If you’ve ever used Hacker News, Reddit, StackOverflow, or 37Signals Answers – these are all examples of a new breed of forum that has emerged online and tends to be much better than than traditional forums.

Traditional forums often have low quality discussions, and are a place for a vocal minority to rant online.  Many companies avoid user discussion forums because they’re worried about giving people a public place to rant.

Ribbot allows anyone to create one of these new types of discussion forums (like the sites mentioned above) with the following features:

• User voting and reputation
• Threaded comments
• Post and comment ranking algorithms

Here’s how they work: if someone posts something off-topic or unproductive then they are quickly down-voted by the community, and their content is less likely to be seen.  Likewise, if someone posts something helpful or insightful, they are quickly up-voted by the community and their content is more likely to be seen.  The net result of this is that (with enough users) you are more likely to see good content when you visit the forum, and hopefully contribute some yourself.

Who might want a new forum like this?  You never quite know (and I’m eager to find out) but my hunch is this might be useful for:

• Businesses: most companies would like to have user discussion forums because they are a great way to reduce customer support costs. Instead of having customer support reps answering the same questions over and over, users can answer each other’s questions – and those answers become public for all to find later (Ribbot lets you search old content easily).  Traditionally, most businesses have been skittish about user discussion forums because they become a public place for a vocal minority of users to rant (see Google Groups). But I believe this new style of forum with the features mentioned above largely solves this quality problem, and businesses will be more likely to adopt it (or their users will for them).
• Question & Answer sites: these have become very popular lately (see StackExchange and Quora) but there still isn’t an easy way for people to start their own QA site on any topic. StackExchange originally started with this vision but they decided to cut off the long tail of smaller topic sites (a mistake in my opinion). Ribbot would allow any special interest group or company to create their own.
• Link aggregation sites: many community sites have grown up around sharing relevant or interesting links on a particular topic (Hacker News is an example of this where the majority of posts are links to external sites with some discussion around them happening in the comments). These are more oriented around timely “latest news and events” links.
• Special interest groups: these could be around health (people with some particular  condition), sports, hobbies, tech stuff (open source projects), classes & learning, etc.  Basically, anything people are using Google Groups for now could work better on Ribbot.

Ribbot is a good fit for the use cases above because it’s customizable.  You can change the terminology of the site to reflect questions and answers, link submissions, posts and comments, or anything you’d like.  You can also allow only certain types of submission (links, posts, questions, etc).  Three other features allow customization (some of these are still under development):

• Themes: Ribbot supports custom themes (much like Tumblr) which I hope will eventually create many diverse and beautiful sites.  Any designer can share (and sell) a custom theme on Ribbot.
• Custom domains: By default Ribbot gives you a subdomain site (again, like Tumblr). But you will soon be able to host the forum on any custom domain of your choosing.
• Monetization options: Ribbot is completely free if you are ok with some ads on the site. But I wanted a way for forum owners and moderators to monetize their sites and be compensated for their work. So with the paid option (see pricing here) you are able to run your own ads and turn a profit. My hope is that a number of forums will generate sufficient traction so that their owners can eventually make it a full time gig. For others, I imagine it could make a nice side income or hobby project.  Many businesses I suspect will keep the paid option and run it entirely without ads – the customer support savings would make it more than worth it.

In short, I think Ribbot will help people build better discussion forums online across a variety of topics.

Final notes:

Ribbot is still in an early beta.

To give Ribbot a try you can visit the Ribbot support forum. This is both the support forum for the site and a demo of the product itself.

As always, please send me your feedback and first impressions in the support forum or in the comments below. I always love to hear feedback from people on how/if it can be useful to them (or why it’s not).

And finally, you can create your own Ribbot forum right here on the homepage if you want to try it out.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

I’ve been experimenting with MyBestPic.org a bit here and there with some excellent advice from Gabriel Weinberg and Naseem Hakim.  This was my experiment in inherent virality.  It hasn’t gone viral yet but I’ve been measuring the k-factor in various tests and learning a lot in the process.  Hopefully some more updates on this soon.

Joyce Hu’s thebookr.com has been growing nicely and getting some real bookings, so this is huge for her.  I’ve fixed a few things on the site here and there but for the most part it’s off and running nicely now, and I think her business is going to do really well.  Investors, get in early on this one.  She is going to be oversubscribed soon :)

Airbnb has been an incredible ride, and I’ve learned so much from the brilliant people there, making tons of friends already.  I’ve been heading up their fraud prevention effort and I’m about to launch a big machine learning solution (built entirely in the cloud using the Google Prediction API).  Oh and they just announced their B-round of funding ($112M).  With press and celebrities in the office weekly (along with our personal chef), this is the definition of what it feels like to work at a hot startup.  Revenue and bookings are growing 30% month over month.

And I finally got a chance to catch up with a few CarWoo! guys (Tommy and Erik) this weekend in San Francisco for a good old fashioned night on the town.  CarWoo! is doing quite well itself and they’ve got some big deals in the works.  Always good to keep in touch with these folks, and converse with talented entrepreneurs.  Apparently Erik is driving this to work now.

Have been doing yoga every week, and rock climbing on Tuesdays.  Can’t wait to get back in the office tomorrow…

http://www.tonywright.com/2010/rethinking-f-you-money/

Totally agree that the mythical 6-10% return is not being achieved by many these days, and that the real pay off of selling a business can come from the credibility – not the money.

Definitely food for thought, Brian Armstrong

The logic being that you can guarantee recurring income for your business (for the length of the contract) or you’ll have some recourse if the person fails to pay.

But there are two flaws with this thinking:

1. If your product is actually good, customers will stick around whether you have a contract or not
2. If the customer owes you less than a few thousand dollars, it’s not even worth your time to sue them

So if you are left with a contract that you’ll never enforce, why even ask for it in the first place?  All you’re doing is creating a hurdle to getting new customers to try your product.

Google Adwords is a good example.  Most agreements in the advertising world are still done with paper contracts, but Google decided to let anyone start advertising on Adwords in just a few minutes with no up front cost or contracts.

If you fail to pay your Adwords bill, Google isn’t going to sue you for $500.  It’s not worth their time.  They simply shut down your Adwords account until you pay your bill.  If two years later you are finally ready to try Adwords again, hey – no hard feelings – you can just pay it and your account is instantly re-enabled.

When I see an internet company asking for contracts up front, it feels like their product must not be very good – otherwise why wouldn’t they just let me try it knowing full well I’m likely to stick around?

Brian Armstrong

P.S. I certainly don’t mean to imply all contracts are bad.  For independent contractors, real estate, anything involving larger sums of money, etc it can make perfect sense.  But most internet companies are charging relatively small sums of money per person.  

P.P.S. Another way to look at is "what would it cost you if the customer doesn’t pay?"  Most internet companies have low marginal costs in their products (ad space, some CPU time, etc).  If you’re in a high margin business you can afford to give away all sorts of "free trials" in the form of people not paying after signing up.  It’s often worth it just to get your product in the hands of more people.

P.P.P.S.  Most companies (including Google) still make you agree to a "Terms of Service" by clicking a checkbox.  Don’t confuse this with a contract though.  The terms of service is usually there to prevent *you* from suing them, not the other way around, and it’s a sufficiently small hurdle that it probably won’t affect your signup rates.

I put up a $795 prize and got 46 entries from a half dozen designers

Most of the designs weren’t very good, but one designer stood out and I awarded him the prize.  His name is Jack Herbert and he is in the UK.  Below you can see the screenshots of his final design which I selected.

These are just photoshop images right now, so I’m spending the evening next few days turning them into CSS on the real site.  It should be launching soon.

Main takeaway: there is just no reason not to have a decent design for your web business these days.  For a reasonable price you can get some great design work done.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

It seems there is a known bug with Groups where people are getting unsubscribed. This happened to me, which in itself is no big deal. But when I re-subscribed by emailing the +subscribe address for the group, my ownership of the group disappeared!

This means I can’t moderate incoming messages and no new members can be added. The group is currently orphaned, without an owner, and there are pending messages waiting from customers that have gotten no response. I can’t even delete the group to recreate it since I’m no longer the owner.

I’ve posted to the Google Groups support forum to see if anyone could help. But it looks like they are swamped and I haven’t gotten any reply.

Googlers, can anyone out there help? Has anyone had better luck with an alternative platform for Q&A and customer support?

Former Google Group Owner,
Brian Armstrong

• 306 blogs with 132,844 total subscribers are now using the service
• 9 paying customers so far which is a 3% conversion rate on a freemium product

The main untested theory behind the site, which is that you can let users import subscriber lists without another opt-in by testing the list first seem to be working quite well.  You can weed out spammers without punishing the good guys.

It has also saved people a lot of money who have switched from Aweber.com.  I was previously paying $70 per month to manage the email list for this blog and one other with Aweber, so in the past 6 months FeedmailPro.com has saved me $360 just by switching.

Maybe it can do the same for your blog?  If you’re looking for a more versatile email newsletter for your RSS feed (at a fraction of the cost) check out the site.

There is also an affiliate program.

Here are a few graphs that I have auto-generated each week to see what’s going on.  I really like the idea of having a “dashboard” for your business like this to help you see the cycles and spot anomalies early on.  If you can’t measure it then you don’t know how close you are getting to your goal, so I recommend having something like this for your business if you don’t already.  These I custom programmed but you could have your programmer do something similar or make them in Google Analytics or Excel.

These show daily totals for a bunch of different metrics that I track, and a cumulative total for number of paying subscribers.

The last month:

The last quarter:

A few points…

• If you are wondering what happened around Jan 1st to cause subscribers to go up, I don’t really know.  I think it was just the new year.  December was sluggish.
• I did do some marketing to get new tutors (hence the spike in the yellow line) but I don’t think this  is what caused the whole subscriber increase – it was probably just from tutors starting the new year and wanting to get new jobs.
• At $10 per month, the subscribers is the main metric I watch.  To get an idea of the business model you can check out the tutoring jobs page.  So you can multiply $10 times the number of subscribers to get an idea of the monthly revenue.
• The expenses are almost nil, about $70 per month in web hosting cost and sometimes I play around with different marketing expenses but these aren’t much.  So the profit margin is high and it’s been cash flow positive since almost the first month I launched it.
• It is now two years ago that I started this project and I have to say I thought it would have grown much faster than it did.  Two years is a long time!  But then again I’m always impatient and there were some failed experiments along the way which slowed things down.
• On the plus side, it is truly passive at this point (I spend probably an hour per week on it) and it is growing nicely so it could become a popular site and valuable asset over time.

Probably the best thing that can help the site grow at this point is to start ranking better in search engines for some tutoring related keywords (to draw in more parents and students).  The site ranks really well in some cities, but not so well in others, so hopefully as it continues to garner new links it will build reputation with Google.

Hopefully this helps give you get an idea of what goes on behind the scenes in a business like this.   If there is anything else you want to see, just let me know in the comments.  And if you have any ideas on how I could take it the next level, I’m always curious to hear people’s feedback on the site.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

While I was back in the bay area for Christmas I randomly emailed some folks who had posted on Hacker News about their startup.  I went and met them for coffee and we ended up meeting for the next 6 hours!  We talked business and strategy, geeked out on programming skills, and talked about the future.  They liked my background in startups  and what they needed in a programmer was a good match with my skills.  Their idea is solid and has some big potential.  A week later they made me an offer to come join them and I decided to accept.

They are 3 very smart guys who just got funding for their idea, and it is a y-combinator company, something I’ve always wanted to be a part of.  The startup is still in stealth mode so I won’t post a link to the site yet (I will when we launch).  Their investors are high profile and the sort of people I want to meet.  The bay area is also the center of everything in the technology startup world right now, and I’d love to dive into that scene head first.  Part of me was reluctant to give up traveling the world for a bit, and technically it is a “real job” which conflicts with the message of this site :)  But it is a startup and my own projects will keep running on the side (luckily they run almost entirely on their own at this point – both businesses and investment property) and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get involved in this group.

In short, I can’t wait to get to the bay area.  Vagabonding has been fun for a bit, and Buenos Aires is a magical city that I won’t soon forget, but I can’t wait to see what opportunities lie in Silicon Valley.

Until next time, keep breaking free!
Brian Armstrong

Image by Thomas Hawk