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We started venturewoods two years back, and largely on an organic basis, it has acquired traction in the community. There are a few thousand members who read venturewoods, few hundred who comment, and more than 50 who write on venturewoods. Personally, it has been a great platform for me to learn and share with the broader community, and maintain the mental connect that could have been lost so easily as I moved from an entrepreneurial role to a venture investor role.
Multiple people have spoken to me in the past to extend venturewoods beyond just blogs. Suggestions vary towards becoming an entrepreneur-network, to offline events, and so on. Some such suggestions had given rise to venturejobs and venturetalent sections, which I believe have enabled a few people to find each other. This is a call for action - I would like the following to help us take the next step, and am looking for volunteers to help us achieve this:
- Suggestions on what direction you would like venturewoods to take
- Specific site functionality that you would like to add or organize better
- Product+Project manager who can take ownership to get this done
- Technical folks who can help us implement this on a suitable content management system (dont worry, whatever we do, we will not make this a white elephant :))
I hope this thread generates as much participation as some of the previous ones have - it will shape what this service looks like a few months from now!
Alok
I’ve been a regular reader of VW and have posted comments sometimes.
my suggestion would be to have a section like a diary where entreprenuers could create a webpage for their venture under a codename and post significant events and learning on a periodic basis….something like sanjay is doing with eko.
this could be done on a no-name basis and without disclosing what the company is really upto.
what this would do is offer significant learnings to other entrepreneurs and sharing of some ground-level stuff.
also, the entreprenuer could ask questions on 1 biggest unresolved question he has during that week/month. it becomes very lonely if u’re a one-man-army and sometimes u do not have the luxury of a sounding board.
third, sharing your dream’s progress with a larger audience would give you enough kick to continue even in adversity and we might have a far higher success ratio on new ventures. of course, not requiring to disclose too much on the exact business or revenue model would help in a free discussion in these venture diaries.
carry on the good work Alok
regards
bb
Hi,
I have been an old reader of Venturewoods. It started off and is one of the most read and respected Indian blogs. I however share the same feelings as a lot of readers which is - Venturewoods has been very shallow of late. Lots of articles have no analysis and are pure personal outpourings. I dont think the “broad range of topics” is a valid argument. When an invitation is sent to the blogger, a certain level of quality is taken for granted (which is fair). I think that quality level has fallen.
I have cherished posts by Sanjay and Alok for a long time. Alok, its a great idea to take a step back and try building a better Venturewoods.
I also think that most comments (including this one) here have discussed the decision than give fruitful suggestions for improvement (which I guess was ALok’s idea in the first place).
Please use a wordpress plugin to split large number of comments into pages.
for e.g. http://www.keyvan.net/code/paged-comments/
Your Venturetalent page frequently times out now (because of the number of comments)
-Sandeep
Agree with self regulating community part. VW does have a real community here, mix of VC, entrepreneurs, students, managers, etc. You’re bound to get a broad range of posts, which I think is healthy. Whats nice is that most posts have healthy debate, whether its people rubbishing the post, giving a counter view, endorsing it, adding to it, etc.
Not entirely sure if VW was meant to focus on a specific subject when started and maybe a bit off course from that, but that happens once the community grows. No worries there.
I think it’s not so much of an issue of outreach as driving posting from existing community. Someone has to lead that. Personally I’d rather see VW become a slashdot style community, rather than a techcrunch type news site.
Well..I have been following www.pluggd.in for quite some time and have seen more relevant comments/posts than any other blog.
Atleast those guys are doing an awesome job with bringing in insights/industry stats..and interviewing indian startups.
anyways, what VW needs is building relevance and not 1000s of posts and comments.Quality vs. Quantity? You decide!
@ Rehan - honestly, if you havent found any issue with quailty here, then cant say much (since I strongly see a major quality drop here in VW)
Alok,
You need to move away from the comment style posting on VentureJobs and VentureTalent to something more usable and robust. I would recommend moving to an open source CMS such as TYPO3 or Drupal. We have expertise in both, specifically TYPO3 where we are knowledge and market leaders in India, and would be happy to help you migrate VentureWoods to such a system.
Let me know if you’d like to explore this further.
Regards,
Rahul Dewan
I think we should focus on what is needed for entrepreneurs in India
From my personal experience
We lack eco-system of bay-area where people can meet quite often to exchange ideas, form teams, look for funding.
That we miss in most of the cities. If we can make dedicated city and topic based networking forums on the portal which help entrepreneurs to network online.
Rehan, I dont think its relevant whether Pluggd is great or not - but there is a set of our past users out there who think we are being more noisy, and its a problem worth thinking about. I am hearing a few things:
- we could be more specific rather than 30,000 ft
- too much promotion and too little content
We may decide to act on some and not on others. But we should think about building self-regulatory community mechanisms to keep the quality high. Also, a broader set of contributors is essential, and we might need outreach to do that.
never heard of Plugdd, doesn’t seem to have many readers considering there are virtually no comments to their posts.
I personally don’t find quality to be an issue here. The main issue is that we’re no active enough for people to visit us everyday. Sometimes days go by without posts. More contribution is needed from all.
Couple of things that have been on the list
1. A more structured job and talent board
2. Ratings for posts and contributors — kinda diggIt buryIt — should help us drive better quality of content
Also, just saw this - and I think this is an important aspect we should cover - how do we continue to build on quality and relevance?