mkinnan

Like any start-up, it can be tough to get any significant traction. So, we are offering equity to someone that might have the resources/connections to help us get forum owners to add their forum to Agalanche, a forum aggregator. The equity is front loaded and tapers off as more forums are added to Agalanche. There are already 7 forums on Agalanche, so 93 more to go to reach 1.0% equity.

The Fine Print -- The equity is vested when a certain number of forums are aggregating: -- 100 forums = 1.0%; 250 forums = 2.0%; 500 forums = 2.5%; 750 forums = 3.0% -- The forums that are added should be established forums (at least a thousand topics/threads or so) and not forums you just created -- The added forums should have low spam content -- We cannot afford a lawyer to write up a special document, so hopefully a dated/signed/notarized letter should be sufficient for the equity agreement -- We are not looking for someone to copy/paste Agalanche onto every single forum/website in existence because that doesn't make a good impression.

As another option, if you (or a company) own several larger forums that are established with active users we could also extend an equity option to you if you added all your forums.

http://beta.agalanche.com

For a little over a year now, we have been building a forum aggregator to connect forum owners and forum readers in order to:

  (1) Simplify the process to subscribe, access, and search diverse forum content;
  (2) Increase traffic to forum websites, which increases forum participation thus increasing potential advertising revenue for forum owners;

With this win/win business model in mind, we can provide forum readers a simple yet familiar interface to follow their favorite forums and forum owners with increased traffic. So far we have gotten a lot of positive feedback but that was just from a small number of people. We are now reaching out to the HN community to get some more feedback on:

  (1)	Our direct and indirect approach for aggregation.
  (2)	If you are a forum owner and do not want to add your forum to Agalanche, why? What can we do to convince you to add your forum?
  (3)	Is there something fundamentally (e.g. programmatically) wrong with what we are doing?
  (4)	How can we improve the functionality of Agalanche to make the website easier to use?
  (5)	How can we make it easier for forum owners to add their forums?

To our surprise it has been a significant challenge to make contact with the actual owner (or admin) of a forum. We hope that if you are a forum owner you will want to add your forum and/or give us feedback.

Please note: Due to budget restraints, Agalanche runs on an old Pentium 4 computer in a living room so it might be a little slow and there is a high probability it will crash with too many visitors.

Thanks for taking the time to view Agalanche and for the feedback.

http://beta.agalanche