This is an admin post, please feel free to ignore if you might not be interested.
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!
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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?