Kyle Bragger

Sep 04

A little sunflower and celosia bouquet i made today. Sold 20+ of these babies at the farmer’s market today too…that was after all my favorite filler flower salvia was sold out. Possible career switch into floral design? I wish.

…Having dirt under your nails feels oddly satisfying.

Brooke’s great :)

A few random thoughts on building communities

Some learnings I’ve acquired over the past nine months building Forrst, bullet-point style and in no particular order:

Your earliest users are vital to the success of the community. They should be people you absolutely trust and/or know IRL (the first 100 or so users of Forrst were all either friends, current/former co-workers, or close friends of theirs)
Your web app itself is only a means to an end; it helps the community form but it doesn’t define it (Forrst is a pretty simple piece of technology in and of itself)
Be ready to follow the community; that is, the community might end up in a slightly/vastly different place than you intended. That’s okay; embrace it. (Forrst became a place where anyone, no matter what their skill level, can come to get great feedback and get better at what they do. My original goal for Forrst was merely to build something to replace the way I (didn’t) use Twitter and Tumblr to post development-related stuff)
Be active as hell and be human. The community needs to know there’s someone just like them on the other end of the line (I use Forrst every single day and interact as much as I can. I also read and respond to every email I get [though it might take me some time :)]. Forrst never would have grown the way it has if I had just stayed out of sight)
Don’t take things so personally; you’ll inevitably have problematic users from time to time. Be adult and human about it. It’s not your fault. It happens.
Have rules and enforce them. Don’t be afraid of not being a one-size fits all place where anything goes (one of the reasons I personally feel Forrst has been successful thus far is that there are rules about what fits and what doesn’t. It’s helped keep content highly focused and relevant)
Reward users for being awesome (Forrst users get more invites for their friends the more active and engaged they are)
It’s okay to be exclusive (Forrst’s invite-only model definitely has gotten its share of flak for being “elitist” [even though we’re far from it], but it’s also helped keep the number of new users per day down to a very manageable number [updated] This is good because it doesn’t overwhelm the existing community with 100s or 1000s of new users in a short amount of time)
Don’t be afraid to say “no” to features (everyone’s going to want feature X or thing Y in the community, but it’s important to maintain a razor-sharp focus. If it doesn’t make sense to in the big picture, don’t do it).

So there you have it. I’ll try to update this post as I think of more things. Discussion on Hacker News. Feedback is welcome: kyle@[my first and last name].com

Sep 01

heykurt:

haddonventures:

Here goes nothing!

So maybe I should explain what I’m doing…

Aug 31

I’ve been working on a little side project lately called Streak.ly. It’s intended to help you stay on top of things you’d like to do daily. If that sounds interesting to you, why not head on over and snag a spot on the beta list? It’s right this way.

AngelList Scouts - Venture Hacks -

caterpillarcowboy:

Posting to let you all know that I am now officially the NY area Scout for AngelList. If you have a startup that you think is ready to be pitched to angel investors, let me know and I’ll do what I can to help.

Aug 02

Welcoming Mike.

forrst:

Forrst has been growing by leaps and bounds since its relaunch at the beginning of May. We recently crossed the 10,000 user mark, more than doubled traffic in July, and the site is bustling with activity — users are more engaged than ever. I’m ecstatic to see developers and designers diving in and helping each other improve their craft. It’s a humbling feeling.

Now that the site is substantially more active than it was a few months ago, it’s getting a bit harder to keep up with support requests, moderation, community questions, and the like; I still try to answer everything, but it’s at the point where I can’t get to things nearly as quickly as I’d like (I’m not ignoring you, I promise!)

To that end, I’m very happy to welcome Mike Evans as the first official Forrst moderator. Anyone who spends more than a few minutes on the site will probably come across Mike. He’s been a big supporter of Forrst since the early days of the site, and I’m excited to be working with him; he’ll be helping me handle moderation of posts and comments, as well as pointing members in the right direction if they’ve got questions about the community.

So, welcome Mike!

Jul 18

startupquote:

If a user is having a problem, it’s our problem.

- Steve Jobs

Except when it’s not!

Jul 17

ksheurs:

Looking forward to reading this.

Me too. Congrats again, Ted!

Jul 13

staff:

Developers: OAuth support

For increased security and more resilient third-party apps, we’ve started early testing of OAuth support in the Tumblr API.

We’ve modeled our implementation after Twitter’s in many ways, supporting OAuth 1.0a with optional xAuth, upon request, where it makes sense such as mobile and native applications.

The existing authentication methods in the API are still supported for now, but we encourage developers to migrate to OAuth when possible.

To get started with Tumblr’s OAuth, integrate an OAuth consumer library into your project and get a consumer key by registering your app.

This is still in its early testing stages, so please report any issues. Thanks.

Finally!

Jul 04

Pasquale D'Silva - Animation & Illustration: Designing the Face of Forrst -

Before the jabber, a little history:

Long before the opening leg of my tour, my good pal Chris Kalani introduced me to a little project named Forrst. While it was a quickly slapped together prototype, Kyle Bragger was definitely onto something, as people started to chatter about his…