AskFora

I signed up for Indie Hackers after seeing a thread about looking for contract help. It's an incredible community - very open and supportive for other entrepreneurs. We even got a few people signed up. We're not spending some time thinking about engaging with communities and forums directly rather than trying to find people to promote AskFora in their own communities where we're not members.

Just a couple years after thinking about how best to use our professional networks, we're ready for a public launch. This spring was going to be our push through social media channels and invigorating our based of support. Our biggest concern is that people are rightfully focused on more important - existential - issues. We're going to get some feedback from our investor and advisors on whether to push through and launch or take our time planning and aim for end of summer.

While talking to private beta users who we're asking to help seed our public beta communities, we've also realized that alumni associations could be great arenas for people to make connections via AskFora. Because of the shared school affiliation, groups can find candidate contractors among a broader range of connections. We can treat each community like an organization and let people search among contacts for any organization member who has joined that group.

Watching a few dozen people try out AskFora has been informative and helps us sort out a bunch of early usage bugs. Based on the feedback and usage patterns, we think the early markets will be around short term digital work, for example specialized marketing tasks or help finding experts. For the public beta we're going to try and seed AskFora among communities that regularly ask members for referrals.

We're eager to launch a private beta and need to wring out a bunch of workflow bugs in the system. We've also got some interest from a group that what's to use AskFora internally to connect interns with jobs that various folks need. There's a bunch of back end work that's the long pole before beta. Also starting to plan launch strategies and looking into platforms like Product Hunt.

The resounding feedback from alpha testers it that the concept is obvious. Most people got that they can just ask Fora for what they need and walk through the login process. We're going to put job creation ahead of login to help people see what they can create before they have to decide to sign up. Then the call to action is that when you sign up we'll find candidates in your network.

We have enough product built to start paying contractors through AskFora. It's a bit manual (and buggy) but great validation that the process works. Next goal is to do some alpha testing with entrepreneurs and see how they react to the workflow. We' still not sure sure if the concept will make sense or needs to be explained. The way we're conducting these tests is to have people load the homepage with no up front context an watch how they interact.

I picked a name! After some sage advice from a long time mentor, I stopped agonizing over what to call this new venture and decided on AskFora. I like the play on words - Ask for a, and it personifies the bot, Fora who you can Ask for help in finding people.

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about how I use the professional relationships I've been creating over the past few decades. We know that in order to be successful, we need to make connections. Always be networking is the mantra of the entrepreneur. I want to work out how we use these professional networks that we've built.