Acknowledgements, &c.Thanks to the many folks who helped with this along the way, including my wife,Brooke, John Capecelatro, Simon Goetz, and everyone else who I’ve forgotten tomention here.

The fonts used in this book are NotoSans and Merriweather, both available throughGoogle. NotoSans is available under an Apache License, version 2.0. Merriweather isavailable under the SIL Open Font License, version 1.1.

All content is (c) Kyle Bragger.

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About Kyle & This BookThis tiny book is part one of an experiment I’ve wanted to do for a long time now. It’swritten entirely in a Q&A format. Its questions were solicited from people across theInterwebs over the course of a few weeks, and range from questions about Forrst, acommunity of developers and designers I started in 2009, community building ingeneral, product design, and more.

As for me, I'm a self-taught developer and product designer. Over the years, I've built,grown, and sold products related to communities, design, development, humanbehavior, and more. My most successful experiment so far has been Forrst, which Iran for three years before we were acquired in 2012. It now lives on at Zurb. I alsostarted a job board for short-term development and design jobs called Tinyproj whichI grew to 10,000 members. Currently, I'm working on Exposure at Elepath. I also madean iPhone app called Thinglist.

Enjoy!

— Kyle

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For communities based around content discovery, how do you personalizerecommendations and extract the most relevant content without fallingprey to the “silo effect” that leads to each user only seeing a narrow slice ofthe overall ecosystem?

— Sacha Greif, @SachaGreif

To begin, I’d identify what about the content being shared should matter. Is itthe quality of the writing itself? The number of views, or likes, or shares? Byenumerating what defines a quality post, you can then start to build systems tosurface those. You can also surface content based on the viewing user’sinterest graph, e.g. what kinds of tags they’ve used over time. In myexperience, the weight of each of these signals is something you’ll want to tuneregularly as the expectations and scale of the community evolve.

Forrst has asymmetrical following (meaning User A can follow User B, but notvice versa), but we never really isolated content beyond a few basic filters:search terms, tags, and type of post (screenshot, code, etc.) In that sense, wedidn’t really leverage that following model to its full potential. Doing it over, Iwould have let users tailor their experience based on what they cared about —Rubyists might only want to ever see Ruby posts from users who identifyexplicitly as developers, for instance.

It’s possible to surface great content to users by a) understanding what mattersabout the content and weighting that higher, and b) letting users have explicitcontrol over what they see. The best silo is one where a user’s seeing contentthey expected to see all along, plus content they didn’t expect, but is pleasantlysurprising and satisfying nonetheless. The ideal place to be is to have yourcontent ranking algorithm that combines gut-feel signals based on yourexperiences/insight as the community steward with user-controllable levers,e.g. who they follow, what tags they use, and so forth.

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Did you ever doubt a project you’ve (recently) shipped?— Fabe Schultz, @fschultz_

All the time! It’s easy to doubt new ideas before they’ve really had a chance toexist in the world. The important thing is to not let that deter you from actuallysitting down and getting something up and running.

I had my doubts about Forrst, about Tinyproj, and about most other things I’vebuilt over the years. A lot of what drives me to create a product is that I reallywant it to exist for myself. The irony here is that in that sense, it’s almostguaranteed to do well ... at least for me! But, I think self-doubt tends to happenonce I start to consider things like “will anyone else care about this?” and “isthis good enough?”

Since doing Forrst, I’ve built a number of prototypes that were complete flops,but I’ve also built a couple things that show promise outside of being useful tojust me. I think as time has elapsed, I’ve learned that whether or not I doubtsomething’s potential is actually irrelevant, so long as its user is elated to use it.(That user is usually me, at least for what I’ve built in the recent past, but couldbe your friend, neighbor, dad, bus driver, etc.)

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Do you think the invite-only model is still the best way to keep the contentquality high (and to create buzz) on an early platform?

— Miles Fitzgerald, @milesfitzgerald

In theory, if quality users invite their peers, then by association it’s likely theirpeers will also be of quality. As it turned out, this worked really well for aboutthe first ten thousand users. After we hit a five digit user count, the sheerabundance of invites available* made it really hard to ensure that only peopleserious about contributing to the community were getting in.

So, yes: I think invite-only systems are an incredible way to drive growth, keepquality high, and to create buzz for early stage products. For Forrst, thisinvitation model was the reason we were able to grow to 50,000 users withoutever spending more than about $500 on marketing in three years. But, at scale,while invites will indeed continue to help grow the size of the userbase, theretends to be a marked drop in the overall quality of the invitees. (I’ve also foundthat Forrst invites tended to act as a form of currency, with bearers toutingthem for an ego boost.)

* Users got invites based on reputation, which was computed every hour or soby a robust algorithm we designed to surface users contributing to thecommunity positively.

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How did you incorporate design and development together to build Forrst,and when it was necessary to prioritize one above the other?

— Aluisio Azevedo, @aluisio_azevedo

As someone who fancies themselves relatively competent in both design andengineering, it became quite an interesting challenge to walk the line betweenboth roles. The engineering-minded side of me generally wants to get theproduct working as quickly as possible, since I believe there’s nothing that canreplace actually using the thing. But, the design-minded side of me typicallywants to approach things design first; that is, actually applying a bit of finish tothe product before really digging into the internals.

These days, it’s hard to disagree that design is more important now than it everhas been (and when I say design, I mean more than just aesthetic; I’m talkingabout designing for emotion, for user experience, designing the business, howit will be marketed, talked about, etc.) So, over time it became increasinglymore likely that we’d end up doing a full set of early designs before writingeven a single line of code. Often, we’d design in the browser based on a robuststyle guide our lead designer, Keith, whipped up. This helped us make betterdecisions and iterate to an ideal version of a feature more quickly.

Ultimately, marrying design and development is a balancing act; they’re bothvital to create a great product, but I’d argue that careful consideration ofdesign is something worth acting on before any substantial engineering isunderway.

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What technology (programming languages, frameworks, etc.) did you usefor your MVP, and why?

— Rasmus Kjær, @rkjaer

The very first version of Forrst was written in Ruby, using Rails 2 and Postgres. Ideployed it to Heroku, which at the time (late 2009), was a young but promisingplatform. This setup worked well for the first few months of Forrst’s existence,but I later rewrote the site in PHP 5 using CodeIgniter and migrating to MySQLfor the datastore. While I’d been using Ruby and Rails for some time, most ofmy experience actually deploying and scaling production sites was using aLAMP stack. So, I decided to do the rewrite while Forrst was still an extremelysimple product.

For what it’s worth, these days I’m back to Ruby, Rails, Postgres, and Heroku formy prototyping (and scaling) needs. The LAMP stack has served me well, butpost-Forrst I needed a break from PHP, decided I’d really missed writing Ruby,so I took the time to gain more competency in deploying and scaling Railsapplications.

Ultimately though, the tools you use to prototype and build products are justthat: tools. Building great software can be achieved with nearly any toolkit, solong as you’re focused on that, and not just the latest, greatest, shiniest newthing out there.

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What did you find the hardest thing about marketing Forrst? In particular,leading up to the launch of the community. Did you have any apprehensionthat it wouldn't succeed or did you have a fair idea of how you thoughtthings would progress?

— Paul Jaques, @pauljaques

The funny thing is that I actually had no intention of building a community; ithappened completely by accident. When I first started working on Forrst, it wasmuch more like Tumblr or Delicious for code and design. As I’d later figure out,the seemingly simple combination of like-minded people sharing specific typesof content, and being able to interact with that content — and with each other— was the catalyst for community.

We launched officially in May 2010, so by that time it was indeed clear thatthere was a strong community forming. Looking back on my time buildingForrst, the thing that stands out most is how afraid I was of “ruining” thecommunity. I definitely tried to temper this fear with a healthy dose of reality(and perhaps some bravado), but it was the one thing that was constantly inthe back of my mind. It’s incredibly hard to gain the trust of a community, butall too easy to lose it.

In the end, my worst fears thankfully never came true, but one thing I tookaway from our launch and subsequent growth is that fear can actually be apositive thing. It made me hyper-aware of each new feature we released, eachchange in policy we proposed, because the community was and is paramount.That fear helped to keep us in check; everything we did had to be for the goodof the community, or else it wasn’t happening.

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How did you manage the demands of friends, family, and a full-time jobwhile building and growing Forrst?

— Mike Wales, @walesmd

First, it was important to understand what my priorities actually were, then tomake my best effort to never waver from them. For me, I always tried to put myfamily and friends first; ideas and projects come and go, but it’s simply notworth losing the love and respect of friends and family. As anyone who does astartup will tell you, this isn’t always the easiest of tasks. It certainly helps tohave an understanding partner, and I’m very fortunate to have one. I think, ifyou truly listen to the inner you, it’s fairly easy to know when you’reapproaching that dreaded point of “man, I really haven’t been spendingenough time with X”.

During the first four months of Forrst’s life, it was a side project for me while Iworked full-time as lead developer of another small web property. This meantthat I only had nights and weekends to work on Forrst. This actually worked outwell, since it forced me to be really efficient about building features. As my timewas very limited, I became hyper-focused when it was Forrst-building time; Itried to set small, realistic goals and to hit them without fail. This also served toget me in a solid mindset once I did start working on Forrst full-time, as I’dalready conditioned my brain to work this way.

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What is your process for vetting ideas for whatever your next venture willbe? Do you take them through some formulaic approach? For example,vetting the market, idea on paper, with friends, then building some MVP,look at the metrics, kill what’s not working, etc. Or, do you just key into anidea and know a good one when it comes?

— Andrew Baisley, @abaisley

Lately, I’ve been writing a name I think works, plus a quick pitch or a few notesabout an ideal instance of the product. Then I walk away from it for a while.That might be a few days, or a week, or a month. The excitement of a fresh ideaoften clouds my judgement about whether it’s worth pursuing, even as aprototype.

I’ll quickly sketch the major screens of the app, just enough to help clarifystructure. Once I feel like I understand the product well enough, I aim to get aworking version running within a week or so.

With the product in an experimental phase, I’ll bring in a few friends orcolleagues, depending on who the target user is. I typically don’t define metricshere — it’s just too early. But, I am looking for people to “get it”, that is, to makesome kind of connection with the product. You can tell when something justisn’t resonating with people. From there, it’s just a matter of relentlesslyiterating and polishing the product into something great and ready for (more)public consumption.

One thing I can’t stress enough is that you absolutely must know who youruser is. It could be you, it could be your neighbor, or your wife, or your team, oryour plumber, but you need to know them by name. At this early stage, genericdemographics do not a user make.

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Once you had the idea for Forrst in your mind, how did you proceed? Forinstance, did you start by defining a clear user experience or did you beginon the data level?

— Dan Sackett, @dansackett

My original vision for Forrst was to build a lightweight web app for cataloginguseful bits of code, interesting design patterns, and so forth; anything thatmight be inspiring to me later as an engineer and product designer. I reallywanted it as a user (which I think is super important), but nothing quite existedthat worked the way I wanted it to. I briefly tried Tumblr, but that’s a prettygeneral-purpose platform and ended up being too much effort to use.

To begin with, I started sketching main screens of the app (post list, new post,post page with comments) to flesh out the user experience, then moved tocode pretty quickly. It was really important to have something real to play with,so I could validate whether the idea I was thinking about was even useful(fortunately, it was!) I knew the data model could change if it had to; that didn’thave to be perfect right off the bat.

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How did you solve the chicken & egg problem of communities? Did you haveto artificially seed the community to begin with, or did it grow organically?

— Zac Halbert, @zachalbert

The first users were all friends of mine. A lot of them were people who workedout of the office I was sharing at the time. The next batch were friends oftheirs; my gut instinct was that they’d also be high quality folks. The first bigbatch of “strangers”, so to speak, was an influx of users from the Hacker Newscommunity, then from some early press we got; in total, I’d say the first 3,000or so users came from one of these batches, and this all transpired within thefirst four months or so.

The funny part is, I really didn’t set out to build a community; that’s somethingthat I don’t think can be forced. To me, the magic formula is really justproviding a better place to share, discuss, or create things that matter to agroup of like-minded people, and let things evolve organically. In Forrst’s case,the original product (which was most decidedly not a community product) hada lot of utility, and had like-minded people using it, and from there thecommunity grew and blossomed. Knowing what I know now, it’s very much acombination of things you can control — a great product, bringing peopletogether — and things you simply can’t, like human nature, and that magicalspark that tends to happen when all of those pieces are in place.

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Did you experience any sort of psychological hurdles (lack of self-confidence, waning motivation, yada-yada), and if so, what helped youwork through them?

— Chase Oros, @chasetastic

I definitely did. Trying to grow a business isn’t easy business, and I thinkcommunities are especially challenging to turn into something self-sustaining.For as many high points as there were running Forrst, there must have been atleast an equal number of times where I was ready to throw in the towel.

In the very beginning, maybe two weeks into building a prototype of Forrst, Istarted having pangs of “this isn’t very interesting” and actually stoppedworking on it for a little while. Now having built and launched a number ofprojects, and in talking with countless friends and colleagues who are alsomakers, I can say with confidence that that’s a pretty normal feeling to have,and it doesn’t go away over time. It’s natural to have bouts of self-doubt —doubt that what you’re doing matters — and I certainly did.

The other big “killer” for me was burnout: waking up and not having an ounceof motivation to get any meaningful work done, and wanting to literally justgive up and walk away. The community backlash against trying to move Forrstcloser to our goal of building the best place to help developers and designersadvance their craft, and so on. It was pretty dark for a while there.

What helped me get through it, though, was a combination of a few things: my(now) wife’s endless support, my friends and family, and some great investors& advisors. Having a solid therapist doesn’t hurt either (especially living in NewYork City). Regular exercise (back then, running, and now, crossfit) is anabsolute must. Seriously. It will literally change your life and get you seeing thebig picture again.

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What advice do would you offer to the recent influx of younger talent in theweb design and developer communities?

— Conor Haining, @conhaining

I think there are a few things to think about as someone young and wanting tobreak into the industry. First of all: this industry can be amazingly welcoming,but also equally horrible. It really helps to have a thick skin (easier said thandone, especially as a teenager).

It’s important to never give up, either. If you truly care about building things,about programming, about design, you have to be persistent. You’re going tomake a lot of stuff that seems like it sucks. This is normal! It takes years (some,myself included, would argue that it’s more like a lifetime) of hard work,practice, and persistence to gain some of the useful skills you’ll need to shipgreat products. It doesn’t happen overnight, and it certainly won’t happen ifyou aren’t persistent.

It’s also important to develop your own voice. Don’t accept things the way theyare just because that’s the common wisdom or fad of the day. Evolve yourthinking. Don’t fall into tropes. Practice, practice, practice. Build on others’ workand make it your own. Remember that design isn’t just what we see, it’s muchmore nuanced than that. Focus on solving problems in an honest andthoughtful way. Don’t get caught up in making what this or that tech journalistsays as canon. Form your own opinions.

Most of all, have fun. You’ve got one life to live, so make the best of it.

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Was there any point during the process of making version one of Forrst thatyou lost confidence in either your abilities, team, or in the idea itself? If thiswas the case, how were you able to rebound to move forward?

— Harry Lewis, @imharrylewis

About two weeks in, I started having pangs of “this actually isn’t veryinteresting” — I think I took a couple days off of working on Forrst and startedthinking about throwing in the towel. Of course, just two weeks and anunlaunched prototype don’t exactly provide enough data to know whether itwas in fact worth building (or not). Fortunately, taking a breather helped meregain the focus I needed to wrap up the prototype over the next week or twoand start inviting some friends in. I’ve learned, though, that this self-doubt isactually quite a common reaction to have, whether two weeks, two months, oreven two years in to building something.

There are a myriad of external forces working to chip away at your confidence.Maybe it’s a negative review about your product, maybe it’s an especially angryuser, or unexpected downtime over the weekend, or exciting new feature thatflops. Whatever the case, there are plenty of times when the fun seems to wearoff and things feel like a slog. The thing I simply can’t stress enough is this:that’s totally normal. Stuff happens. You can’t please everybody. (I wish I’dknown this sooner!) It’s really important to keep sight of the big picture: whyare you building what you’re building? What problem are you solving, and forwhom? Are they happy? Are you happy? That’s all that really matters in the end.

Focus on building honest, thoughtful products that make your user’s day a littlebetter (and that user could be you, too!) and the rest tends to fall in to place.Once I realized that, everything changed.

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What is your definition of design?— Steven Chung

I think the thing that comes to mind for most people when they hear the worddesign is aesthetic. This isn’t an entirely incorrect definition, though; to thecontrary, one aspect of design is indeed how something looks. But to me,design is much, much more than that.

When I think about designing a product, I’m thinking about everything fromhow I’ll talk about it, what it’s called, how it works, how a user will feel using it,how I’ll market it, the business behind it, and yes, how it looks. To me, everypiece of a product should be well-designed. Aesthetics are important, butshould be informed by how the product works, not the other way around.

Well-designed products should be thoughtfully designed in all of these areas.To focus on aesthetics first, or worse - to the exclusion of everything else — willonly cripple your ability to ship honest software.

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How do you deal with criticism, specifically from well-known, ortalented/respected peers?

— Tyler van der Hoeven, @Jeepsing

Having a thick skin and being able to take criticism (and act upon it in a healthyway) is something that I think requires a lot of practice. I specifically say“practice”, because it’s something that takes experience, time, and repetition todo well.

Building a product whose membership grows beyond a small group of friendsusually means you’re going to have a lot of feedback coming in, both good andbad. When Forrst started to hit that point, I was initially really overwhelmed. Alot of the feedback was positive, but, as you’d expect, it also got a fair amountof criticism; everything from “this is just a ripoff of X” to folks thinking Forrstwas pointless or poorly designed, or that the community was somehowinferior. (Even the occasional piece of hate mail.)

The fortunate thing about hearing criticism from well-known industry folks isthat 95% of the time it’s actually really thoughtful, constructive, and usuallypretty easy to take away something actionable from it. But, I think that’s in nosmall part due to people of that caliber simply having a lot of experience takingcriticism from others. I’ll take constructive feedback from folks time and timeagain over praise, though, because ultimately that’s what will help me build abetter product and grow a healthier community.

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Any good strategies on how to avoid spam accounts and content?— Magnus Hjelm, @magnushjelm

We implemented a few different measures at Forrst, and in fact, I’d say 30-40%of our feature development revolved around building tools to make ourmoderation efforts more effective.

The first (and most successful method) was simply keeping the site invitation-only. This meant that we’d be able to avoid automated, mass signups. We didsee a handful of manually created spam accounts from time to time, but ourcommunity had a sharp eye and usually reported these to us fairly quickly.(Side note: make it really easy to get in touch with your staff!)

We also implemented a “bozo box” feature, which let us selectively hide usersand posts from the community without the offending user realizing what wasgoing on. That way, they continued to do whatever it was they were doinganyway, but the rest of the community didn’t ever see anything. We’dinvestigate any posts or users flagged more than a certain amount (and werenotified automatically when we needed to take action.)

We also prevented users from abusing the ability to flag content, turning offemail notifications if a user mass-followed tons of other users (“follow spam”),and automatically flag content containing any kind of commonly used spamcontent or tactics, like BBCode or tons of URLs.

Above all, we made it easy for any member of the community to report stuffthat looked suspicious, and we made sure we had effective processes in placefor dealing with it.

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Do you think there’s room for more communities like Metafilter that peoplehave to pay a small fee to join? Had you thought of charging for Forrst?

— Jed Sundwall, @jedsundwall

I’m pretty fascinated by the idea, actually. I think Forrst became somethingquite special because it was invitation-only, which in essence is just an artificiallimiter on growth. Charging for access is another thing that’d probably achievethe same effect (and in fact, we actually considered this multiple times.)

I think the idea that you have to pony up to participate also acts as a naturalfilter for keeping people who aren’t very serious it out. I often wonder if suchcommunities tend to have overall higher engagement rates (even if fewerusers), simply because a small fee is a good litmus test for interest.

On the other hand, if a community like Reddit had charged from the beginning,would it have been successful to nearly the same degree that it has been? Whatabout Twitter? I think the takeaway here is that it all depends on your goals forthe community, and that it’s an interesting enough idea to give seriousconsideration.

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Can you talk about a time you removed or disabled a feature, knowing someor most of the community would be disappointed? How did you approachthis and what was the outcome?

— laura gluhanich, @lauraglu

Definitely. The most notable is probably a thing called Discussions. It wasbasically a real-time chatroom for members. The version we initially releaseddidn’t have any way to create rooms, or do anything except literally sendmessages to anyone else who was in the room with you. Looking back, it’s clearthe feature just doesn’t feel like it belongs with the rest of the product. Wekilled it with little fanfare after only about a week or so. I didn’t feel it warrantedan email blast, since so few users actually cared about the feature to beginwith. It’s death was fairly painless and well-received.

There were a few lessons from this. One was to stay focused! It sounds easy,but it’s just as easy to fall victim to the “wouldn’t this be cool?” game.Discussions wasn’t something that users were actually asking for to a largedegree. It was a fine feature from an implementation perspective, but it didn’tsolve a problem. In that sense, it’s no surprise that it was a flop! We builtsomething that was more or less based on conjecture. Maybe people will usethis if we build it, we thought. That’s something that, unfortunately, tends tonot work as expected a lot of the time. It’s important to build with a real user orusers in mind, not just generic demographics.

Don’t be afraid to kill stuff. Take it slow, work on a single thing at a time, anduse a combination of gut instinct and data to inform your decisions.Sometimes, though, things just don’t work as planned, and that’s perfectlyokay. It’s easy to make excuses to leave things in, like “this took so long tobuild” or “maybe people will use this if...”, but ultimately, the product will onlysuffer if you are afraid to be ruthless about pruning stuff that just isn’t working.

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How did it feel as the smaller service in comparison to Dribbble? Did itaffect your design, development, or business decisions?

— Joshua Sortino, @joshuasortino

I have huge respect for what Dan, Rich, and their team have built. This questionis (unsurprisingly) one that has come up a lot in the past. I can’t stress enoughhow important it is to know these two things: who your user is, and what you’rebuilding them. Sadly, a lot of products exist whose creators don’t have ananswer for one or both of these points. (I’ve been guilty of this, too.)

I think it’s a poor use of time to be reactionary to other companies you mayview as competitive. Similarities often exist between products in a market,especially a niche one; that’s a given. But, if each feature you build is framedwithin the context of “who’s the user and what does this help them achieve?”,you maximize that feature’s potential to successfully elevate its users. But,when you start to let competing products inform your decisions, I think it’sreally hard to answer this question with integrity. You’re no longer buildingwith purpose, you’re playing catch-up. Ultimately, the product — and yourusers — with suffer for it.

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How did you decide on the minimum set of features to ship with Forrst?When did it feel right? Did you plan it or go by gut?

— John McDowall, @MrMcDowall

I really just went by gut instinct. I think listening to your gut instincts is one ofthe most under-valued tools we have as product builders. There’s a lot of talkabout making data-driven decisions, but I think a better term for this (that Idefinitely didn’t come up with, but just really like) is making data-informeddecisions instead. To me, that means combining gut feel with metrics, andmaking a well-informed decision based on those factors. Generally, I think a lotof great products are built by people acting on a hunch, while keeping in mindwho they’re building for, and integrating meaningful data to help focus whatthey’re building.

Now, for a side project in its infancy, of course there won’t actually be muchdata to go on, so in that sense, things are indeed much more gut-driven. ForForrst’s MVP, I started simply by stating what I wanted such a product to let medo — to catalog interesting code and design — and started working fromthere. The resulting MVP could hardly be called a complicated product, buteach feature it had was solid, complete, and gave me a good starting point toobserve how I and other early users actually used it.

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What is the best feedback a designer can receive?— Gyan Prayaga, @gprq

“Have you considered ... ?”

As product makers, quality, thoughtful, constructive feedback is one of themost invaluable things someone else can give us. In order to truly move ourcraft forward, we have to be open to receiving this feedback. That meansputting ego aside and being open to criticism.

P.S. I think this answer truly applies to everyone who builds products, not justdesigners.

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What is your background? And have you launched anything else than Forrst,successfully or not?

— Jonas Kelstrup, @JKelstrup

I’m a self-taught engineer who eventually found his way into product design,largely out of necessity. Around age twelve I “found” a copy of Visual Basic 3and some basic programming tutorials around the web. I’ve always beenobsessed with building things — whether Lego or model airplanes or aminiature trebuchet (yes, this really happened). I tend to geek out over theinner workings of something.

Later on, I discovered HTML and CSS, and from there, PHP. The idea that Icould build an application that anyone in the world could use was astoundingto me. Amazingly, people were even willing to pay me to build apps for them. Ilanded a front-end engineering position at a company in New York City. Afterthat, I did some consulting, tried building a few of my own (terrible) ideas, andeventually started Forrst as a side project while at a company called Cork’d.

I’ve launched lots of experiments over the years, but Forrst is definitely themost successful thing that I built (so far). Second is probably either a thingcalled Tinyproj, which was a mailing list of short-term dev and design jobs, orThinglist, which is an iPhone app that makes it dead simple to keep a “want to-do” list. I ended up selling Tinyproj to a company called GroupTalent shortlybefore Forrst was acquired in 2012. As for things that sucked, well, there’vebeen dozens of those. But, as long as I can learn something from each one, it’shard for me to consider it a failure.

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As your community grows in size, how do you prevent a general slidetowards mediocrity?

— Luke Chamberlin, @lchamberlin

Something that didn’t click until much later was that folks doing great workoften just don’t have the time to devote to participating in a community to thedegree I would have hoped. Our goal at Forrst was to provide developers anddesigns of all levels with a place to get (and give) thoughtful, constructivefeedback. The idea of writing paragraphs upon paragraphs of critique doesn’texactly thrill most folks who already have a full plate.

A lot of the engineering we did was building systems behind the scenes toelevate users who did take the time to provide such feedback, even if onlysparingly. As Forrst grew, we refined these systems regularly — each newinflux of users meant new behaviors and therefore required us to constantly bethinking about what defined a “great Forrst user”.

For a niche community, Forrst’s scale was certainly interesting once we crossedinto the multiple thousands of users range. Each new user has no concept ofwhat the community is, stands for, strives for, etc.; that has to be assimilatedthrough participation, as well as how we (the staff) position features, throughthe copy we write, and the guidelines we put in place. While I think mediocrityis inevitable, by elevating the users and content which best represent the ethosof the community, it can thrive regardless.

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How did you find Pasquale D’Silva?— Hariawan Bangun Safutra, @haribangsa

Believe it or not, on Forrst! He was user #221, and joined when the site wasonly a few months old. Pasquale was incredibly generous with his insights andfeedback into what Forrst could be, and we became fast friends. He eventuallywent on holiday to NYC, and we made a point to meet up. I was such a hugefan of his work that I hired him to help develop Forrst’s identity, which endedup including a new logomark and some awesome illustrated characters for ourhomepage and error pages. Fast forward a few years, and we’re still greatfriends, and also have the pleasure of working together at a venture calledElepath.

Pasquale is only one of many, many great folks I met through Forrst. I actuallyended up hiring our community manager, Mike (user #27), and our leaddeveloper Zack (user #2,304) from there, not to mention countless otheramazing makers with whom I’ve developed friendships.

Community can be a powerful thing.

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How did you get the first 1,000 people on the platform? Word of mouth?Marketing?

— Cesare Rocchi, @_funkyboy

There are a few phases I went through to get the first thousand users. The first50 or so were friends and colleagues of mine, who I invited when Forrst wasjust in its infancy. (I’d built an invitation system into the site so that I could limitaccess while the product was still maturing.)

The next batch of users, perhaps another hundred or two, were invited by theexisting userbase. My thinking was that liked-minded folks I respect are mostlikely going to associate with like-minded people they respect, and so on. So, Igave them all a handful of invites to send out, which many did. As expected, itworked, and Forrst ended up with a few hundred awesome people using itregularly.

From there, as I recall, the next phase was doing a Show HN on Hacker News,which ended up growing the waiting list to around a thousand people, who Iinvited in. My thinking here was that most people reading HN are the types ofpeople I’d want using Forrst.

Something worth mentioning is that early on, the email you’d get whensomeone invited you was actually pretty long. It was kind of an open letterfrom me to the recipient, talking about why I wanted Forrst to exist, what theycould expect from the product so far, and more importantly, what wasexpected of them. I’d later learn that setting this ethos early was somethingthat ended up being vital to Forrst’s growth as a community.

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Did you have any personal or professional life mottos along the way thatgave you hope?

— Christopher Kennedy, @kennedysgarage

A big theme in running Forrst was to do everything for the benefit of thecommunity. Being mindful of that, and framing every decision in that contextmade things much simpler; whether it was a new feature, or pricing or policydecision, I’d ask myself “is this healthy for the community?” The majority of thetime, it was pretty easy to answer with either a yes or no. Things that I couldn’tanswer yes to I generally didn’t move forward with. That’s not to say that everysingle decision was or should be a binary one, but leading with that questionhelped filter features and decisions that would likely be a waste of time topursue.

I also tried to remember to have a thick skin. This isn’t always easy, but it’simportant to realize that in any sufficiently large group of people, you’ll havefolks who love you, hate you, or maybe just don’t care. It’s the ones who areintent on conveying how much they loathe the community (they somehow arestill using regularly; go figure...) and hate you for existing, etc. But, here’s theupside: it’s nothing personal! Not everyone is going to love what you’vecreated. Some people are simply unhappy, and look for any chance they can totake that out on others. Just focus on the members of the community who arebeing positively impacted by what you’re building, and ignore the naysayers.Not to mention, I’d rather be building something that people loved or hated, vs.something they simply didn’t care about one way or the other.

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How many of your users were you personally in touch with?— Ben Lang, @benln

I tried to be very accessible to users. This resulted in me being inextricablybound to Forrst (not to mention some sweet fan art being created.) Early on,the invitation emails were actually pretty lengthy; I talked about my vision forForrst, what I expected of users, and what wasn’t quite working yet. As wegrew, it naturally became more challenging to be able to personally respond toevery single support and feedback email, but I did my best. We ended upimplementing Uservoice to collect user feedback, which unfortunately got tothe point where a lot of items where simply never responded to; in retrospect, Iprobably needed to hire a second support person in addition to Mike, ourcommunity manager.

From time to time, I’d also send email updates to all users about new features,policy, and the like. I also blogged with some regularity about the same,though as we grew it also became harder to keep up with. When we releasedForrst v3 in late 2010, we built a beta group of a few hundred users and theywere simply amazing at finding bugs, giving great feedback, and generallyhelping us to refine the new product we were about to release. Similarly, Ifound that it was almost impossible to personally respond to each. This issomething that really pained me, as Forrst was the first time in my professionallife I’d ever had to even consider ignoring someone’s note to me. But, I madesure to read each one, even if I couldn’t respond.

Having an open line of communication with the community is super important;simply participating isn’t enough; there are sure to be issues folks just don’tfeel comfortable discussing publicly. Be open to ideas, brilliant, insane, andeverything in between.

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What are some of the things you did to engage your users?— Teng Siong Ong, @siong1987

The earliest thing we did was run the Forrst App Contest. We encouragedmembers to team up and build something cool together. We gave folks a weekto get something online, and after a week we chose a winner. We sent themsome Forrst swag (one of our “Survival Kits”, which included a coffee mug, shirt,stickers, and wristband.) Just a handful of people participated, but it was reallycool to see camaraderie between members, even so early on in thecommunity’s life. (I still get notes from time to time from old users telling methey still use the mug daily.)

As far as site features, we rolled out a pretty standard notifications center; it’dtell you about new content you probably would be interested in, such ascomments on your posts (or posts you were following), new followers, and soon. We saw a permanent spike in daily engagement on the order of about1.5—2x the day we launched.

Email was the other medium with which we tried to engage our users. We’dsend out periodic updates about what was going on with the community, newfeatures, featured content, and so on. Our open rate over the three years I ranthe site was something like fifty or sixty percent, with click-thrus around 25%. Itried to only send newsletters sparingly, and for transactional emails, made itdead simple to opt-out on the spot, no login required. It’s easy to overdo it withemail, but I think that keeping things tasteful almost certainly helped keepusers coming back.

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Thank you.Thanks so much for your purchase. I sincerely hope you came away from this withsome new insight into building community products. If you have any feedback,questions, complaints, or otherwise, I’m on Twitter at @kylebragger, and reachablevia email at kyle@kylebragger.com.

Cheers,Kyle

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