Vanilla

Last night TechCrunch broke the story that we’ve closed our first funding round for Vanilla, and we have launched our first premium upgrades for our hosting service at VanillaForums.com. Todd and I couldn’t be happier about our financing, our investors, or the future of Vanilla. We’ve had tight lips about everything for the last few months – I’ve had such a hard time keeping everything quiet as all of the loose ends were tied up, that I had to stop going to our community forum and even stop tweeting so often to keep myself from slipping up and saying something I shouldn’t. So, now that the cat is out of the proverbial bag, I’d like to tell the story of our funding.

The Road to Financing

We officially began looking for funding on August 7th, 2009 at the TechStars investor day in Boulder, Colorado. Investor day was, of course, the culmination of months of work on our product and our pitch at the TechStars program. We were well received, and had a fantastic day meeting investors from across North America. One of the investors we met that day would end up leading our financing round (John Stokes from Montreal Startup), others whom we had already met through the TechStars program would end up following on with a significant investment (eonBusiness in Denver), and another investment group in the room would also end up joining the round (Norseman Capital in Denver).

Following the end of our time at TechStars, I went into full-time “find investors” mode. Using the little amount of money remaining from TechStars, I traveled across North America to New York, San Francisco, and Montreal for meetings with investors I had met on investor day. Before going into TechStars, I thought that this part of the process would be torture, but I must admit that I had a lot of fun meeting with everyone and telling people about Vanilla.

When you walk into a room of investors, you never know how things are going to go. Some people don’t have a clue what your company does, others think they know it better than you do and are biased in ways you cannot fathom, and others truly do have a fantastic understanding of your idea. On September 30th, 2009 we pitched to a room full of investors at the Microsoft campus just outside of San Francisco in Mountain View, California. Once again, we met a ton of amazing investors and I was once again set off in motion arranging follow-up meetings that would take up weeks of energy and devotion. One of the people I met that day was Eric Klein of Klein Venture Partners. Eric only had a few minutes to talk before running to another meeting, but he was excited about Vanilla and wanted to speak with us further. I didn’t know it at the time, but Eric is the VP of marketing for Java at Sun Microsystems. The open-source Gods smiled upon us that day, because Eric later invested in Vanilla, and also came on our board of directors and agreed to devote significant amounts of his time to helping Vanilla succeed. He has already proven to be a fantastic asset, and we couldn’t be happier to have him involved.

After meeting all of these investors, I can honestly say that you can never tell how things are going to shake out. When I first met John Stokes, he asked if we’d consider moving to Montreal instead of trying to open up shop in the US. I told him straight-up that we weren’t interested. At the time, we had our minds and hearts set on staying in Boulder. It was only after I further spoke with John over telephone and email, and then Todd and I both went to Montreal to meet with his partners, that we became very serious about Montreal.

You may have read about us in the Wall Street Journal two weeks ago in an article about the Startup Visa movement in the US. It was painful for me when that article came out, because it was at a time that I couldn’t openly speak about our funding round and how excited we were about it, our investors, or moving to Montreal. And to them it must have read like we really didn’t want to be in Canada. The reality, however, is that we had wanted to be in the US (Boulder, specifically), and we even had other offers from investment firms to lead our round that would have allowed us to stay in Boulder. In the end, the benefits of being Canadians operating a business in Canada were too great. There are no visa issues, there are all kinds of government incentives, there is a fantastic community of entrepreneurs in Montreal, not to mention across Canada from Toronto to Vancouver (who have been emailing us saying we should stay), there is a thriving open-source community ever-growing in Montreal, and the partners at MSU (Montreal Startup) are smart, friendly, helpful, and even have other open-source investments, and a keen understanding of open source.

Life After Financing

We made the decision to go with MSU months ago. Since then we’ve been working with lawyers on both sides of the border getting our financing arranged. This was a process that I was not prepared for. It has been expensive, time consuming, and exhausting. However, we come out of the closing of our financing ready to move ahead at full-steam. Now that we have the resources, we want to kick Vanilla into overdrive by ramping up sales & marketing, development, and delivering to our customers.

Our First Offerings

We are extremely pleased to announce that we are now offering our first two premium upgrades on the hosting service at VanillaForums.com (custom domains and ad-removal), and we will be releasing our third upgrade (Custom CSS) later this week. If you are a customer, we are always available, and we want your feedback. Feel free to contact us any time at: support [at] vanillaforums [dot] com.

Staffing Up

I have sold my house, and I will be heading to Montreal in the first week of February. We will be opening an office in Montreal shortly therafter, and we are now hiring. If you are a developer in Montreal, or if you are a marketing/sales person with a great understanding of SEO and ad-targeting, contact us: jobs [at] vanillaforums [dot] com.

And Beyond

Since making the decision to apply to TechStars, our lives have completely changed. We have a network of mentors and colleagues who are constantly rallying behind us, we closed our first round of financing with helpful, friendly, and supportive investors, and we finally have the resources to take Vanilla where it needs to go. Now, we just need to deliver.

Addendum

On a closing note, I should mention that if you are an entrepreneur and any of this sounds like the direction you want to go, they are now accepting applications at TechStars in Boulder. It changed my life, and it could change yours, too. If you have questions about TechStars, feel free to drop me an email: mark [at] vanillaforums [dot] com.

VanillaForums.com is our new Vanilla hosting service, where you can get your own Vanilla 2 forum up and running in just a few moments.

We are launching VanillaForums.com in “beta” as we are still finishing up some of the upgrade/premium features. However, many of you have been asking us for this service, so we didn’t want to wait another minute to let you start using it.

Sign up, sign in, have fun, and stay tuned for more news and information about it.

If you run into any bugs, feel free to use the brand new VanillaForums.com category on the community forum to report them.

In recent weeks I’ve heard the same question again and again: how can a forum help my business to grow?

I think the real question isn’t how forums can make your business grow, but how they can make your community, or user-base, grow. Users equals customers, and customers are what all businesses want.

There is no single correct answer to this question, but having used (not to mention created) many forums over the years, I’ve come to understand that there are 5 simple steps you can follow:

1. Keep it Simple
Simplicity is paramount in every product, but even more so in discussion forums. Look at most multi-category, sliced-content forums out there, and know for a fact that our moms, dads, grandma’s and grandpa’s don’t know how to find the discussions, let alone take part in them. This is the main reason why the first thing you see on all Vanilla installations is a list of discussions in big chunky letters. I’ve literally watched users close windows on forums because they don’t understand how to use them, and I’ve seen them quickly and easily get involved in discussions on Vanilla forums. If you choose a forum other than Vanilla, do your best to change the appearance so that it will make sense to your customers.

2. Be a Member
I can not stress enough how important it is for you to be a member in your own community. This means more than just creating an account there. It means getting involved on a daily basis. Set aside 30 minutes every day to check out the new discussions, answer people’s questions, and discuss their ideas. This will quickly become a fun part of your day, and your members will value both the forum, and your product or service more for having you there.

3. Avoid Censorship
If you find that members of your forum are voicing opinions that you don’t like, or are simply trash-talking your product or service, do not ban, delete, or in any way hinder their ability to express their opinions. Chances are that if your users are upset, there is a good reason for it, and a strong negative opinion should be just as important to businesses as a strong positive opinion. You should be listening to what the users are saying, and attempting to find a solution that will please them. Even if you are not going to change your business in a way that will make them happy, they will respect you for engaging them with your explanations, and allowing them to speak openly about their issues.

4. Listen & Respond
Pay attention to what your users are telling you, and make changes to your business to reflect their wants and needs. If a person decides to spend time on your forum, they have most likely used your product or service a great deal. I’ve found that it is not uncommon to discover users who know just as much about the product as you do. Their opinions matter, and you show them this by listening to their suggestions and reacting accordingly. Of course you steer your own ship, but if someone makes a great suggestion: implement it, give them credit, and thank them!

5. Use the Tool
Most forums are loaded with features and options that you can take advantage of to help build your community. With Vanilla we’ve created custom plugins for specific communities to help define and nurture their unique language and culture. These features can vary from things like discussion polls, to discussion or comment voting, or even fun features like “King for a Day” status that is granted to one member for one day each week. Benefits like this will keep your community fun. Your users will want to return every day, and truth be told: so will you.