in union square but I live in bk.

I’m curious about your new project, “Blah.” What can you tell me about it?

It’s something our designer, myself, and pasquale (d’silva) are hacking on the side. Good to have something going on to help stave off burnout. It’s a writing tool. Full screen editor – markdown support etc. Simple typography for the frontend – focus is on long form content.

Do you find that having other projects helps with that? Why?

Yeah def. Context switching. Different problems to work on. Everything I do I aim to not only enjoy but also use as a testbed for ideas I could roll back in to Forrst.

So you like to spin-off ideas that could stand on their own but could also become part of the suite of tools on Forrst?

Yeah – always looking at behaviors on forrst that could make sense as spinoff products.

Tim Cox: Roughly how many people are signed up on Forrst and how many of those are active users? How do you go about trying to make those users as active as possible?

27,000 – 40% active. We have a huge MAU rate – we only count accounts > 30 days old and they must create content, not just login. I think the login = active metric is BS. As for engagement – adding “realtime” notifications helped – it’s already the 3rd most visited page. Also – email notifications, but we’re always thinking about ways to bring people back more.

Where are you taking Forrst so that you can achieve scale. aka, how are you going about getting more scale?

Right now our growth is 100% organic, adding ~2500 users/month on the invite model. Slowly transitioning to a more open model but with some secret sauce stuff to make sure we’re still able to prevent non dev/designers from getting in. The community is also very self policing at this point.

Tim Mather: What advice do you have for other community sites looking to gain some level of funding?

It has been insanely hard raising money, especially 6 months ago when we had less scale. Many of the investors i spoke to didn’t see the this as a “big” business. e.g. can’t generate 100MM – 1BN returns. We’re out raising more as we scale the community further – once we have more scale some of our revenue paths will make much more sense. In general, bootstrap as long as you can.

How has the investment from Dave McClure helped?

He and Gary V investing acted as social proof from an investor standpoint. Their names are helpful, not to mention they are super smart about design/metrics/community. So it’s win/win. So, not looking forward to raising more cash as it’s a time sink and super stressful, but hopefully the story is better now and more folks will be able to see that this kind of niche community, our huge MAU rate, traffic, engagement etc is a compelling story.

Tim Cox: Is it vital to Forrst that you achieve a minimum level of investment for Forrst to survive? Could you not sustain growth from that of the supporter accounts and advertising revenue?

Our burn is more than people assume – minimum amt of staff required to keep things going (2 engineers, designer, community manager/moderator). Ads don’t pay the bills but the rev streams we have now do scale very nicely. Fewer people than we expected signed up for supporter – only 530. People take websites for granted and assume that they are cheap/free to run.

Can you share a little about your rev streams? What are you exploring? Rev streams for community sites are difficult I think.

Ads are silly but do bring in some cash – we’re doing > 2 mil impressions this month and probably ~400k uniques – not too bad for a closed community. Bigger picture is becoming angel list for dev/design talent and companies looking for freelancers + fulltimers. Everything revolves around the community though. They are the core product, so the revenue stuff is bolt on — if it works, great, we scale it. if not, we ditch it.

So you see Forrst as being a place that an entrepreneur can find a technical co-founder maybe?

People certainly have partnered before. We do eventually want to make it easier to do that — to find collaborators, just lower on the roadmap.

Scott Hurff: The Forrst community LOVES to make mockups of what a Forrst iPhone app would be. Do you have any plans for going mobile? What steps do you have in mind for developing a mobile app (i.e. what has to be present for you to feel comfortable building a Forrst app)?

Heh, yeah they do love that. Mobile: big emphasis on consumption and discussion. Harder to do posting since mobile device uploads are difficult/non existent (e.g. from browser). I guess you could post a question or code but i think the experiences will likely be more about consuming content and engaging w comments/likes.

Jonathan Younes: So it’s possible to work alone ? Everybody says that it’s better to have associates.

It sucks working alone, trust me But I do think you should hire cofounders, Mark Suster has some good essays on this.

Hire co-founders over bring them on board?

Yes – there are VERY few people I’d ever start a company with. It’s a relationship that takes YEARS before you ever start something. It really is like a marriage. Always gets me when people are like “where do i get a cofounder.” You def can’t just jump into that.

That’s interesting because you’ve started a number of your spinoffs with other people right?

Side projects are a different story. Lower risk, more fun, less stress. Side projects are an incredible way to potentially meet cofounders though.

Can you talk a bit about youshouldworkwith.me. Where did that idea come from and how successful was it?

It was fun – got a bit overwhelmed. did a bunch of consulting thru it. i was just thinking about the notion of discount buying sites but for humans. Humans that specialize in tech (design/copywriting/dev).

Brian Norgard: May I ask your opinion of 99designs.com? And, for that matter, crowd sourced marketplaces…

Great question – mixed feelings. Spec doesn’t help the industry. You end up with people who don’t know their own value competing to under-charge companies who don’t know any better.

Brian Norgard: You have built such amazing trust with your users through hardcore community management (I know b/c you once barked at me for asking a commercial question). I think you’ve done a really good job of this. How important is this aspect of the business?

Paramount. (sorry for barking!) I get shit all the time for our guidelines (which are actually going to be relaunched as a more broad-focused set of community principles). People are not used to structure. They think that Forrst can be a free for all, since the internet is a free for all. But i think having a sharp focus and sticking to it is important. Yes, you will lose users, and yes, people will be angry and call you names and be immature about it, but at the end of the day without focus what are you doing?

Starting out w/ Forrst, you were really against any commercialization of the platform—has that changed as the platform has gotten bigger? Would you consider licensing the platform?

If we do, it would be as the “Forrst for teams” product. But I’m against doing any kind of self hosted stuff. Too many headaches.

Pek Pongpaet: What do people like most about Forrst based on your data?

We realized that people were leaving incredible feedback. So we spent a month pimping out that part of the site, and re-worked our vision a bit. we hear all the time that people are loving the discussions, and they get honest feedback no matter who they are (vip or beginner).

Mike Puangmalai: how do you prioritize community feedback in your product roadmap for Forrst?

Depends on how closely it matches up with our vision, but also if it makes us say “shit that’s a great idea. Important to balance listening to users with ignoring them, if that makes sense.

Last question. Are you a developer or a designer? Is it important to be both? You tend to blur the lines…

Engineer by background but picked up some design sense somewhere along the way. Also really interested in typography. These days I’d almost say I’m more of a product guy than dev/designer – those are just means by which to build great products. I think it’s important to be incredible at one or the other, but have an understanding (if not more) of the other side. e.g. dev who gets design, or designer who can hack html/css/js.

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