![]() I was a bit worried about whether the forum was going to look empty. That may climb, but hopefully sales will be climbing as well. The cost of the forum is currently around $20 per month, so pretty low. But I know from my experiences moderating Joel Spolsky’s Business of Software forum that moderating a busy forum can be tricky, time-consuming and emotionally draining. I try very hard to provide a good product, with good support and haven’t had any issues with negativity, so far. If that rises substantially then I may have to delegate it. Some of that is time I would have spent answering support emails. It probably only takes me 1-2 hours per week to post on the forum at present. For example, people posting links to spam or competing products. Disgruntled customers potentially airing their grievances in public.A forum that is broken or full of spam and unanswered questions is worse than no forum. A forum with lots of content should have a large SEO footprint.A lively forum is ‘social proof’ that your product is worth buying.It is also more interactive as customers can respond on the forum and see each other’s responses. This is much quicker than sending out an email newsletter. ![]() I can post a link to a new snapshot release in a few minutes. It is a quick and easy channel to communicate with customers.If a customer asks a question that has already been asked, you can send them a link to the appropriate forum page.Sometimes they will answer before you are able to or will give a different perspective. Customers can help each other with support questions.Which, in turn, can add a lot of value to your product. Letting customers talk to each other, and post content helps to create a community around the product.That is before we get on to the fact that Facebook make their money monetising hatred and abusing our privacy at an industrial scale. Or they could just decide to shut you down and delete all the content. Facebook could even be showing ads for your competitors on your forums. You have almost no control of such a forum. Some people use Facebook Groups for their product forums. The sheer number of options in Discourse are quite daunting, but I stuck with the defaults for the most part. ![]() And it gives the option to export everything, in case I want to part ways with them. I didn’t want the hassle of setting up and patching a Discourse server, so created the forum through (previously ). My ISP offered various forum software packages, but I really wanted Discourse, as I consider it head and shoulders above all the other forum software I have interacted with as a user (even if I find the badge system a bit patronising). But I rethought this position with my latest product, Easy Data Transform and started a forum at in December 2020. I handled customer support for PerfectTablePlan and Hyper Plan by email and kept customers up-to-date with an opt-in email newsletter. Until this year I never had a forum for any of my products. I started selling software online 16 years ago. ![]()
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