What's the hardest part about starting a new forum?

[Bawse]

I think a lot of forums owners start new sites without much thought, and not planning how they'll grow their community.

For you, what was the hardest part about starting your forum?

 

[AWS]

Deciding on the topic and domain.

When your communities are in the same niche it's hard to step out of the box to enter another.

 

[Mike30]

Many of us, including myself. We start a forum without much thought. And I am glad it is like that, otherwise one would get
action-paralysis.
I believe in progression, things change over time and it takes it's natural course of life.
As mentioned by @AWS, many times the hard part it's just to pick a topic/theme/niche. But hell, shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.
What I give more weight is, just start....

Starting a forum, takes hard work and long hours/time. It's better to do something you enjoy doing or it will be easy to quit along the way.

But that same question is the one that help you to grow as an individual and eventually reflected in your community.
What was hard once, it becomes natural and easy with enough practice. So, everything can be hard at the beginning.

 

[JoelR]

shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.

This used to be my most favorite quote. So inspiring!

And then I had a friend point out that you also land in the soul crushing black void of space too.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

Shoot for the moon but do it strategically haha

 

[Bawse]

Deciding on the topic and domain.

When your communities are in the same niche it's hard to step out of the box to enter another.

I think you should pick a niche you enjoy, regardless of the competition. If you're passionate about the topics you post, you'll add much more value to your forum.

 

[Mike30]

This used to be my most favorite quote. So inspiring!

And then I had a friend point out that you also land in the soul crushing black void of space too.

If you are not prepared to deal with the crushing black void of space, then that would be a problem. I have gone and returned many times to shoot again. It's not as difficult as it looks for inexperienced.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I think you should pick a niche you enjoy, regardless of the competition. If you're passionate about the topics you post, you'll add much more value to your forum.

That's not incorrect

Passion does tend to trump anything else.

The admin niche is pretty saturated but I'm passionate about it so I'm happy with my decision to get into it.

 

[Jason]

It's difficult to get people to post in it and especially to do it for nothing in return. However, I've seen forums where people are posting things enthusiastically and a lot, just like they would probably on social media.

 

[JennyorAlice]

I think a lot of forums owners start new sites without much thought, and not planning how they'll grow their community.

For you, what was the hardest part about starting your forum?

I think this is it.

I've seen some people in the past that have opened a forum with very few replies or none at all. You have to post some activity on your forum if you want to get people to participate. If the admin/owner isn't participating then people are less likely to join your forum and participate themselves.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I've seen some people in the past that have opened a forum with very few replies or none at all. You have to post some activity on your forum if you want to get people to participate. If the admin/owner isn't participating then people are less likely to join your forum and participate themselves.

This is definitely a common mistake among new forum owners.

They create an empty community and wait. Nothing happens. They burn out and quit.

You definitely have to work your butt off in order to make a forum work these days but once it does, it feels so good afterwards knowing that you achieved it.

 

[JoelR]

I'm going to say something here that legacy forum admins haven't learned in over 20 years.

You're probably starting your forum too early.

You must have your own unique audience, your own set of followers, or your own 5 superusers who already engage with you before you should launch your community. If you don't have any of those, you need to go back to rebuilding your followers.

A community should only be launched when you have a sizeable enough audience to make it worthwhile. A forum is a tool that only makes sense once you've hit a certain reach; it is honestly not a tool for every solution.

 

[Tracy]

For you, what was the hardest part about starting your forum?

Determining the niche and then determining if I myself had enough knowledge of that niche to be able to create content for it.
Luckily for my niche, I have been able to document my procession of learning what it involves, so it's not so much based from an experts viewpoint but from someone getting into the field.