sreekbda wrote:This forum is doing better than the msn group it replaced. That group peaked with the real estate bubble where most of the discussion was around speculative investments. This one is more mature with a balance between house construction and site purchase / investment.
I still remember the chilly evening when namburi and myself were standing on the terrace of his old house in March 2009. We were chit-chatting and he mentioned that MSN is deciding to close the Groups. I was always interested in learning about technologies that affect people's lives than those board room presentations that predict the companies fortune (no offense meant for corporate world
) Then we get into the details of how big is the group and how many members are there and what is the member participation rate. I was surprised by the numbers. I was having 3yrs of work experience back then and I knew many nitty-gritty of software management. Then I asked him why dont we bring up our own forum? He asked me how much its going to cost. Then I proposed that we'll use open source technologies and bring up. I had the demo site ready in one week and on March 22, 2009, we went live.
When deciding about the software to use, I checked for other forum softwares and we found vBulliten to be close matching in features what Namburi wanted but we need to pay yearly subscription also. I did not want my first venture's founder to scared away because of the cost factor!
Even I was not convinced to invest money when we dont have a revenue model. But I must admit that we were lucky in selecting phpBB. Not just free, phpBB is very stable and mature. We never had any major issues with the software. Even the features we introduced were done by many open source enthusiasts and we never paid anything for any of them. And yet, they are smooth to install and works well.
Before finalizing and starting the actual work, I asked Namburi, what exactly you want to do and why do you want to bring up your own forum. He told me that MSN forum was very vibrant and he wanted to do his bit to bring back the same community . And he said that a lot of price manipulation by brokers is making the dream of a middle class man an unrealized dream. I too saw the truth in it as when we were search for a rent house in 2009, we could't find a good house without the help of a broker. We were lucky because one street vendor helped me to get a house that time! I was very new to the selling and buying of plots that time. Working for an Indian MNC, my salary kept me on ground and did not look beyond rent house. So, Namburi explained about real estate transactions and how price speculation happens.
I did not see a burning desire in the eyes of Namburi or anger on real estate brokers or any such filmy reactions. He was calm and soft spoken. I saw the genuine concern for the dream of a common man. And he has a solution that can give some relief to the common man. We were very clear in the beginning that money should be our second criteria and our goal, aim and mission is to create an open platform for Bangalore Real Estate. So, the Bangalore most visited real estate forum took birth.
Also, the name decision was funny. I asked him what name we want to have. On a lighter note, he said lets call 'mybdasites.com' since MSN Group name was bdasites and I'm sponsoring this one, so, let it be 'mybdasites.com'. When I asked him to finalize it, he told me that its going to be dedicated to the MSN community, lets use same name as bdasites.com but put the word 'my' so that people will connect to it. I actually felt that the name 'myBDASites.com' is weird but when I checked for domain name, it was available and we went ahead with its registration. But he was right. Though the name was peculiar, it stayed with people. We actually tossed with the idea of changing the name to more relevant name like bangalorerealestateforum.in but did't dare to after seeing the registrations and discussions.
We tried to do email marketing initially by contacting 2000 former MSN members and we saw around 225 registrations. This is my first learning about the power of email marketing. Then we realized that one more person from MSN groups started similar portal (bangalore estate . com) and we saw that he is able to draw the crowds. When I raised this concern that we are competing to create forum, Namburi told me that our goals are clear to create open forum. That doest mean others can not have same dream. Though he was right, I was worried that our efforts may be in vein to create such platform when other people are giving rich set of software features. But Namburi was right in one sense. The other site wanted to go commercial and they started attracting real estate marketing people and brokers. When we met later, he explained me that we should not be the field ground for such people and explained what to check when approving registrations. Finally one fine day, bangalore estate . com site had some error message popping up and site was not restored even after one month. We were barely touching 300 member count that time.
Slowly we started to see the activity going up in myBDAsites.com There were days when there is no activity at all and I used to call Namburi and ask him what should we do to bring up more people (Admin mind set, can't help it
) But he was consistent about efforts in awareness campaign and putting up relevant content. We had our moments when we were eager to see the membership count crossing big numbers like 500, 1000, 1500, 2000, 2500.. When we look back, it looks silly but those days, these numbers were milestones for us! We also saw that our forum getting attracted by Spammers from China and getting 120+ registrations per day. For a month, I could't spend time to stop them from software side but Namburi was patient in checking each and every registration request and approving the genuine ones. He used to read each and every post and weed out the fake or marketing people and put them under moderation. Once the forum cross 2500 registrations, I have taken over the administration and moderation. Since the bar is already set high, I had to sweat initial two months for administration and moderation activities and used to spend considerable time.
When we started the email digest, we overdid and set the daily digest by default. After two weeks, we started getting angry mails from some of the members and one fine day, a warning from our hosting company. Then we corrected our mistake and changed the setting to weekly and then worked with the feature author to give option during registration time. This is next lesson for my admin role and never took the subscribers for granted any time later!
There were lot of technical aspects that I used to bug Namburi about like our sites's alexa ranking, our site's page rank, number of sites in which mybdasites.com is linked in, most users online ever, number of mail subscribers, cpu thresholds etc etc... The list is countless and our mail, chat and phone conversations are endless. But he was patient and used to give answers to each and every question.
When I told my colleagues about our forum, the first question most of them asked is 'are you making money out of it?' I tried to explain them that this is not about money but a genuine platform for real estate. Most of did't bother to understand till they started searching for house/apartment to buy! Infact, we bought our apartment from the listing in mybdasites.com
We had many experiences with forum management. Once we had to follow up with Bangalore's cyber crime police since one of the realtor got offended for one of our member's post and he complained to the cyber crime. Lucky for our forum, we had our own lawyer, Mr. Murali who guided us and issue got settled amicably. Couple of real estate marketers tried to contact us and thorugh some of the active members to persuade to delete the content against them and in return they are ready to give ads to our site.
Even today, we are not making any money out of this forum. But Namburi is the brain, moderator, mentor for this forum. So are MSN, blrsiteseeker for their moderation and content contribution to the forum. I always heard good comments about the forum and especially about the content in it. It would not be possible without effective moderation and content contribution by moderators and members. I must admit that I always felt proud when I explain my role for mybdasites.com and it is possible only because of the wonderful community.
So, this anniversary is not just for the admin team but for the whole 8750+ members. Happy fifth anniversary guys... Hope we celebrate the silver jubilee with many more members joining our forum.
Offlate, my priorities have changed and I have requested Namburi to take over moderation and administration and he again started to raise the bar! Will definitely come back and take over the administration to serve this wonderful vibrant community. Till then, you are always welcome to contact me for any technical issues you may face and I'll be more than happy to assist.
BR,
Krish.
.Hope we will have many more new members on this forum to share their valuable experience.Thank you for your wonderful job.