What has been your greatest failure?
This is another one of the many interesting questions I receive in the Forum Trends mailbag! I would have to say that my very first forum was my worst failure. It wasn’t a large monetary investment at all, but this was where I got my feet wet and began learning all the ins and outs of vBulletin as well as how to build a forum from scratch. I customized the design, did the promotion, began with basic hacking, and so on. I would spend hours a day posting and recruiting. It basically came back to the fact that I didn’t do enough planning prior to the start date.
As you likely have heard me say before, you need to pick a niche that can be marketed and experience growth. The niche of my choice had to do with a nonprofit organization I was involved with, having to do with child abduction prevention education. I quickly found out (over a period of 3 months), that this wasn’t a niche that was going to be easily developed as a forum.
Looking back, I am VERY glad I got my start here. While I wasted plenty of days, made less than $10 over a 3 month period of time, and ended up shutting the forum down, I still count this as a project with positive results. I began to meet some interesting folks in the forum industry and definitely got my feet wet. This is also where my forum addiction was birthed…
Those were the days!
True! That was when you and I first met. Oh, the memories.
What was the site name? :p
As Aerosmith said to my favourite song “You’ve got to lose to know how to win”